Relativity In Money

[betterToDo]

The answer to your question is our function, which is preservation of the selfish gene through replication. Nothing else.

The way that manifests may appear complicated, but at the core of all human endeavour lies this single thing. It defines us completely, although we like to think differently.

An amusing competition in ever more flowery responses from the many egos based on intelligence in this forum has ensued as never before. Injin created this by summoning forth insight, conjuring into existence an arena of competition, and ironically through your efforts rather than your responses, you have all illustrated the answer to the question he seeks.

The selfish gene is your constant, look no further. All the other fluff, including money, is simply a means to an end.

Edited May 24, 2009 by Fraccy

[Alan B'Stard MP]

The answer to your question is our function, which is preservation of the selfish gene through replication. Nothing else.

The way that manifests may appear complicated, but at the core of all human endeavour lies this single thing. It defines us completely, although we like to think differently.

An amusing competition in ever more flowery responses from the many egos based on intelligence in this forum has ensued as never before. Injin created this by summoning forth insight, conjuring into existence an arena of competition, and ironically through your efforts rather than your responses, you have all illustrated the answer to the question he seeks.

The selfish gene is your constant, look no further. All the other fluff, including money, is simply a means to an end.

I was too polite to say so - but it seems you on the other hand like burping and farting at the table.

Edited May 24, 2009 by Alan B'Stard MP

[Methinkshe]

Intrinsic, extrinsic aside (for I consider that a separate debate) we seem to agree. Taking this one step further illustrates something very interesting about money that I feel to be at the heart of the financial crisis.

Assume two monetary amounts (in the same currency - lets keep it easy) - say A and B. There are some objective things we might be able to say about A and B (please, assume I'm talking about money - not the stuff we use to represent money):

1. A = B

2. A < B

3. A > B

I'm going to ignore case 3 as it will be covered by discussing case 2 (owing to symmetry.) Case 1 is trivial - it can be checked mechanically - it requires no intelligence or factual understanding. Two monetary amounts are equal if and only if, when we write them down as a sequence of digits (in the normal form), the representations are identical. So far so good.

What about the case for inequality? This, it turns out, is far more complicated - though few acknowledge this.

if A and B are different, there are two distinct ways we can establish a comparison:

1. A - B

2. A / B

The first assumes an additive basis for money. This is the money of the working class; of artisans and the hourly paid. Acquiring more money requires proportionally more effort or sacrifice. This relates to remunerating for commodity purchases and till receipts when we go shopping. This is the money whose inflation we (badly) measure with RPI.

The second assumes a geometric basis for money. This is the money of aristocracy - of investors and savers - the money of managers and directors... the money of governments and international trade statistics. This is the money whose inflation we (badly) measure with CPI.

Clearly both systems can be applied - and - given raw figures we can come up with explanations of any financial phenomenon using either formalism. Here's a really, really big question: which model is right? Of course, that's a leading rhetorical question... neither is universally appropriate - for without the workers and artisans, there'd be nothing for savers and investors to buy with their returns. Either view, if taken to the extreme, would destroy an economy - so there are two issues:

1. What is an appropriate equilibrium between geometric and arithmetic influences?

2. When is it appropriate for two people who communicate (i.e. interact in any way) to adopt different models?

These two, together, reveal an interesting question: when is it morally and ethically appropriate to employ either form of reasoning? I think it interesting to note that Jews got a reputation as money-lenders (i.e. people with a geometric model) when they were shunned by the Christian church in Italy and they formed their own ghetto community which was effectively independent of the state and distrusted by the broadly Christian public. Curiously, this gave rise to accountability - because there was no trust... the avaricious Jews expected the free-loading Christians to default - and the free-loading Christians expected the avaricious Jews to charge usurious rates of interest. Neither group, of course, was as unethical as the other thought - but the separation and cynicism lead to the risk of debt being taken very seriously. This was an entirely different environment to the environment we have today - one in which there were fewer moral hazards... assuming you (and everyone else) knew if you were a Jew or a Christian. Yes, the separation of people like this was barbaric and distasteful - but it served a purpose (maybe unintentionally.) In my view, the abstract models need to be separated - not the people. We need to be clear about what sorts of things relate to effort and work - and, hence, by their nature, are additive... and which are geometric. We need to be clear where our statistic originate before we compare them. We need to be on a constant look-out for charlatans who misrepresent supposed mathematics and scientific evidence to serve their own vested interests. This has happened throughout history - and today it's is done with more sophisticated tools than ever before. The trick, however, is trivial - and almost universal in finance... switch arithmetic models for geometric models and hope no-one notices. This is the source of all (excess) profit in banking and insurance - and it explains the insatiable appetite of practitioners in these domains for ever more complex models - as well as the tendency to spin their business as taboo, secret, sensitive or too complicated for public consumption.

Interesting post.

I'm trying to relate it to my proposal that there exists within the world, and especially within humanity, two opposing forces, creative and destructive, communicative and entropic (to borrow your terminology although I don't think you set the two in opposition as I have done) both of which I consider to be geometric and not arithmetic albeit in opposing directions - multiplication or division to use my simplistic terminology.

My initial thoughts are that when you speak of money, we are already in the realm of entropy/destruction and thus whether the individual events that occur within that realm are geometric or arithmetic is largely irrelevant since the whole is geometric and tending to destruction.

My reasoning is that in placing any kind of faith in the tangibles that are represented by money, one has eschewed communication/an outwardly directed attitude (i.e. intangible) in favour of its diametrically and mutually exclusive opposite - inwardly directed self-benefit through material gain.

But perhaps I am guilty of not seeing the wood for the trees.....

I have to retire now - got duties to attend to....

Just don't want you to think that I have lost interest.

I will return in the morning.

[Injin]

The answer to your question is our function, which is preservation of the selfish gene through replication. Nothing else.

The way that manifests may appear complicated, but at the core of all human endeavour lies this single thing. It defines us completely, although we like to think differently.

An amusing competition in ever more flowery responses from the many egos based on intelligence in this forum has ensued as never before. Injin created this by summoning forth insight, conjuring into existence an arena of competition, and ironically through your efforts rather than your responses, you have all illustrated the answer to the question he seeks.

The selfish gene is your constant, look no further. All the other fluff, including money, is simply a means to an end.

And a sensible selfish gene tries to find things out.

[Alan B'Stard MP]

And a sensible selfish gene tries to find things out.

Do you feel empowered by knowing?

How many theorist in history havent felt inclined to publish?

Edited May 24, 2009 by Alan B'Stard MP

[betterToDo]

And a sensible selfish gene tries to find things out.

Absolutely, and all such efforts are only to be applauded.

[A.steve]

One of us is definitely saying dumb things.

I think regardless of the black hole - if you were walking around a galaxy - would you not feel the greater gravitation pull at the point at which you are closest to all objects in that galaxy (sum of all the distances to each object). i.e. the centre.

Erm, we can't walk around a galaxy because we need (roughly uniform) gravity and a surface in order to walk. If I could ignore the practical problems of re-locating myself, and I could find the centre of the galaxy; if I was small relative to the size of the galaxy, but with a discernible mass... and, if a centre of the galaxy exists (OK, this might be considered extreme scepticism)... then I'd either experience zero gravity or infinite gravity - if we assume gravity is the force that attracts masses and works according to the inverse square law as classical physics suggests. Applying Occam's Razor - I think it far more likely that there is no mass at the centre of our galaxy than infinite mass... for two reasons: First, if there was infinite mass, I'd expect our galaxy to have already collapsed... and second - I've never seen anything with infinite mass and see no reason to invent it to support a hypothesis I consider dubious anyway.

Why does it contradict? If there was an amusement ride called earth where would you rather be strapped? At the north pole where you spin serenely or on the equator where you are likely to puke up?

This is where I'm most sure it's you who's saying something dumb. It's bloody cold at the north pole - but people who go there don't get dizzy - and people experiencing tropical conditions at the equator don't feel any significantly lighter or heaver - or experience stomach churning forces by virtue of the Earth's movement. Gravity is what matters - and gravity certainly seems to act as if it is a force drawing masses towards the centre-point of other masses. Speed itself is not an issue - relative velocity is an issue - changing that requires acceleration - or force proportional to the accelerated mass.

Your comment seems to assume gravity is independent of mass and is constant wherever you are in the universe... which, obviously, is nonsense - as the existence satellites - demonstrated to all and sundry by sat-nav - adequately demonstrates.

[Injin]

Do you feel empowered by knowing?

No clue what this means.

How many theorist in history havent felt inclined to publish?

[Methinkshe]

The answer to your question is our function, which is preservation of the selfish gene through replication. Nothing else.

The way that manifests may appear complicated, but at the core of all human endeavour lies this single thing. It defines us completely, although we like to think differently.

An amusing competition in ever more flowery responses from the many egos based on intelligence in this forum has ensued as never before. Injin created this by summoning forth insight, conjuring into existence an arena of competition, and ironically through your efforts rather than your responses, you have all illustrated the answer to the question he seeks.

The selfish gene is your constant, look no further. All the other fluff, including money, is simply a means to an end.

Damn! You mean I've wasted all this time thinking and developing an argument when the answer to everything has already been resolved as not 42 but "the selfish gene."

I can't imagine why anyone bothers to discuss anything - just quote "the selfish gene" and there you have it. The answer to life, the universe and everything in it.

[Alan B'Stard MP]

No clue what this means.

Do you what to know for the sake of knowing or some other reward.

Not hard to understand.

[Mr Nice]

What value would Buddah, or Jesus have placed on a bag of gold?

to jesus the value of the bag of gold would have been the amount of charity to your fellow that you could trade the bag of gold in for.

[Injin]

Do you what to know for the sake of knowing or some other reward.

Not hard to understand.

I don't know.

[A.steve]

Awesome post.

(I'd add C and D - viewpoints with differing valuations for A and B merely as a mental exercise - writing it all out would be a grueller and hardly anyone would read it.)

I'm glad you liked it. I consider that to be an exposition of mathematics in the context of practical finance that takes us up until the end of the 1970s... it certainly seems to explain unions vs management and strikes - for example.

I think that international capital flows were a game-changer - and I wonder if that's what you're on about when you talk about C's and D's - or if you're just being a smart-**** (nothing wrong with that, of course.)

Interesting post.

I'm trying to relate it to my proposal that there exists within the world, and especially within humanity, two opposing forces, creative and destructive, communicative and entropic (to borrow your terminology although I don't think you set the two in opposition as I have done) both of which I consider to be geometric and not arithmetic albeit in opposing directions - multiplication or division to use my simplistic terminology.

Again, I'm pleased you liked it.

I don't believe in two opposing forces - though recognise that this is a common assumption - yin and yang in perfect balance; good and evil; right and wrong - Newton-1: action and reaction forces; equals and opposites attract - shagging... that sort of thing. They're a great strategy if you want to perpetuate something. The strategy can be applied in two ways - either you provide two opposites that are equally unpalatable - say heaven and hell strategies... and rest assured that almost everyone will chose something in the middle... or, conversely, you might pick two irrelevant extremes - say left and right wing politics - and polarise the debate thus... which effectively subverts democracy since the actions of the politicians are no longer held to account - but, rather, the public is distracted by an irrelevant debate... while politicians milk public office for personal benefit. I think similar things happened in organised religion - and that the enlightenment and fundamentalist shift towards application of scientific modelling in all intellectual contexts was a reaction to this.

I'm afraid I'm going to be arsey and pedantic about "entropy" - entropy originally comes from thermodynamics and roughly relates to temperature on an absolute kelvin scale. That's boring. In information theory, entropy is the stuff in a message you didn't already know - it is the minimum size of a message that is capable of causing an identical effect. My mum and I have low-entropy communication - our messages rarely convey more of substance than that we are both alive and not in immediate peril (absence of messages would have considerable entropy). My dad and I (also my sister and I) have high-entropy communication - a message always indicates action required/requested (absence of a message has zero entropy... my mum would have to tell me if my dad died in order for me to respond in a timely way. I hope this means they've things to talk about in their old age together - each with a different perspective.) Entropy is the measure of symbolic information - this is extremely well established terminology.

Just don't want you to think that I have lost interest.

I will return in the morning.

Cool - I stopped after deciding to rebuke (in a friendly way, I hope) over "entropy" - this is my subject, so I insist. If I can convince you to use entropy as I understand the word, I'd be happy to pick up again from there.

to jesus the value of the bag of gold would have been the amount of charity to your fellow that you could trade the bag of gold in for.

I don't believe you. Everything I've ever read and every informed opinion I've heard suggests something entirely different.

The answer to your question is our function, which is preservation of the selfish gene through replication. Nothing else.

I don't believe you, either. This is the road of eugenics towards its political exploitation and genocide. It is a view that is simultaneously vile, inconsistent, irrational and small-minded.

Edited May 24, 2009 by A.steve

[Injin]

I'm glad you liked it. I consider that to be an exposition of mathematics in the context of practical finance that takes us up until the end of the 1970s... it certainly seems to explain unions vs management and strikes - for example.

I think that international capital flows were a game-changer - and I wonder if that's what you're on about when you talk about C's and D's - or if you're just being a smart-**** (nothing wrong with that, of course.)

It does work out to be the international capital flows in our current system, largely because the individual revaluation on an on going basis that would take place in local markets is currently verbotten.

What this does (I think) is create huge whiplashes as the price signals are basically ignorable for a long time under such a system, the mispricing continues until something serious breaks. Sadly, when one group gathers together to impose values on others, the usual reaction is to create a counterbalancing group - the management/unions kinda of split.

[betterToDo]

Damn! You mean I've wasted all this time thinking and developing an argument when the answer to everything has already been resolved as not 42 but "the selfish gene."

I can't imagine why anyone bothers to discuss anything - just quote "the selfish gene" and there you have it. The answer to life, the universe and everything in it.

You've taken offence where none was intended, missed my point entirely, and are putting words into my mouth about what "the selfish gene" is an answer to. Put your ego down. I'm not trying to insult you or all the other perfectly intelligent and interesting discussions in this thread. I happen to think an ego based on intelligence is a very successful kind of ego to have in today's world actually. I do not think debate is pointless, quite the opposite, merely that in this particular case, the process itself was illustrating the answer to the question posed.

I think Alan agrees anyway *burp*

[A.steve]

It does work out to be the international capital flows in our current system, largely because the individual revaluation on an on going basis that would take place in local markets is currently verbotten.

What this does (I think) is create huge whiplashes as the price signals are basically ignorable for a long time under such a system, the mispricing continues until something serious breaks. Sadly, when one group gathers together to impose values on others, the usual reaction is to create a counterbalancing group - the management/unions kinda of split.

I'm afraid you'll have to be more explicit - while I can identify the broad ideas, I don't follow the details in that post...

We seem to both be focused on international capital flows (or ForEx influences) but I'm in no position to provide a clear-cut explanation of my opinions about them. I'm certain that they are extremely relevant to everyday modern life - but it feels as if I'm stone-walled at every junction in trying to find out what is the current state of play.

I started to read about GDP a while back - and it is baroque to an extent that makes Douglas Adams fiction appear an eminently sensible guidebook for world affairs. The fact that Brown had banged on about "economic growth" (code for GDP expansion) coupled with what I could discover about national accounting procedure left me feeling rather nervous about our political/economic situation. I think that widespread misunderstanding of the nature of GDP has lead to substantial additional economic risks and the unquestioning abuse of this statistic has a lot to answer for. I emailed a university professor "out of the blue" who claimed GDP was his area of expertise - and asked him for a reference to understand (like a computer scientist might) the detailed mechanics of how GDP is calculated. I said that, as a personal project, I wanted to try to verify the GDP figures published by the ONS by establishing an estimate based upon other sources - a bit like shadowstats does in the states. I asked for his advice on where to start - what texts I should read -etc. He was very friendly and replied after a few days - but his reply only added to my concerns about GDP... this expert seemed little better informed than me - and I knew I knew very, very little. He pointed me at a mainstream economics text that explained supply and demand - etc. This was not what I was after - I wanted to know specifically how GDP was calculated - so that, like a hardcore-hacker, I might think about how to subvert the metric by making seemingly innocuous changes... this would then allow me to identify further areas of interesting research. I'd undertaken a similar project with CPI and RPI - and convinced myself that the statistics themselves are broadly honest... just used in entirely the wrong way by almost everyone. I'd never have had confidence in the statistics if I hadn't been able to challenge them... The economics professor simply didn't understand what I wanted to do... this way of thinking was clearly alien to him.

I've read and found interesting (but complicated) the Pink Book. It tells me too little detail about leveraged speculation on an international stage. I get the feeling that it is a quaint nationalist publication in a global environment - condemned by its focus to offer too little information to establish real understanding. It was, however, to my mind, sill, dynamite.

Erm... Edit to add... I actually read the 2007 pink book... the 2008 edition seems dramatically more substantial at 214 pages.

Edited May 24, 2009 by A.steve

[Injin]

I'm afraid you'll have to be more explicit - while I can identify the broad ideas, I don't follow the details in that post...

If we start from a freeish position in terms of individual economic actors on the smallest scale making price adjustments in whatever they happen to be using as money (right down to the housewife level) then stability will be gained and maintained as if by magic as "market forces" (horrible bloody phrase) do their thing.

Take that homeostasis away and instead of millions of individual but limited viewpoints creating a form of objective valuation (although always backwards looking in nature) the use of multinational fiat currency hands the power of constant revaluation to fewer actors who try and achieve pretty much the same thing by using greater understanding and a lot higher level of interest in the process.

If they go too far from the individual valuation, problems are inevitable, it's also inevitable that they will go some way away from the actual market values. The trick being to not go so far as to nuke the whole system. If they do, it doesn't matter because the individual valuation will come roaring back instantly and sort things out - but this leaves the few out of the loop, which they don't want.

We seem to both be focused on international capital flows (or ForEx influences) but I'm in no position to provide a clear-cut explanation of my opinions about them. I'm certain that they are extremely relevant to everyday modern life - but it feels as if I'm stone-walled at every junction in trying to find out what is the current state of play.

"It's a big club, and we aren't in it."

I started to read about GDP a while back - and it is baroque to an extent that makes Douglas Adams fiction appear an eminently sensible guidebook for world affairs. The fact that Brown had banged on about "economic growth" (code for GDP expansion) coupled with what I could discover about national accounting procedure left me feeling rather nervous about our political/economic situation. I think that widespread misunderstanding of the nature of GDP has lead to substantial additional economic risks and the unquestioning abuse of this statistic has a lot to answer for. I emailed a university professor "out of the blue" who claimed GDP was his area of expertise - and asked him for a reference to understand (like a computer scientist might) the detailed mechanics of how GDP is calculated. I said that, as a personal project, I wanted to try to verify the GDP figures published by the ONS by establishing an estimate based upon other sources - a bit like shadowstats does in the states. I asked for his advice on where to start - what texts I should read -etc. He was very friendly and replied after a few days - but his reply only added to my concerns about GDP... this expert seemed little better informed than me - and I knew I knew very, very little. He pointed me at a mainstream economics text that explained supply and demand - etc. This was not what I was after - I wanted to know specifically how GDP was calculated - so that, like a hardcore-hacker, I might think about how to subvert the metric by making seemingly innocuous changes... this would then allow me to identify further areas of interesting research. I'd undertaken a similar project with CPI and RPI - and convinced myself that the statistics themselves are broadly honest... just used in entirely the wrong way by almost everyone. I'd never have had confidence in the statistics if I hadn't been able to challenge them... The economics professor simply didn't understand what I wanted to do... this way of thinking was clearly alien to him.

I've read and found interesting (but complicated) the Pink Book. It tells me too little detail about leveraged speculation on an international stage. I get the feeling that it is a quaint nationalist publication in a global environment - condemned by its focus to offer too little information to establish real understanding. It was, however, to my mind, sill, dynamite.

I had an interest once in the relationship between sentencing at courts and the accounting that rocks on in the background of the state. I had a very basic theory that the apparently insane judicial verdicts made sense if looked at as an accounting exercise.....

[Mr Nice]

That's true, but it also lacks a first cause.

I'd say that the first cause is basic need.

at any given point, any given person is going to have a set of needs that they are experiencing.

as someone said earlier, we are all the centers of our own universes.

everything you see around you only really has relevance to you and your need and abilities.

[Mr Nice]

I don't believe you. Everything I've ever read and every informed opinion I've heard suggests something entirely different.

by all means I would like to hear an example of where your difference of opinion is coming from.

[Alan B'Stard MP]

It's bloody cold at the north pole - but people who go there don't get dizzy - and people experiencing tropical conditions at the equator don't feel any significantly lighter or heaver - or experience stomach churning forces by virtue of the Earth's movement. Gravity is what matters - and gravity certainly seems to act as if it is a force drawing masses towards the centre-point of other masses. Speed itself is not an issue - relative velocity is an issue - changing that requires acceleration - or force proportional to the accelerated mass.

You might find this article enlightening.

http://www.cleonis.nl/physics/phys256/equatorial_bulge.php

Differences in gravitational acceleration

Because of a planet's rotation around its own axis, the gravitational acceleration is less at the equator than at the poles. In the 17th century, following the invention of the pendulum clock, French scientists found that clocks sent to French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, ran slower than their exact counterparts in Paris.

Any object that is stationary with respect to the surface of the Earth is in actual fact following a circular trajectory, circumnavigating the Earth's axis. Pulling an object into such a circular trajectory requires a force. The acceleration that is required to circumnavigate the Earth's axis along the equator at one revolution per sidereal day is 0.0339 m/s². Providing this acceleration decreases the effective gravitational acceleration. At the equator, the effective gravitational acceleration is 9.7805 m/s². This means that the true gravitational acceleration at the equator must be 9.8144 m/s² (9.7805 + 0.0339 = 9.8144). At the poles, the gravitational acceleration is 9.8322 m/s². The difference of 0.0178 m/s² between the gravitational acceleration at the poles and the true gravitational acceleration at the equator is predominantly due to the fact that objects located on the equator are about 21 kilometers further away from the center of mass of the Earth than at the poles, which corresponds to a smaller gravitational acceleration. (I have glossed over differences in density now. The Earth's core is much denser, and there are other, smaller density variations.)

In summary, there are two contributions to the fact that the effective gravitational acceleration is less strong at the equator than at the poles. About 70 percent of the difference is contributed by the fact that objects circumnavigate the Earth's axis, and about 30 percent is due to the non-spherical shape of the Earth.

Centre of gravitation

Let a satellite be in an equatorial orbit. If all of the Earth's mass would be concentrated in a single point, where would that point mass have to be to exert exactly the same gravitational force on the satellite as the Earth does?

In the case of a celestial body that is a perfect sphere the answer is that all of the mass can be treated as concentrated at the geometrical center. In the case of an oblate spheroid, flattened due to rotation, this does not apply. In the case of a satellite orbiting the Earth in an equatorial orbit, the center of gravitational attraction is about 10 kilometers away from the Earth's geometrical center. For an orbiting satellite this means that at every point in time a different point inside the Earth is the effective center of gravitational attraction. For a satellite orbiting the Earth, the center of gravitation is a point that circumnavigates the geometrical center of the Earth at a distance of about ten kilometers away from the geometrical center of the Earth.

It is not a coincidence that Saturn's rings orbit Saturn in Saturn's equatorial plane. The fact that the effective center of gravitational attraction moves around in a circle tends to align satellites with the planet's equatorial plane.

Again on wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_bulge

As I said, the gravitational pull at the equatorial plane is less due the centrifugal forces - displacing the centre of gravity between two masses because of the bulge. I would therefore suppose that the lesser gravitational acceleration on this plane provides a path of least resistance and is what satellites with their own momentum will tend towards.

Edited May 25, 2009 by Alan B'Stard MP

[SNACR]

Do you feel empowered by knowing?

How many theorist in history havent felt inclined to publish?

Yes, but I think fame and celebrity are modern mores. Didn't Newton discover calculus and forget about it, or something similar?

[roman holiday]

So markets are to arbitrate values even though markets only represent the collective opinion of the day.

That seems to me like a pretty shifting sandbank on which to anchor values of any description.

Yep, until we have philosopher kings.... oh no.... we tried that.

OT has got to do with mundane money. I think you have confused the notion of economic value with "values" in a moral sense.

Edited May 25, 2009 by roman holiday

[Methinkshe]

I'm glad you liked it. I consider that to be an exposition of mathematics in the context of practical finance that takes us up until the end of the 1970s... it certainly seems to explain unions vs management and strikes - for example.

I think that international capital flows were a game-changer - and I wonder if that's what you're on about when you talk about C's and D's - or if you're just being a smart-**** (nothing wrong with that, of course.)

Again, I'm pleased you liked it.

I don't believe in two opposing forces - though recognise that this is a common assumption - yin and yang in perfect balance; good and evil; right and wrong - Newton-1: action and reaction forces; equals and opposites attract - shagging... that sort of thing. They're a great strategy if you want to perpetuate something. The strategy can be applied in two ways - either you provide two opposites that are equally unpalatable - say heaven and hell strategies... and rest assured that almost everyone will chose something in the middle... or, conversely, you might pick two irrelevant extremes - say left and right wing politics - and polarise the debate thus... which effectively subverts democracy since the actions of the politicians are no longer held to account - but, rather, the public is distracted by an irrelevant debate... while politicians milk public office for personal benefit. I think similar things happened in organised religion - and that the enlightenment and fundamentalist shift towards application of scientific modelling in all intellectual contexts was a reaction to this.

I'm afraid I'm going to be arsey and pedantic about "entropy" - entropy originally comes from thermodynamics and roughly relates to temperature on an absolute kelvin scale. That's boring. In information theory, entropy is the stuff in a message you didn't already know - it is the minimum size of a message that is capable of causing an identical effect. My mum and I have low-entropy communication - our messages rarely convey more of substance than that we are both alive and not in immediate peril (absence of messages would have considerable entropy). My dad and I (also my sister and I) have high-entropy communication - a message always indicates action required/requested (absence of a message has zero entropy... my mum would have to tell me if my dad died in order for me to respond in a timely way. I hope this means they've things to talk about in their old age together - each with a different perspective.) Entropy is the measure of symbolic information - this is extremely well established terminology.

My OH is a retired engineer; his specialisations were thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. I have taken from him my understanding of entropy which he explains (simplistically and without the mathematics) as the tendency towards disorder within a closed system. He says that strictly entropy is a measure of disorder.

These are the dictionary definitions:

1. Symbol S For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.

2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

3. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.

4. The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.

5. Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.

I agree that we need to clarify what we each wish to communicate when we use the word "entropy".

Cool - I stopped after deciding to rebuke (in a friendly way, I hope) over "entropy" - this is my subject, so I insist. If I can convince you to use entropy as I understand the word, I'd be happy to pick up again from there.

Could we agree on a mutual understanding based on the dictionary definitions above?

[Methinkshe]

You've taken offence where none was intended, missed my point entirely, and are putting words into my mouth about what "the selfish gene" is an answer to. Put your ego down. I'm not trying to insult you or all the other perfectly intelligent and interesting discussions in this thread. I happen to think an ego based on intelligence is a very successful kind of ego to have in today's world actually. I do not think debate is pointless, quite the opposite, merely that in this particular case, the process itself was illustrating the answer to the question posed.

I think Alan agrees anyway *burp*

No, I didn't take offence - my response was meant to be light-hearted which I thought would have been recognised by my reference to "42".

Sorry you didn't appreciate my attempt at levity.

[Injin]

Yes, but I think fame and celebrity are modern mores. Didn't Newton discover calculus and forget about it, or something similar?

Yes, he invented it then didn't tell anyone for 20 years. he did lots of stuff like that he also worked out the weight of earth without telling anyone until it came up as a bet between his mates.

Edited May 25, 2009 by Injin