I’d have to disagree with that. It’s a far-future science example and an obvious default one given the current model of physics for anyone who understands thermodynamics. Okay, it may take some explaining before it’s equally obvious to everyone, but it is, in fact, obvious. Especially if you want value that scales nonlinearly with material. I find it difficult to put into mere words just how obvious this is—it far exceeds the obviousness of, say, using gold to talk about inflation, when the choice of those particular atoms is completely arbitrary in a grand physical sense.
Yes, in some sense it’s an obvious default, which seems to go largely unrecognized (even by those who understand thermodynamics), maybe due to a bias towards thinking that value scales linearly with material. But I don’t want to claim too much. There are a number of caveats I didn’t mention in my post:
Some space-time geometries may have better entropy dumps than black holes. In an open universe without dark energy, for example, the cosmological background temperature goes to 0 and negentropy is essentially infinite.
Why make negentropy the object of fair division, instead of value created from using up negentropy, which might not be a linear function of it?
Why should individuals own matter? If they don’t, then our intuition about what constitutes fair division would change drastically.
may take some explaining before it’s equally obvious to everyone
That doesn’t seem like a partly useful meaning of “obvious.”
The real issue is that most people don’t believe in the future. Do you want that as a prereq for game theory? does it have positive propaganda value? (I’d guess that it has negative propaganda value, but I’d also guess that the people complaining are incorrect about how distracting it is.)
Harvesting negentropy by dropping mass into black holes is not a real world example, it is a far future sci-fi example.
I’d have to disagree with that. It’s a far-future science example and an obvious default one given the current model of physics for anyone who understands thermodynamics. Okay, it may take some explaining before it’s equally obvious to everyone, but it is, in fact, obvious. Especially if you want value that scales nonlinearly with material. I find it difficult to put into mere words just how obvious this is—it far exceeds the obviousness of, say, using gold to talk about inflation, when the choice of those particular atoms is completely arbitrary in a grand physical sense.
Yes, in some sense it’s an obvious default, which seems to go largely unrecognized (even by those who understand thermodynamics), maybe due to a bias towards thinking that value scales linearly with material. But I don’t want to claim too much. There are a number of caveats I didn’t mention in my post:
Some space-time geometries may have better entropy dumps than black holes. In an open universe without dark energy, for example, the cosmological background temperature goes to 0 and negentropy is essentially infinite.
Why make negentropy the object of fair division, instead of value created from using up negentropy, which might not be a linear function of it?
Why should individuals own matter? If they don’t, then our intuition about what constitutes fair division would change drastically.
That doesn’t seem like a partly useful meaning of “obvious.”
The real issue is that most people don’t believe in the future. Do you want that as a prereq for game theory? does it have positive propaganda value? (I’d guess that it has negative propaganda value, but I’d also guess that the people complaining are incorrect about how distracting it is.)
Obligatory “obvious” joke: http://www.basicjokes.com/djoke.php?id=803
Beat me to it. Link.
See also: “Trivial”.