And the 2nd law of thermodynamics is another gotcha, as I posted in the other Yudkowsky thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510 http://news.ycombina

And the 2nd law of thermodynamics is another gotcha, as I posted in the other Yudkowsky thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510 Someone thought maxwell's demon and the fluctuation theorem provided a way around the 2nd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 but I'm not convinced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625 "Thanks, those are interesting links. Still, nothing there that seems especially compelling. Maxwell's demon assumes the energy cost for sorting the molecules is less than the net gain. That looks like another variant of the perpetual motion machine. The fluctuation theorem says the 2nd law doesn't hold for very, very small entities, but its probability of being correct climbs exponentially as the system scales. So, it is fallacious to then say the 2nd law may not hold at the macro level due to it not holding at the micro level, since the theorem used to support this idea is itself an instance of the idea being false."