It seems to me that every utopian dream falls flat in the face of human fallibility. The core aspects of human behavior have remained stable over millennia and, while we have many good aspects, our negative behaviors towards each other cannot suppressed. I wish it were not true. People like MM have their heads in the clouds.
It is not only fallibility, but in addition, nobody agrees on the specifics of utopia. To create an ideal society it is not enough to say it will have no bad things, but one must specify all the details of how it would be brought about. There have been many utopias written, from Plato on, but as Isaiah Berlin pointed out, nobody would want to live in any of them. This problem is why idealists never are specific about the ideological terminus. Instead it is always about just destroying what exists. They are in fact nihilists.
There is a novel "Looking Backwards" by Edward Bellamy which a great (unintentional) example of what goes wrong when the specifics of an ideal society are stated.
Looking Backward 2000-1887 was one of the most successful books ever published in America. Dating to 1887, it posited a time traveler to 2000 who encountered a utopian socialist world. Lots of people found the ideas congenial. At one point, there were 162 Bellamy Clubs in America. Interestingly, Bellamy avoided the word socialism and called the system of the future (capital N) Nationalism.
Bellamy's Nationalism is remarkably genteel. There is no rock and roll in 2000 and never will be.
It isn't even fallibility or negative behaviors. Different values conflict regularly, and social engineers ignore this by substituting their own value systems as if they were universally desirable.
One thing I took from the autobiography of George Stigler (Economics Nobel 1982) is that high-powered academics are selling ideas, and often they oversell. After all, you need to get noticed, and to get people to react.
Razib Khan had a conversation with Muthukrishna which gives a more favorable impression of the book. There's also a transcript at the link, which I hope isn't gated:
That early excerpt from the book is either a blunder in a better book, or indicative of a bad book to follow. I am not reading the book, and have no intention of doing so, but if I had come across that in reading it, it would have probably induced me to stop reading and take it back to the library.
“The authors want to say that the drop in the time-price of bananas illustrates abundance due to human ingenuity. But does the sharp rise in the time-price of baseball tickets illustrate scarcity due to human sloth?”
Could the relative increase in abundance of food and other necessities (bananas) and the relative decrease in the abundance of luxury goods (baseball tickets) indicate a general increase in productivity and therefore of leisure time?
I am reading it now and have only gotten through the first chapter. I too am skeptical of his assurance with his four laws and his supposed scientific "theoretical framework." I will say that his fourth law is evolution, which he specifically clarifies includes innovation by trial and error and competition.
I could go into my concerns with each of the four laws, but I am assuming he will delve more into these in future chapters.
Do I have you confused with someone else? Didn't you say you don't much like books? This one sounds pretty bad. Why are you reading it AND summarizing it?
Regardless, I'm kind of looking forward to what you have to say about it. It doesn't sound like something I could read so your cliff notes version might be interesting.
Hm, the books sounds crazier than what I heard before. What I heard seemed so obvious, it is boring: Big changes in energy-utilisation brings the big changes: Photosynthesis transformed life and the planet. Human use of fire, of husbandry, of agriculture and human-societies use of energy-efficient division of labor. Then use of coal: Industrial revolution. Then oil/gas/electricity and nuclear energy. In the present/near future: solar and fusion. You need a BOOK to get that message across?!
Re commodity prices and Simon/Ehrlich: prognosticators in the past were unsuccessful at predicting the future - therefore prognosticators in the present will be wrong about the future.
You would think people would tire, eventually, of sheep-like taking the "received" view of that incident.
Modern social science and social evolution provides not just a theory *of* everyone, it provides a theory *for* everyone, as its unfalsifiable narratives can explain many conflicting ideas in many conflicting ways. Its great! It’s a Revolution!
Rereading, I still don't see where he states an opinion on that. He notes that energy needed to extract more energy is his preferred measure but I don't see that he even comments on where he thinks that is headed.
Producing oil in Saudi Arabia is cheap. Before fracking there was a lot of oil and gas that was incredibly expensive to reach. Fracking made it way cheaper and cheap enough to economically extract in large amounts but not as cheap as in Saudi Arabia. So which trend do we focus? Oil in rocks becoming way cheaper to reach or, by producing the fracked oil, the average cost of all oil going up?
Your physics is wrong. Earth receives very low-entropy energy in the form of sunlight (approximately black-body radiation emitted at the temperature of about 6000K) and re-emits the same quantity of energy as infrared radiation at about 280K, containing about 20 times more entropy per unit energy. Earth generates entropy, and this process happens on Mars just as well as on Earth. The difference in entropy of incoming vs outgoing radiation pertains to radiation and is not necessarily balanced by decreases of entropy in parts of the overall Sun-planet-infinite space system. Living creatures create order within themselves at the cost of increasing entropy production outside themselves; this is just as it should be according to Second Law of thermodynamics. A close analogy is thermal convection of water in a pan: the convection is a form of order (it involves collective motions of water correlated over large distances which can make beautiful patterns) and it serves to convey heat from the bottom of the pan to the top more efficiently than conduction, creating more entropy.
The question at hand is not one of entropy. It is about the energy man has some control over. This is a rather small portion of the total. The issue at hand is how and how much man's control is increasing.
I'm saying man can continue using fossil fuels, solar/wind, crops, and nuclear without any worries of reaching entropy limits. The question is if and when we can produce more energy economically.
Note: I'm ignoring the potential for land use and climate issues which might arise but are not, strictly speaking , entropy issues.
So it would not be correct to say that order is increasing on Earth, but rather being maintained - by life - at the expense of entropy increasing outside of Earth (life)?
To be fair physicists either have difficulty conveying the meanings of these terms, or actually disagree about their meanings, or else short of that understand them but disagree about the manner in which to convey them.
I don't understand if you're asking a positive or a negative question. When order is increasing on Earth - by life - it is at the expense of additional entropy, usually outside of Earth (if we're thinking globally). This follows directly from the Second Law.
> To be fair physicists either have difficulty conveying the meanings of these terms [...]
Yes, all three of these. These are subtle matters, and the methodological mess does not help. 'Entropy' is strictly speaking a term belonging to the scientific theory "thermodynamics" and to the scientific theory "information theory", and as such is difficult if not impossible to convey without teaching the basics of these theories, but it is also used loosely to describe phenomena, and this can cause confusion, especially when (as is often the case) the word is used by people who do not have a grasp of its formal meaning in the scientific theories mentioned. 'Order' is not, as far as I remember, used as a term of any scientific theory in meanings approaching what we are talking about (mathematical ordered sets and so on are much too abstract) but is, again, used loosely when describing certain kinds of phenomena, roughly speaking - subsystems which maintain states the entropy of which is lower than they would have if they were in equilibrium with the larger system (environment).
I have a memory of a lecturer, Ilya Prigogine, saying the words order and disorder (“deezORder”) in his particular accent, in a way that made them hard to distinguish. I had no science education though so don’t know anything about order having any sort of definition.
I think you restated the thing I was trying to confirm.
Yes, Prigogine was one of the people who thought about this and tried to formalize it. You were lucky to be able to listen to him. He had interesting ideas and was able to handle a few very simple cases of dynamical systems (such as the baker's map) with the formalism he developed, but got into insuperable mathematical difficulties with more complicated ones.
This is true, but as a counterpoint we usually don't care for the entropy of Earth's mantle and such. Glucose plus oxygen created by photosynthesis have lower entropy than the inputs of carbon dioxide gas and liquid water, and there is certainly more glucose on Earth now than there was before life existed. Again, there may have been more glucose/organic matter and oxygen at some points in the geological past than there is now, but we often don't care about raw amounts of simple molecules either. Of course, continuing this line of reasoning, we see that the last sentence of Scott Gibb's quote is either false or so loose as to reduce to 'there are more structures and patterns that we care about now than there were in the past': a statement about what we are interested in rather than about the world outside us. It may be possible to formalize 'structures and patterns' in a way that makes that sentence true, and it may happen that there is a 'natural' formalization into which our preferences do not enter much, but I have not heard of this having been done convincingly. In the absence of such a formalization, paragraphs like the quote above are not much more than 'science poetry': perhaps suggestive of interesting questions, but not to be taken as true in a literal sense.
The question at hand is not one of entropy. It is about the energy man has some control over. This is a rather small portion of the total. The issue at hand is how and how much man's control is increasing.
You need to account for what you mean by "system". Entropy can clearly decrease in a system if you define the system narrowly enough. I would argue that the Earth is not a system defined narrowly enough to make it true to say "the entropy of the Earth is decreasing". Think about the fossil fuels in the ground. Highly ordered energy potential, right- molecules made of multiple atoms of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen? Humans extract them, burn them to generate work that is used to create complex and even more highly ordered systems and to maintain those complex systems, but in the process the highly ordered fossil fuel molecules have been turned into larger numbers of highly disordered molecules carbon dioxide and water molecules all around us that remain a part of the Earth as a system. The residual heat generated dissipates as infra-red radiation into space.
Then the entropy of the Earth is increasing would be my argument- increasing in some areas, decreasing in others, but increasing overall. Life does use energy to increase order, but that process does create disorder somewhere else within that sphere.
The main place where that process dumps disorder is the void of space. Imagine a glass ball with water and carbon dioxide in Earth orbit. The stuff is nearly transparent, i.e. it does not absorb appreciable amounts of low-entropy sunlight (T=5700K) and accordingly emits very little high-entropy infrared radiation (in fact the matter would condense and freeze). If you now seed the ball with cyanobacteria, they will absorb most sunlight and reradiate it as heat, producing entropy and dumping it outside the ball at a constant rate. They will also cause the matter inside the ball to be out of chemical equilibrium, unlike a stone ball which also reradiates sunlight and produces entropy. Life is peculiar in that it requires a continuous production of new entropy to maintain a given amount of itself, not just a one-time 'payment'.
It seems to me that every utopian dream falls flat in the face of human fallibility. The core aspects of human behavior have remained stable over millennia and, while we have many good aspects, our negative behaviors towards each other cannot suppressed. I wish it were not true. People like MM have their heads in the clouds.
It is not only fallibility, but in addition, nobody agrees on the specifics of utopia. To create an ideal society it is not enough to say it will have no bad things, but one must specify all the details of how it would be brought about. There have been many utopias written, from Plato on, but as Isaiah Berlin pointed out, nobody would want to live in any of them. This problem is why idealists never are specific about the ideological terminus. Instead it is always about just destroying what exists. They are in fact nihilists.
There is a novel "Looking Backwards" by Edward Bellamy which a great (unintentional) example of what goes wrong when the specifics of an ideal society are stated.
Looking Backward 2000-1887 was one of the most successful books ever published in America. Dating to 1887, it posited a time traveler to 2000 who encountered a utopian socialist world. Lots of people found the ideas congenial. At one point, there were 162 Bellamy Clubs in America. Interestingly, Bellamy avoided the word socialism and called the system of the future (capital N) Nationalism.
Bellamy's Nationalism is remarkably genteel. There is no rock and roll in 2000 and never will be.
It isn't even fallibility or negative behaviors. Different values conflict regularly, and social engineers ignore this by substituting their own value systems as if they were universally desirable.
One thing I took from the autobiography of George Stigler (Economics Nobel 1982) is that high-powered academics are selling ideas, and often they oversell. After all, you need to get noticed, and to get people to react.
Razib Khan had a conversation with Muthukrishna which gives a more favorable impression of the book. There's also a transcript at the link, which I hope isn't gated:
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/michael-muthukrishna-a-theory-of#details
That early excerpt from the book is either a blunder in a better book, or indicative of a bad book to follow. I am not reading the book, and have no intention of doing so, but if I had come across that in reading it, it would have probably induced me to stop reading and take it back to the library.
In your review of SuperAbundance you wrote:
“The authors want to say that the drop in the time-price of bananas illustrates abundance due to human ingenuity. But does the sharp rise in the time-price of baseball tickets illustrate scarcity due to human sloth?”
Could the relative increase in abundance of food and other necessities (bananas) and the relative decrease in the abundance of luxury goods (baseball tickets) indicate a general increase in productivity and therefore of leisure time?
I am reading it now and have only gotten through the first chapter. I too am skeptical of his assurance with his four laws and his supposed scientific "theoretical framework." I will say that his fourth law is evolution, which he specifically clarifies includes innovation by trial and error and competition.
I could go into my concerns with each of the four laws, but I am assuming he will delve more into these in future chapters.
Do I have you confused with someone else? Didn't you say you don't much like books? This one sounds pretty bad. Why are you reading it AND summarizing it?
Regardless, I'm kind of looking forward to what you have to say about it. It doesn't sound like something I could read so your cliff notes version might be interesting.
To adapt GK Chesterton "He who has a Theory of Everyone understands no one."
Sounds like John Stuart Mill to me.
GK Chesterton: "When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." I did say 'adapted'.
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
https://philife.nd.edu/j-s-mills-on-liberty-seek-disagreement/#:~:text=He%20who%20knows%20only%20his,ground%20for%20preferring%20either%20opinion.
Hm, the books sounds crazier than what I heard before. What I heard seemed so obvious, it is boring: Big changes in energy-utilisation brings the big changes: Photosynthesis transformed life and the planet. Human use of fire, of husbandry, of agriculture and human-societies use of energy-efficient division of labor. Then use of coal: Industrial revolution. Then oil/gas/electricity and nuclear energy. In the present/near future: solar and fusion. You need a BOOK to get that message across?!
Re commodity prices and Simon/Ehrlich: prognosticators in the past were unsuccessful at predicting the future - therefore prognosticators in the present will be wrong about the future.
You would think people would tire, eventually, of sheep-like taking the "received" view of that incident.
Modern social science and social evolution provides not just a theory *of* everyone, it provides a theory *for* everyone, as its unfalsifiable narratives can explain many conflicting ideas in many conflicting ways. Its great! It’s a Revolution!
What you say about cost to extract shale oil is interesting but what is your point? Can you restate it for me?
Rereading, I still don't see where he states an opinion on that. He notes that energy needed to extract more energy is his preferred measure but I don't see that he even comments on where he thinks that is headed.
Producing oil in Saudi Arabia is cheap. Before fracking there was a lot of oil and gas that was incredibly expensive to reach. Fracking made it way cheaper and cheap enough to economically extract in large amounts but not as cheap as in Saudi Arabia. So which trend do we focus? Oil in rocks becoming way cheaper to reach or, by producing the fracked oil, the average cost of all oil going up?
Your physics is wrong. Earth receives very low-entropy energy in the form of sunlight (approximately black-body radiation emitted at the temperature of about 6000K) and re-emits the same quantity of energy as infrared radiation at about 280K, containing about 20 times more entropy per unit energy. Earth generates entropy, and this process happens on Mars just as well as on Earth. The difference in entropy of incoming vs outgoing radiation pertains to radiation and is not necessarily balanced by decreases of entropy in parts of the overall Sun-planet-infinite space system. Living creatures create order within themselves at the cost of increasing entropy production outside themselves; this is just as it should be according to Second Law of thermodynamics. A close analogy is thermal convection of water in a pan: the convection is a form of order (it involves collective motions of water correlated over large distances which can make beautiful patterns) and it serves to convey heat from the bottom of the pan to the top more efficiently than conduction, creating more entropy.
The question at hand is not one of entropy. It is about the energy man has some control over. This is a rather small portion of the total. The issue at hand is how and how much man's control is increasing.
I'm saying man can continue using fossil fuels, solar/wind, crops, and nuclear without any worries of reaching entropy limits. The question is if and when we can produce more energy economically.
Note: I'm ignoring the potential for land use and climate issues which might arise but are not, strictly speaking , entropy issues.
So it would not be correct to say that order is increasing on Earth, but rather being maintained - by life - at the expense of entropy increasing outside of Earth (life)?
To be fair physicists either have difficulty conveying the meanings of these terms, or actually disagree about their meanings, or else short of that understand them but disagree about the manner in which to convey them.
> So it would not be correct to say ... ?
I don't understand if you're asking a positive or a negative question. When order is increasing on Earth - by life - it is at the expense of additional entropy, usually outside of Earth (if we're thinking globally). This follows directly from the Second Law.
> To be fair physicists either have difficulty conveying the meanings of these terms [...]
Yes, all three of these. These are subtle matters, and the methodological mess does not help. 'Entropy' is strictly speaking a term belonging to the scientific theory "thermodynamics" and to the scientific theory "information theory", and as such is difficult if not impossible to convey without teaching the basics of these theories, but it is also used loosely to describe phenomena, and this can cause confusion, especially when (as is often the case) the word is used by people who do not have a grasp of its formal meaning in the scientific theories mentioned. 'Order' is not, as far as I remember, used as a term of any scientific theory in meanings approaching what we are talking about (mathematical ordered sets and so on are much too abstract) but is, again, used loosely when describing certain kinds of phenomena, roughly speaking - subsystems which maintain states the entropy of which is lower than they would have if they were in equilibrium with the larger system (environment).
I have a memory of a lecturer, Ilya Prigogine, saying the words order and disorder (“deezORder”) in his particular accent, in a way that made them hard to distinguish. I had no science education though so don’t know anything about order having any sort of definition.
I think you restated the thing I was trying to confirm.
Yes, Prigogine was one of the people who thought about this and tried to formalize it. You were lucky to be able to listen to him. He had interesting ideas and was able to handle a few very simple cases of dynamical systems (such as the baker's map) with the formalism he developed, but got into insuperable mathematical difficulties with more complicated ones.
Figuring out the overall entropy of Earth would be very complicated. It is certainly not clear that the entropy is lower than in the past.
This is true, but as a counterpoint we usually don't care for the entropy of Earth's mantle and such. Glucose plus oxygen created by photosynthesis have lower entropy than the inputs of carbon dioxide gas and liquid water, and there is certainly more glucose on Earth now than there was before life existed. Again, there may have been more glucose/organic matter and oxygen at some points in the geological past than there is now, but we often don't care about raw amounts of simple molecules either. Of course, continuing this line of reasoning, we see that the last sentence of Scott Gibb's quote is either false or so loose as to reduce to 'there are more structures and patterns that we care about now than there were in the past': a statement about what we are interested in rather than about the world outside us. It may be possible to formalize 'structures and patterns' in a way that makes that sentence true, and it may happen that there is a 'natural' formalization into which our preferences do not enter much, but I have not heard of this having been done convincingly. In the absence of such a formalization, paragraphs like the quote above are not much more than 'science poetry': perhaps suggestive of interesting questions, but not to be taken as true in a literal sense.
The question at hand is not one of entropy. It is about the energy man has some control over. This is a rather small portion of the total. The issue at hand is how and how much man's control is increasing.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, since the second law states that order decreases.
You need to account for what you mean by "system". Entropy can clearly decrease in a system if you define the system narrowly enough. I would argue that the Earth is not a system defined narrowly enough to make it true to say "the entropy of the Earth is decreasing". Think about the fossil fuels in the ground. Highly ordered energy potential, right- molecules made of multiple atoms of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen? Humans extract them, burn them to generate work that is used to create complex and even more highly ordered systems and to maintain those complex systems, but in the process the highly ordered fossil fuel molecules have been turned into larger numbers of highly disordered molecules carbon dioxide and water molecules all around us that remain a part of the Earth as a system. The residual heat generated dissipates as infra-red radiation into space.
Then the entropy of the Earth is increasing would be my argument- increasing in some areas, decreasing in others, but increasing overall. Life does use energy to increase order, but that process does create disorder somewhere else within that sphere.
The main place where that process dumps disorder is the void of space. Imagine a glass ball with water and carbon dioxide in Earth orbit. The stuff is nearly transparent, i.e. it does not absorb appreciable amounts of low-entropy sunlight (T=5700K) and accordingly emits very little high-entropy infrared radiation (in fact the matter would condense and freeze). If you now seed the ball with cyanobacteria, they will absorb most sunlight and reradiate it as heat, producing entropy and dumping it outside the ball at a constant rate. They will also cause the matter inside the ball to be out of chemical equilibrium, unlike a stone ball which also reradiates sunlight and produces entropy. Life is peculiar in that it requires a continuous production of new entropy to maintain a given amount of itself, not just a one-time 'payment'.