Sorry, I want to make a comment that’s not related to the substance of your post.
You seem to use the word “entropy” to mean “bad things”, especially in the paragraph about “fighting one sort of entropy” etc. Using technical terms as metaphors is uncomfortably close to woo. So is the meme that “life exists on the border between order and randomness”, which as far as I can tell arose from poor science reporting on the subject of self-organized criticality.
ETA: Turns out Shalizi has a note about the above-mentioned meme. (If someone is unfamiliar with Shalizi’s notebooks, run don’t walk and read as many of them as you can.)
I may not have my idea of entropy clear enough, but when I say that totalitarianism is lower entropy than authoritarianism, I’m not implying that entropy is equivalent to “bad things”. What I’ve got in mind is the idea that entropy is what happens unless an effort is made to get something else to happen.
How about “decay”? This way you won’t get grumpy people like me complaining that in physics you cannot decrease entropy no matter how much effort you make :-)
My problem with it is not that it is uncomfortably close to woo. My problem is that even when it is being used in a nontechnical sense, when I see the word, it is hard for me to suppress the habit of winding up the part of my brain needed to understand technical uses of the concept of entropy.
Sorry, I want to make a comment that’s not related to the substance of your post.
You seem to use the word “entropy” to mean “bad things”, especially in the paragraph about “fighting one sort of entropy” etc. Using technical terms as metaphors is uncomfortably close to woo. So is the meme that “life exists on the border between order and randomness”, which as far as I can tell arose from poor science reporting on the subject of self-organized criticality.
To clarify the difference: this is woo, and this isn’t.
ETA: Turns out Shalizi has a note about the above-mentioned meme. (If someone is unfamiliar with Shalizi’s notebooks, run don’t walk and read as many of them as you can.)
I may not have my idea of entropy clear enough, but when I say that totalitarianism is lower entropy than authoritarianism, I’m not implying that entropy is equivalent to “bad things”. What I’ve got in mind is the idea that entropy is what happens unless an effort is made to get something else to happen.
How about “decay”? This way you won’t get grumpy people like me complaining that in physics you cannot decrease entropy no matter how much effort you make :-)
Thanks for the link, cousin_it! I immediately started to download it, it appeals me a lot!
You mean the book by Mézard and Montanari? Yeah, it’s completely awesome, I couldn’t put it down. Nesov and I have linked it on LW before.
My problem with it is not that it is uncomfortably close to woo. My problem is that even when it is being used in a nontechnical sense, when I see the word, it is hard for me to suppress the habit of winding up the part of my brain needed to understand technical uses of the concept of entropy.
Would “easy defaults” work better for you?