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Showing posts with the label Entropy

The Wave You Ride

We can't predict the future. Chaos always reigns. The unpredictable compounding of events is inevitable, and we can always count on surprises occurring , which is why it pays to build our lives (and invest) with the certainty that something will inevitably go wrong. Accounting for the certitude that something you planned for will not go as planned should prod you to hedge yourself via diversification --or even better, redundancies. Of course, building redundancies takes resources. That insurance policy doesn't pay for itself. You sacrifice current income (and/or effort) to build that safety net in case SHTF.  And although it could very well be that you'll never use it, it's not stupid to build it. An example: Nature, in its infinite iteration game called evolution, gave us two kidneys. I am pretty sure it's not free (evolutionarily speaking) to carry an extra filter behind your belly just in case one clogs with crap you throw at your body. If evolution settles on an...

We're All Conservatives

We are nothing more than little ants fighting disorder in our immediate environment living in a universe trending towards chaos. From our insignificant, unilateral (human) viewpoint, we are always striving to minimize surprises. That's the brain evolution gifted us . And when surprises appear, we learn , hoping to apply what's learned in our next interaction with our environment, so we hopefully survive. Ok, maybe not "we" , but our genes, because we're really just the vehicle genes use to perpetuate themselves into posterity.  If only us little ants' fight was costless. Every time we strive to reduce disorder locally (reduce entropy), and rearrange our environment so that it's less hostile to us, we actually increase disorder (entropy) in the overall universe. When we chop down forests to dedicate that land for human crops, and we reduce the threat of going hungry (reducing entropy from humans' perspective), we actually increase entropy at the planet...