Theme: Science

PROPERTARIANISM AND INFORMATION THEORY

(Guest Post)

Eds: Kirill stated “well, you’ve unified science and social science. So how do we unify science, social science, and information theory”. (Pretty awesomely Nerdy question really!!!) He thought about if for a bit and sent me this post. And, maybe it’s hard to grasp the elegance of his point, but if you’re enough of a science wonk then you’ll see how brilliantly he puts it together (Despite English being his third language.)

“FROM ENTROPY TO TRUTH TELLING”

– Kirill Latish

[E]ntropy is commonly understood as a measure of disorder. According to the second law of thermodynamics entropy of isolated system never decreases. Moreover. Hubble’s law tells us that Entropy of Universe tends to increase with time. And even more — the cosmological arrow of time points in the direction of the Universe’s expansion, or in other words — in the direction of Entropy increasing.

So we can assume that everything tends to Chaos – most stable state. That means that Evolution – is expressible as “a process of chaos production”.

This statement looks absurd from the first look. You can argue – we investigate the Universe, learn more and more about Nature, produce new and new things (read – order). But let’s not forget about costs. Each bit of partial knowledge that we accumulate, each product that we produce – is the result of an action, and that action, according to the second law of thermodynamics, can only increase Entropy. So that means it increased the amount of Chaos.

**Everything we do leads to increasing amount of disorder in the Universe**

From the other side we can say that Intelligence level of a person is amount of Chaos produced by this person. At the same time Intelligence level is amount of True facts that person knows and can use. And there are only two ways how we can “earn” Truth facts – empirical, or analytical:

– Empirical – try to get Truth from experiments.

– Analytical – try to get Truth statements from the information flow around us.

COMMUNICATION

Information flow exists only because we communicate with each other. So let’s ask – why do we communicate? And the answer is fairly simple – it is profitable for us. In many senses. From the beginning of our history we collaborate because it is much easier to survive in groups. It is easier to defeat our enemies, easier to learn, easier to resist to unpleasant environment conditions, and easier to produce goods and services of all kinds.

And so we can make two key conclusions:

1. In groups we can do more than apart – so the group is producing more disorder than all members individually.

2. For all our lives we try to resist the Universe – we are trying to not become fuel for Chaos.

TRUTH TELLING

And let’s think about difference between telling Truth and Lying. Truth telling is expensive in short term perspective because you have to check facts, and telling A lie doesn’t cost anything. But in long term perspective Truth telling gives you a competitive advantage by giving you the ability to use knowledge against your enemies.

And it is only one real choice that you have in your life – tell the truth and face up with all costs on this way, or lie and become a fuel for the Universe. From that point choice is obvious. But the problem is that we are almost always using greedy algorithms trying to solve our problems. But that doesn’t work in long-term perspective – and moreover – leads to defeat in the main battle in our life – Battle for survival.

So now we have very clear, long-term, survival strategy:

***Collaborate with society, operate only with truthful facts, try to attract maximum number of participants to your group in long term***

Kirill Latish,

Kiev, Ukraine