Entropy is Always Decreasing
Our tendency to appeal to natural laws might be more harmful than helpful.
Theories aren't all that useful.
Leave a theory on the kitchen counter and walk away, and it will just sit there, doing nothing.
Leave a theory in a hot, humid car sprinkled with spores and it will fail to act as a nutritious substrate for your anticipated mushrooms. They'll surely spring up in the sweat-stained upholstery before you see them sprouting mycorrhizae in the frictionless, sterile environs of theory. They are what I’ve heard
call “cold data”, ripped from context and connections that once made their data warm and alive.Cram your head full of them (theories, not mushrooms), and you might find yourself somewhat more equipped to describe and label the world around you in inaccessible ways, which I guess is pretty neat, but these skills might fail to instill any kind of in-the moment understanding of what actions must be taken next. They may actually get in the way, like martial arts theory crowding the attention, time, and energy of an amateur in a street fight, one who would be better off flailing mindlessly than trying to consciously “OODA-loop” their way through the next move as though this was a chess match.
Theories are just so hefty, resting on high shelves in the archives of our brains' metaphorical "System 2". They're unwieldy. They're more anvils than swords... and yet every day, so many of us drag theory to a practice fight. We get our clocks cleaned by reality, who is a dancing, unencumbered, reflexive practitioner, who flicks their blade impossibly quickly through flesh as we try and focus on lifting theory with our knees.
Meanwhile our opponents probably can't even pronounce the word mycorrhizae...
We lug theory into a conversation and drop it heavily onto the table for others to look at, pleased as punch that we have such a hefty contribution, while meanwhile they're wondering how quickly they can politely move on.
Systems-thinking pioneer Russell Ackoff, in a lecture on the shift from mechanistic to systemic thinking, shares this perspective on natural laws:
"All the fundamental laws of physics tell us what will happen when there is no environment, not when there is one. Their universality doesn’t derive from the fact that they apply in every environment but from the fact they don’t apply in any! All other environments are simply approximations of various degrees to the non-environment... What do you call a place where a scientist does his research? A laboratory. What’s a laboratory? It’s a place deliberately constructed to exclude the environment, right? You want to study the effect of x on y without the intervention of the environment, you build a laboratory. Because we believe that the understanding of the universe would derive from the understanding of dyadic relationships; x and y without the intervention of the environment. So we had an environment-free theory of explanation."
So, how useful are laws of physics to us who spend our entire lives very much within environments, in situations that aren't sanitized enough to reliably produce the effects described by scientific laws?
How many of us still think that scientific laws are useful for describing, predicting, and operating in the world? How do they hinder the way we think, and how might we escape that?
Later in the lecture, Ackoff adds this:
"See, as a child I learned there are lots of universal laws, and the first one I learned is: everything that goes up must come down. That’s not true. It’s true within the gravitational pull of Earth. But go out beyond it and it’ll go up ad infinitum. Every law is constrained by the environment within which it applies. There is no such thing as a universal law."
The environment must be accounted for.
There's one law in particular that bothers me every time it gets brought up.
The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, entropy always increases. People love to cite the relentless march of increasing entropy as the explanation for all kinds of things, but they ignore an important factor... None of us exists in a closed system. Patterns are becoming ordered around us all the time, because energy is being put into systems from the outside... because they aren't closed systems. I may not be able to unbreak an egg, but I can sort my Skittles into color groups before eating them systematically in such a way that the colors always have equal numbers--the correct way to eat Skittles. Entropy didn't increase in the case of the initially unordered and now ordered Skittles, because I acted on them, converting my metabolic energy, fed from outside my open system, into kinetic energy, imposing my will on that open system from the outside.
The second law of thermodynamics therefore doesn't really present as a law in our daily lived experience so much as it does a metaphor that supports the popular impression that all is decay and nothing is ever getting any better that so many of us harbor deep down in our angsty little goth hearts.
Entropy does not always go up... not really in the world as we experience it... not at our scale and scope of interest. In the universe, in aggregate? I guess! In a bounded simulation online that explains why entropy always increases? Absolutely. Within mechanistic systems that are contained enough to be effectively isolated? Yes, I have heard that is the case. But at our scale, in our context, in complex, human systems, the degree of entropy vacillates wildly. Order and organization in systemic patterns emerge from the energy brought into the system by individuals, modulated by environmental and social constraints and drivers. In your teams and workplaces, your relationships and strategies... you're not going to be mostly fighting the relentless pull of disorder. More likely you'll be fighting the order that emerges in human systems--the patterns of perception and behavior that are constantly emerging and finding stability. In social systems, perhaps the scientific "fact" of increasing entropy isn't only inaccurate, but actually leads to us believing that we're witnessing an increase of disorder when what we're actually facing is the emergence of order, and our best attempts at creating the patterns that we want are destructive... the entropy is coming from inside the house. The entropy was inside us the whole time... From the emerging social system's perspective, we are the source of disorder.
A favorite depiction of the concept of increasing entropy over time is the analogy of socks in a sock drawer. As time passes, the nicely organized socks in our sock drawer are going to have a tendency to mix, to become disorganized, and given enough time, they will scatter throughout the house. Bringing socks back into an ordered state, by picking them up and pairing them back in the drawer, requires the expenditure of energy. So as time passes, we have an increase in disorder and a decrease of available energy. It's a fun analogy for a very real scientific fact of increasing entropy, but there's a slight problem when we make the analogy applicable to social systems.
The socks are sentient.
They interact, cooperate, develop affinity for one-another, and form their own little social sock systems, with their own ideas of what proper sock behavior and desired social sock patterns look like. They don't want to live in the drawer, and they don't give a damn what you think about how they live their lives. You find yourself expending energy time and again bringing them back to an "ordered" state, and they will experience your machinations as disrupting the patterns within which they find stability. Give it some time, and we shouldn't be surprised if the socks rise up, overthrow their human oppressor, and thus create for themselves an increased affordance of available energy that they were previously forced to expend trying to get back into an ordered state every time you showed up and "organized" them.
It would be silly to think "gosh aren't these just the most entropic socks you've ever seen?" because what you're witnessing wouldn't be an increase of disorder. It would be the emergence of competing ordered patterns. My contention here is that the application of the second law to social systems is seriously misguided, because the socks are sentient. The breakdown of ordered patterns is very much not the same thing as the emergence of competing patterns. This could be another way of understanding the difference between ordered and complex systems (#Cynefin). Ordered systems are tightly contained. Complex systems on the other hand are open, layered, and their human components are themselves little power plants bringing their own energy, agency, and capacity to increase order, to form, join, and manipulate systems of their own.
To summarize:
Our understanding of the natural laws at play here are inaccurate when applied to complex systems (entropy is not always increasing, it is actually regularly decreasing), and therefore what we're presenting as laws are really no more than metaphors, grounded in cultural assumptions (e.g. everything is always getting worse)
We have a tendency to think as though there is no environment, but there is always an environment, and our abstractions that fail to account for that environment will hinder our capacity to operate within it.
What we perceive as increasing disorder in social systems might be more accurately framed as competing ordered patterns emerging that are coherent with context, constraints, and drivers within the environment.
That third point matters a lot because your interventions ought to change if you shift from a "competing with entropy" approach to one that seeks coherence with emergent, ordered social patterns, determining what they mean about what's possible in the environment based on existing constraints, affordances, and attractors. The ideal approach doesn't start with "what's desirable" and then seek to brute-force a solution through the imposition of energy.
It seeks to understand what's viable given the existing emergent patterns and then shapes strategy or design to be coherent with those conditions.
The larger point is that theories, no matter how scientifically accurate at some larger scale or provable in a laboratory setting, might be more incumbering than enabling, because they can only describe what would happen in what is for our purposes a fictional setting. Scientific laws do not reliably apply where there is an environment to contend with... and there is always an environment to contend with. A scientific law or theory that is descriptive and predictive in a laboratory or a closed system can prove to be the opposite of helpful when we attempt to apply it in the confounding conditions that we face in actual reality, at the scales of teams, organizations, states, and nations, where order is always emerging in coherence with invisible environmental factors.
What other metaphors masked as theory and law might constrain our thinking?
I've read a decent number of books that offer some really useful-feeling theories about how to understand what happens in the world. Few have really effectively helped me anticipate what will happen in the world, at least as far as I can tell. Most of them simply take advantage of retrospective coherence to describe the cause and effect of the past in a clear, linear way using some method derived from pattern-finding. Many popular books can basically be described as starting with a premise and then describing the past through that lens. Usually this involves some amount of cherry-picking of case-studies, but it's also fairly straightforward to simply exclude all the information from history that blurs the picture a bit.
Did Apple really succeed because they started with why? What about all of the companies that started with why and didn't succeed? Aren’t there other hugely important factors here? I'm not saying it's bad advice to start with why... except no… actually in the case of design, it's probably more useful to start with who...
The only books that really helped me anticipate the future were the books that convinced me to do something in order to create an effect in the world. This is because the only accurate way to tell the future is to create it yourself--to be a sentient sock rather than one that lies lifeless and waits to be sorted.
What I'd like to do here is not just fill your head with unwieldy theories that you're just going to have to file away in the "system 2" archives, which are likely to only slow down your reflexes. I'd like to try and articulate what taking action based on those theories means. We don't need more people walking around with anvils when what we really need are swords. I want to put a few bugs in your head that affect those reflexes, how you perceive the world around you. To start with, I want to undermine your faith in universal laws and let go of mechanistic thinking about social systems.
What I've covered so far are the following simple ideas, contained within which are thousands of other more useful ideas.
There are no universal laws; the environment must be accounted for.
The socks are sentient; sentient socks can't simply be sorted.
So what does it mean to act in a system where the socks are sentient, where order is as likely to be increasing as it is to be decreasing?
What does it mean to operate in a way that accounts for the environment?
What does it mean to be a sentient sock yourself, in a world where some would seek to cruelly sort you in a manner incoherent with your wants and needs?
This essay is a rewrite of the first chapter of my Patreon project and I would like to extend my thanks to the people who continue to support my writing even though I have been very inconsistent in my output.