Entropy Is Fatal
kerkour.com
kerkour.com
It's fine to think of entropy as messiness; that's the Boltzmann picture of statistical mechanics. The mistake is thinking that lowering entropy, or getting rid of the mess, is a satisfactory strategy.
Think of it as a negative feedback system, like a thermostat. Keeping entropy low means continually correcting errors. This is a successful strategy only if the world always stays the same, but it notoriously does not. Some degree of messiness is needed to remain flexible, strange as it may sound. There must be room to make the good kind of mistakes and happy little accidents (as Bob Ross would put it).
Because the author chose an analogy rooted in statistical mechanics, here's another: supercooled water. Take a bottle of purified water and put it in the cooler. It gets chilled below freezing temperature without freezing. If you give it a shake, it instantly freezes. The analogy may sound a bit vapid, but noise is the crucial ingredient for the system to "find" its lowest-energy state. The system crystallizes from some nucleation site.
It's the same with evolution. Mutations are a must. Keeping our genetic entropy low isn't a viable option, because that means we'll get stuck and die out. There must be opportunity for randomness, chance, chaos, noise; all that jazz.
This is how China became an economic powerhouse under Deng Xioping, for instance. They experimented with various policies and if something accidentally turned out to work great, it became something of a "nucleation site". The policy that worked in, say, Shaowu, would spread all across China. But it would never have worked if they stuck with a rigid, Confucian strategy of keeping "entropy" low at all times.
Entropy isn't necessarily fatal. Entropy can be used as a strategy for adaptation.
The result is that almost invariably, I found a new way of doing something that's better than before. It often takes multiple tries, but it's something that takes little energy because it can be done throughout the day and the stakes are small.
Applied to a larger scale, random adjustments to larger systems can be exactly what's needed.
Kidding =]. I actually don't have a better way of opening jars, it was more an example to show the triviality of the type of problems this kind of trial and error can work for. Maybe a better example is figuring out a repeatable way to get a stubborn door to shut. Things like that.
EDIT: Actually, you probably already know this, but if you turn a jar upside down and hit it on a counter top, it can knock the lid loose enough to twist off. I didn't mention it because I didn't figure that one out on my own, but if you're looking for jar-opening tips, that's a good one.
Most 'best practices' are good defaults, but the superlative rhetoric comes with the unstated assumption that any deviation is necessarily inferior, and that the best cannot be iterated upon. This drains agency from actors within a system, selecting for predictable mediocrity rather than risky innovation.
Fascinating perspective to me, and probably the right one. The term “best practices“ gives me a warm feeling because I view it as a good starting point, one that will save me some time because others have figured out what not to do. It never occurred to me that best practices would be a static thing.
But it should be added: If one leaves the field of kinetic gas theory and focuses on scenarios where cohesion becomes relevant, such as in crystallisation, an increase in entropy means an increase in order.
A lot of people struggle with this disconnect of "the mess" of "variety" but I think your comment helped me to maybe get some more analogy that could help folks get unlocked to the thinking.
Thank you very much for this very precious feedback! I think it way better explain what I wanted to say in "3rd Poison: Momentum".
But, there is an important distinction to make: The China you are describing seems to have way more "available energy" (people and resources) than needed and no really specific goals, while in my experience it's rarely the case for smaller organizations, teams and individuals.
So, how to innovate and avoid starvation while operating on limited resources? This certainly deserves its own post :)
This is also mirrored in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency%E2%80%93thoroughnes...
> 1st poison: Unlimited and uncontrolled growth
IMO this is by far the biggest poison, and the one our society is most prone to ignoring. Every company, government budget, population, etc is considered "successful" if it's growing, and "failing" if it's shrinking. And the growth is always measured in terms of percentage, meaning the growth is compounding/exponential.
Sustainable living means getting comfortable with flat or even negative growth.
Reindeer population growth in Alaska.
Remove the unnecessary actions to produce X, and you're down to the bare minimum set of actions. Now speed up those actions and you'll eventually reach some minimum time requirement, and the output of X is a function of Required_Actions * Required_Time and how many Producing_Units you have and available time.
Seems it'd be asymptotic
The quibble I had was with the "sustainable", which in that context, I read as indefinitely/infinitely sustainable (and it seems other responders have similar issues).
I agree that there should be a lot more human ingenuity ahead of us than behind us (assuming that those seeking power over others, e.g., megalomaniacs and autocrats, don't first destroy us).
That said, productivity of any one thing is certainly never an x^y sort of curve but eventually flattens and becomes asymptotic, if not declining.
As long as we have free brain cycles focused on solving problems or understanding something we do not yet understand, we’ll continue to do better.
Everything is controlled by the maths of physics and chemistry.
Physics being math doesn’t quite make sense to me yet, if for no other reason than a large body of physics laws are ‘because that is what happens in real life’ when you get down to it.
It’s clear the math is a tool to try to reason about the reality, not the other way around.
Those properties could be constants or additional formulas in their own right, just like a computer program in many ways.
Chemistry is ‘higher level’ physics, and similarly the discipline grew out of observed reality far before the maths were used.
Maths were useful tools, and continue to be more and more useful as they are developed and have useful predictive power. But the predictive power (and falsifiability of their predictions) against reality is key.
Biology will put limits in place long before physics will.
Sadly, most techies completely ignore or miss this point.
For example, human population. Let's say the birthrate in a population is growing, so a naive conclusion would be that the population, a concrete object, must also be growing. This is not true if the deathrate is growing by the same amount. Now, this is the standard kind of thing you see in a intro to differential equations course: a river feeds a lake at rate X, and another river drains a lake at rate Y, and so is the lake growing or shrinking? Ooops, we neglected to take evaporation into account, so we get the wrong answer.
Economists are among the worst offenders in this misuse of concepts. Take 'productivity growth' - this is actually growth in the rate at which product is produced, right? If productivity is flat and market demand is flat and human population is flat, well, that means everyone is getting what they need, if say the product is cell phones, for example. If everyone has a cell phone, and cell phones are replaced every five years, then what is productivity growth? Maybe you can make the cell phone manufacturing line more efficient, by recycling the materials from old cell phones into new cell phones, or by automation etc. Nevertheless, the desired rate of cell phone production is fixed, and everyone has a cell phone.
Of course the market should be broken up between different producers to encourage competition, but here growth in production of a better cell phone with higher demand is counterbalanced by shrinkage in market share by another producer, as net demand is flat.
Unfortunately, if the cell phone makers form a cartel, and raise their prices in unison, some economist will call that 'economic growth' based on the fact that they're extracting more money from a market with fixed demand, which is just ludicrous - but that's modern neoclassical economics for you.
Immediately reminded me of Bill Gates' comment on how measuring progress on a designing and building a software project by using a Total_Lines_Of_Code metric is about as dumb as measuring progress on designing and building an airplane using a Total_Weight metric.
What you want in both is the least amount of code/material that will actually do the job, and being smarter than a simple "more is better"approach. Yet so many supposedly intelligent managers use such approaches...
The big issue near as I can tell, is that defining what the job actually is, and what accomplishing it actually looks like is the hardest part most of the time.
Many of the most innovative solutions also come from changing pre-built assumptions about what they can look like.
Yet so many supposedly intelligent engineers work for such managers...
But growth isn't about one company ever increasing. It's about new companies innovating and taking over old ones. As long as there is innovation, there will be growth.
Change should be embraced. I personally see no reason to advocate for stagnation of human progress with the same handful of companies serving humans for all time.
Dividends (what a value company typically produces) are taxed at a much higher rate than long term capital gains (which a ‘growth’ company produces).
Dividends usually at the same rate as income, from 10-37% at the federal level, and often the same if the state has an income tax.
Long term capital gains are 0-20%, and many states don’t tax them at all even if they tax income.
Everyone has a significant incentive to go ‘growth’ in that environment.
It is not a guaranteed way to do it however, as unlike a dividend, there is no way to directly tie the repurchase of shares to x amount of actual long term market value.
It often works though, and when markers were going up, it helps.
I don't understand what you mean. From the point of view of the company - and what you called its significant incentive to go ‘growth’ if I understood your comment - there is no difference between spending $1bn repurchasing shares or distributing dividends.
If you spend $1bln buying back shares, that isn’t money in their pocket until they sell. And if they sell, they don’t get any future ‘growth’.
And if the company/economy doesn’t do well next quarter, they’re losing it in the form of decreased stock value, or even implosion/complete loss.
A dividend is direct cash in the bank. Much lower (zero) ongoing risk of losing that payment. But it gets taxed directly at a higher rate.
I thought we agreed that the difference to investors is that selling shares back to the company is better from a tax perspective than receiving a dividend.
> If you spend $1bln buying back shares, that isn’t money in their pocket until they sell.
In aggregate, they just sold $1bn. Individually, they can sell the proportional part. (Ignoring the second-order effects due to the uncertainty about the timing of the buybacks.)
> And if they sell, they don’t get any future ‘growth’.
Just like when they get the dividend and they end up owning the same share of the same company. The difference is that they pay less taxes.
> And if the company/economy doesn’t do well next quarter, they’re losing it in the form of decreased stock value, or even implosion/complete loss.
This seems more of a reason to avoid companies that do not distribute money (either in the form of dividends or buybacks), doesn't it?
> A dividend is direct cash in the bank. Much lower (zero) ongoing risk of losing that payment. But it gets taxed directly at a higher rate.
Selling the stock to the company is also cash in the bank - and it doesn't get taxed at a higher rate.
Whatever the relevance of "they don’t get any future ‘growth’" argument it's unrelated to the difference in rates between income taxes and capital gain taxes.
For the sake of the argument, let's say that both tax rates are equal. If company A distributes $1bn and company B doesn't would you still say that investing in company A the investros "don’t get any future ‘growth’"? In that case your preference for 'growth' companies is not based on the fact that dividends are taxed at a much higher rate than long term capital gains.
1) tax efficiency 2) actual risk of losing money/extracting value from their holdings.
If an investor wants reliable, regular income, stock buybacks aren’t helpful. Dividends are. Enough to be worth using less tax efficient structures.
However if an investor wants a maximally large portfolio at a indefinite future point, they generally don’t care about dividends. In fact if they want maximum tax efficiency above cash flow (which such investor generally wants), and are comfortable with risk, they want to avoid dividends.
Stock buybacks ARE more tax efficient than dividends, but also higher risk.
In theory (and usually in practice even more so), buying back the $1bln increases the value of ongoing remaining stock holdings by $1bln.
However, unlike a dividend, that doesn’t get converted into cash. It turns cash into increased scarcity for equity ownership in the company.
Depending on expected future earnings multiples (cough inflated P/E) this can swing widely, but also provide ‘leverage’ for a company doing this.
Which increases ongoing dependence on management of the company, market perception of the companies worth, etc. which increases actual risk to the investor going forward.
It is far more tax efficient though.
Which if ‘everything always goes up’ is not a big deal, and often desirable. If someone is making sure they have cash in a bank account every month so they don’t need to be eating cat food, less so.
Does what I’m saying make more sense in that context?
I suspect that the ‘market goes up’ + automation of trades has also made dividends look less necessary. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a good stock market crash.
That's absolutely wrong. (If that's - in some sense - correct, it will also be true that distributing $1bn in dividends the company increases the value of ongoing remaining stock holdings by $1bln.)
Anyway, the question was if the tax treatment of dividends relative to capital gains gives investors a strong incentive to prefer 'growth' companies that do not ever return capital to the owners rather than 'not-so-much-growth' companies that pass a substantial part of their cashflows ot the owners. And the answer is 'not as much as you implied' because there are also companies that distribute money using a mechanism that is not affected by the tax treatment of dividends so investors can avoid dividends without being restricted to 'growth only' companies.
Even if the shares are not destroyed, the assets of the company now include those $1bln shares and are non-voting. Every other shareholder now has their actual voting power/control/share increase proportionally.
Take the hypothetical case where all but 1 share was bought back by the company. The owner of the one remaining non-bought back share is now the controlling shareholder and that share should be valued at the prior market value of all public shares, modulo what everyone things about it’s new future in such a scenario.
Dividends do not work the same way, and would not do the same thing - though for a value company, share price generally is based off the dividend payment history over a period of time, and expected likelihood of that trend continuing. So missing a dividend would definitely have an impact.
It isn’t quite like a bond, but many people try to use value companies that pay dividends for similar purposes - cash flow.
If a dividend isn’t paid, theoretically you’d expect the money not spent to be an asset on the books and increase the overall share price proportionally, modulo the markets valuation of such a thing. But it still isn’t cash in anyone else’s bank account, and the companies management could just spend it on something else at any time.
The market cap definitely doesn't stay the same. When $1bn goes out the door (either as a distribution of dividends or to repurchase shares) the value of the company goes down quite a lot instantaneously. [Maybe somewhat less than $1bn though, as cash on hand may be discounted due to the risk of mismanagement, the tax on the dividend is considered, etc.] The market value adjusts instantaneously when a dividend is distributed as it's known in advance, in the case of buybacks the company only discloses them from time to time but the adjustment to the fundamental change in value happens eventually.
Can you provide a single reference that says that the value of a company doesn't goes down when it gives money away?
> Every other shareholder now has their actual voting power/control/share increase proportionally.
All the shareholders together own a company that is worth less than before - the only difference is that it has less dollars in it's current account. [That is, all the remaining shareholders. When all the previous shareholders are considered they jointly own a company that is worth less than before and a bag of money - their aggregate wealth is essentially unchanged as discussed above.]
> Take the hypothetical case where all but 1 share was bought back by the company. The owner of the one remaining non-bought back share is now the controlling shareholder and that share should be valued at the prior market value of all public shares, modulo what everyone things about it’s new future in such a scenario.
Ok, let's assume that I have an Intel share and everyone else agrees to sell their shares to the company at the current price of $40 and the company can somehow get the $160bn financing required to buy those shares. Then my share is worth $160bn?
Yesterday, all the shareholders together had a company worth $160bn. If today I own a company worth $160bn and the other shareholders have $160bn in cash, where do you think the extra $160bn came from?
A simpler case: Alice and Bob are equal shareholders in a company. The company has $10mn in cash. They reach an agreement about the valuation of the company being $20mn. The company uses the $10mn in cash to buy back Alice's interest. [I said the company has $10mn in cash for simplicity. It could have more or have less and take a loan for the rest without affecting the argument.] Now Bob is the sole owner of the company. How much is the company worth? Do you really think that the company is still worth $20mn?
What if I'm a sole owner and sell half of my shares to the company? Has my wealth doubled? Can I have the (half) cake and eat it too? Can I keep selling half my interest to multiply my wealth?
"Alice and Bob are equal shareholders in a company. They agree that the fair value of the company is $20mn. The company pays $10mn to Alice for her shares."
the correct answer is
(a) "Alice has now $10mn in cash and Bob is now the sole owner of a company worth $10mn [their joint wealth is unchanged]".
If for some reason you are under the impression that
(b) "Alice has now $10mn in cash and Bob owns a company worth $20mn [the deal has created $10mn of added value]"
maybe you could try to explain your reasoning.
In universe (a) they agree that the company is worth $10mn. Alice pays Bob $5mn and they end both with $5mn in cash and each half of the company is valued at $5mn. Their net wealth is unchanged.
In the nonsensical alternative universe (b) they agree that the company is worth $20mn and Alice pays $10mn to Bob to get back 50% of the company. Alice would be again in the initial situation (no cash and a piece of business worth $10mn) while Bob would have made a large profit ($10mn in cash in addition to half of the company with the same value as before). If all the exchanges between Alice, Bob and the company have been done at fair value how did Bob end in a better situation than Alice? If all the exchanges have been done between Alice, Bob and the company only how can the net profit be explained?
It's not the right word. Entropy is a "term-of-art" that has a specific meaning that differs from that in the general populace or in thermodynamics. This website can't be loaded over HTTPS:// without sufficient Entropy.
Would you care to explain that? The term ‘entropy’ originates in statistical mechanics / thermodynamics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
This is similar to when a programmer uses the word auto in a car dealership to mean something other than automobile - because it means something different in a different field. Even when that person first explains what he is about to refer to with the word auto, it is still the wrong word to use in that context.
Your link explains this: "In 1948, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon developed similar statistical concepts of measuring microscopic uncertainty and multiplicity to the problem of random losses of information in telecommunication signals. Upon John von Neumann's suggestion, Shannon named this entity of missing information in analogous manner to its use in statistical mechanics as entropy, and gave birth to the field of information theory. This description has been identified as a universal definition of the concept of entropy." [1]
Throughout the universe we see that bigger growth in a system, entity, body, etc means less adaptive potential, slower change potential, because latency of information increases. When latency increases too much it can be fatal to a system that 'communicates' or is synchronized in some way to remain a consistent system, entity, body, group etc. What holds all bodies together on the macro and micro seems to be information synchronization. And when particles, bodies, etc can't synchronize information in a timely manner, things degenerate from there and the system undergoes a state change. One of those degenerative factors is growth. Just as in an orchestra, if it becomes too big you lose synchronization. Other disturbances I'd argue use those same basic principles to corrupt a system; they interfere with the synchronization of information unless it can form a new changed state compatible with a revised system.
I recently talked about this in a very broad sense throughout a few blog entries but mostly it's just me being a dumdum: https://0134340.blogspot.com/2022/06/bottom-to-top-principle...
Entropy should not be thought of as “overhead” or “wasted energy,” which is what I believe the author is getting at. Instead, entropy is the tendency to disorganization. So, the analogy could be the more stuff you have, the more disorganized it becomes; but this is a weak analogy in my opinion.
Here is a link to another article that discusses the link between complexity and entropy. The two are indeed related: entropy is necessary for complexity to emerge. Entropy is not, as this author suggests, a result of complexity.
https://medium.com/@marktraphagen/entropy-and-complexity-the...
Something about this particular line does not sit well with me.
How would we define the relationship between entropy, complexity and information?
tldr:
(Shannon) entropy [1]: expected description length of a state of a system
(Shape) complexity [0]: a 'clumped-ness' metric: clump sizes / inter-clump separations
information: not sure anyone ever really resolved this in a satisfying way :^) [2]
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/606722/how-do-di...
[2] https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Shannon_Claude_E_1956_The_B...
My understanding is that this is pretty cool stuff that solves Maxwell's demon and also sort of explains biological evolution, because apparently a system responding to it's environment is computation, performed by changing the system's state as a function of a driving signal, which results in memory about the driving signal that can be interpreted as computing a model, a model that can be predictive of the future. Now apparently how predictive that model is equals to how thermodynamically efficient the system is. Even the smallest molecular machines with memory thus must conduct predictive inference to approach maximal energetic efficiency.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221703137_Thermodyn...
Asimov was way ahead of TFA :)
I like to think that life is a thermodynamic mechanism that:
- locally reduces entropy by consuming
lower-entropy energy and casting out
higher entropy stuff
- reproduces
For example, life on Earth consumes low-entropy (because colimated and short-ish wavelength) sunlight and molecules of various types (e.g., CO2) and uses that to build locally-lower-entropy things (plankton, plants, animals, ...), in the process emitting lower entropy things like detritus, feces, etc., but especially longer-wavelength light in all directions. Because Earth's climate is roughly in equilibrium, if you examine all the light going in (colimated, low-wavelength sunlight) and all the light going out (longer-wavelength IR in all directions), the energy must balance, but the entropy must be much higher on the outbound side. Similarly, Venus must be dead because it reflects so much sunlight, thus failing to use it to improve local entropy, thus it must be dead.
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/05/23/198-...
Exponentially? I guess, in the sense that from fertilized egg to adult, lifeforms grow exponentially, you're right, but adults usually do not keep growing. So I would say "sustained", and once the negentropy (I don't like that term either) operation is no longer sustained -and so local entropy is once more on the rise-, then the being has died.
For stars, I think the issue is that local entropy does not go down. Collapse is avoided on a sustained basis, and when that stops being so, the star dies (and possibly leads to the creation of new stars, which looks like reproduction). That looks like life, but it isn't because local entropy still goes up.
> Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
Entropy is a force of nature, it will always increase, second law of thermodynamics. And yes, it is fatal, we will all die in the end there isn't much we can do about it. But that's where the author backs out, saying that "organizational entropy" doesn't follow the laws of thermodynamics because there is a magic spell called "minimalism"... Why make a parallel with physics then?
I think that just like thermodynamic entropy, there is no solution, we will all die, period. The only thing we can do is make the best of the time we are alive.
And if we look at the author's ideal, it has zero entropy, literally absolute zero, nothing moves, which is not the most enjoyable situation...
Furthermore, the proposed solution (minimalism) involves creating a small pocket of low entropy. In thermodynamics, that would be a freezer. But while freezers can lower entropy locally, they increase entropy globally, freezers need energy to function. And the colder your freezer, the more energy it consumes and the more entropy it creates. It means that minimalism can be counterproductive: the more you try to make things perfect, the messier everything around it becomes.
So, don't try to put every atom at it correct place, you simply can't, absolute zero doesn't exist in nature, just admit that life isn't perfect, that it is sometimes better to do something useless than doing even more work trying to find if it actually is useless. And low entropy (nothing moves) is as boring as high entropy (just noise), the best is somewhere in the middle, life is in the middle.
the assumption that the world is a closed system - depicted here by the black border around the particles, showing it is closed off from the world.
Sure, in a closed system, eventually you get something like heat death, within the box.
But life, and the world, are an open system - at least especially from the human-scale life experience. You can't say that heat death is sure to happen.
Does entropy increase at the macro level? Pretty much yeah. But to define what 'macro' is, is hard enough to make any answer dubious or uninteresting - is it the entire universe? Is it the solar system? In either case the scale at which it appears closed much bigger your life, which is coincidentally a scale at which it may seem open - bc the world is not uniform and ergodic at the living-as-a-human-scale. We each experience a different life story (another debate for the future, perhaps? :^) )
If you like you can imagine that the entropy in your own particular life could always decrease while the entropy somewhere else far away undergoes a commensurate simultaneous increase.
As I remember it, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow) wrote in the book The Evolving Self that basically the meaningfulness of your life is:
(the flow you experience == the entropy/time 'life bandwidth rate' you experience)
x
(the good you do for others)
the Shannon-Hartley theorem tells us that the channel capacity C depends
B: the channel substrate bandwidth,
SNR = Power(Signal) / Power(Noise), both in decibels.
C=B log2(1 - SNR)
On the other hand we're not gas molecules confined in a chamber. So as much as we'd like to apply the laws of thermodynamics to our lives it just won't work. The reason we exist is a mystery. Usefulness takes an entirely different shape when you're not sure what it is that you're trying to optimize for. Useful to what end?
Software: try to build orthogonal features so that maximum value can be obtained with minimum complexity; build tools with well-designed deprecation mechanisms, then have releases where underused/redundant functionality is first deprecated and then removed entirely.
e.g. all the major extension repositories for a particular tool parse the machine-generated deprecation list, scan extensions, and email owners when they use deprecated APIs. Maybe provide "shims" where APIs are internally removed entirely but transitional packages are provided that implement the removed APIs in terms of still-present ones.
Companies: deliberately design policies and organizational structures that are simple and minimize entropy; be prepared to pay some upfront financial costs to do so (e.g. because your policies aren't layers upon layers of hacks that grow every time someone makes a mistake), but reap rewards in the future as incidental costs of running your company are lower and less bureaucracy means workers are more efficient.
e.g. instead of having a bunch of different rules about different kinds of vacation time, consolidate them all into 1 or 2 kinds (normal and medical?) and give everyone a bit extra to compensate for some of the edge cases that were smoothed over.
Governments: legislators should spend some time attempting to "refactor" old laws such that fewer words and less complexity still results in effectively the same legal environment; reduce government functions (as much as some of you may dislike that idea).
e.g. instead of trying to provide hundreds/thousands of different special-case tax breaks for low-income families, use a "sliding" tax rate where e.g. at $1k/year annual income your tax rate is 0%, at $1M a year your tax rate is n%, with linear interpolation between those two extremes (or whatever). Simpler, still somewhat fair, people might actually be able to do their taxes by reading the law, and no suspicious discontinuities[1]. Or something else - with some thought and a little experience in government, I'm sure someone could come up with an income tax system that was an order of magnitude shorter than what the US has now.
This would be a major constitutional change, by which I mean that it introduces new limits on government. Politicians would have some understandable inclination to oppose it. Not saying it isn't needed, it obviously is.
In this context "be a minimalist" is a thought stopper in all its grace.
This neatly sums up the reason for Apple's ever expanding set of Animojis with every iOS release.
The only result nihilism brings is a slow and dangerous detachment from reality and the world we live in.
No it's not, and there's plenty of evidence that a certain amount of disorder is needed to be creative and flexible, to adapt quickly to change, and evolve.
The key is to find a balance.
There are no isolated systems in the context being discussed, i.e. houses and phones and so on. This is an important point: steady-state thermodynamics is a far more complicated beast than closed-system thermodynamics, and moving-state thermodynamics even more so.
Furthermore, how does one distinguish between useful and useless work? Work is work, the value of work is something humans decide on socially. Say people are put to work building a pyramid, so the kings and priests have a nice high place to sit. Egyptian pyramids are impressive, but are they useful? Maybe in terms of some abstract notion like consolidating the power of the state or impressing one's neighbors.
Anyway, here are some solutions to the author's points:
1) Unlimited and uncontrolled growth: match inputs to outputs. Delete as many old emails per day as you receive new ones. If it's important, copy and store securely offline. If you buy new clothes, send an equal amount of old clothes to recycler or the thrift store. If that's too much work, cut back on inputs instead.
2) Decision-makers have no skin in the game: If the decision-maker wants to build a pyramid, the decision-maker should be spending their days building that pyramid alongside their employees. Then they might decide that building pyramids is a useless activity, and perhaps building a bridge or a dam would be a wiser undertaking. Yes, investment capitalism has this problem. Put the shareholders to work on the production line or give them the boot, that's the solution.
3) Momentum is not a source of entropy I don't think. Entropy is more like diffusion than directed momentum. An object impacting another due to momentum could increase entropy, like a car running into a brick wall. Maybe the author is talking about something abstract like 'the momentum of bad habits is hard to break'? Here is where an injection of entropy ('shaking things up') might be helpful.
Physics analogies can be rather overused, in conclusion.
Entropy is a quantity. Qualities can only change, they do not live or die. The article should have been titled "Low Entropy is Fatal", or "Larger areas Low Entropy Areas are More Quickly Fatal than Small Areas of Low Entropy". Which is also wrong. All areas of low entropy are fatal, it is just easier to see the larger low entropy areas failing than the smaller ones. And larger areas of low entropy need more energy to keep the entropy low. Which is why minimalism is easier, it just shrinks the low entropy area to one that needs less energy.
Also...
You, as a human, are a low entropy area. Your whole existence is predicated on continuing to sustain your area of low entropy. How do we do this? By enabling electrons to flow through our mitochondria and stealing their angular momentum.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33671585/
Areas of low entropy have a constant stream of electrons flowing through them. For humans the electron transport chain in our mitochondria steals the electrons angular momentum energy. Our mitochondria steal the angular momentum of electrons.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b09262
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1407716111
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00108...
The mitochondria are quantum machines that capture the free energy from electrons. Black holes are also quantum machines. Anywhere you see an area of low entropy you see a quantum machine. Quantum machines are powered by the angular momentum of electrons to make areas of low entropy.
Electron spin makes all matter possible, everything object a quantum machine that uses the angular momentum of an electron (which happens to be the speed of light!).
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
IMHO, Black holes are black because they capture all of an electrons angular momentum. Very efficient quantum machines indeed.