Societal entropy
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Societal entropy page
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In daily life, you experience an ever-growing 'environment'. Your activities keep coming in, but few leave. We call this societal entropy, which has consequences for your social life.
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Deep dive
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- Higher entropy in the environment/context ensures higher brain activity/entropy
- Life tries to minimise entropy because it costs us energy
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Below, you will find a description of different forms of entropy that influence society.
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In the brain
Intense complexity and irregular variability in brain activity from one moment to the next mark more significant long-distance correlations in neural activity.
Greater entropy, up to a point, indicates more information processing capacity, as opposed to low entropy—characterised by orderliness and repetition—which is seen when we are in deep sleep or coma.
Increased brain entropy indicates increased brain activity, suggesting an increase in information processing capacity in the brain.
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In communication
The core idea is that the "informational value" of a communicated message depends on the degree to which the content of the message is surprising.
- If a highly likely event occurs, the message carries very little information.
- On the other hand, if a highly unlikely event occurs, the message is much more informative.
For instance, the knowledge that some particular number will not be the winning number of a lottery provides very little information, because any particular chosen number will almost certainly not win. However, knowledge that a particular number will win a lottery has high informational value because it communicates the outcome of a very low probability event.
With a low entropy, there is no uncertainty: one has full knowledge of what is to come, and this information, therefore, does not contain "news". On the other hand, with a high entropy or maximum uncertainty (e.g. with a random symbol sequence shown), every event is unexpected and, therefore, new and causes surprise.
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In information theory
The compression entropy of a message (e.g. a computer file) quantifies the information content carried by the message in terms of the best lossless compression rate.
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In sociology
Entropy is the natural decay of structure (such as law, organisation, and convention) in a social system. This causes changes in the environment, which in turn creates the need for greater entropy in your brain (see above).
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