People say many things about entropy: entropy increases with time, entropy is disorder, entropy increases with energy, entropy determines the arrow of time, etc.. But I have no idea what entropy is, and from what I find, neither do most other people. This is the introduction I wish I had when first told about entropy, so hopefully you find it helpful. My goal is that by the end of this long post we will have a rigorous and intuitive understanding of those statements, and in particular, why the universe looks different when moving forward through time versus when traveling backward through time.
  • Sims@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 days ago

    Neat article. I too battled with the different definitions of Entropy (in relation to surprise, order/disorder, complexity etc), but didn’t come as close as this guy.

    “But I have no idea what entropy is, and from what I find, neither do most other people.”

    Something is happening on a Civilization scale.

    Anecdotally, I’ve experienced the same phenomenon many times, to be a non-expert, and start questioning established knowledge/experts - finding gaps and inconsistencies - while getting annoyed/disappointed. I suspect that most common people that use AI for deep philosophy/Science seem to discover that experts don’t agree on many definitions or assumptions, and that there are huge knowledge gaps that are glossed over. The established knowledge space are suddenly under scrutiny by millions of people enhanced with AI, now looking at the conclusions, disagreeing with definitions/assumptions and finding new perspectives and maybe even methodologies for the problem.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love Science/The Methodology, but it isn’t a perfect thing (far from it), and the handful of Hooman experts have been converging on whatever expert level a handful of experts and pre-AI tools could reach. They could only do so much.

    So far, we’ve only heard about a single paper fully written by AI, but it seems reasonable to say that all new papers are assisted with AI. Experts are being accelerated by AI from rapid ideation and combinations of disparate methodologies/perspectives etc, so I suspect that a wall of papers are under way from the more rigorous academic side. They just take a bit longer to produce/show their new thoughts and ideas. We probably need a new Science publishing system that can handle quicker feedback/evolution of ideas and knowledge.

    I think we are seeing the first glimpse of the coming knowledge explosion. Millions of ordinary people are testing out established facts, going new ways, and challenging assumptions/definitions etc. They will statistically puncture a lot of the current knowledge space, and significantly accelerate soft/theoretical expert knowledge.

    We will have a temporary global Democratization of Knowledge, where almost anyone can enter the debate on frontier science, based only on ideas, co-developed and checked with/by AI. AI is lowering entry-requirements to the knowledge/ideation field, and lifting ordinary people closer to expert levels.

    In only 5-10 years, our current societal structures will be judged by a global population with +50 IQ. I doubt anyone will be in awe over what they see.