In a world of entropy
It might be difficult to see what is paradoxical happening in plain sight, it somehow need a kind of “decoding” perception to see what actually is happening at the moment in our world. Have you ever seen the movie “A Beautiful Mind”?It’s a fantastic movie based on the life of the American mathematician John Forbes Nash. I recommend you watch the movie, and I will go on with what my message here in this post is about, but basically what you’ll understand after the movie is “the game theory” developed by John Nash. The game theory is about understanding a mathematical framework of strategy and interaction. It’s about understanding how decision-making e.g. in conflicts work – and at the moment it is a way to understand how the political strategies play out in the world today. As such game theory is also about social science. So let’s look into what that has to do with how the world is today. There are different categories of games like e.g. cooperative vs non-cooperative games. It is basically about predicting which coalitions will form in the world today; the cooperative game predicts collective payoffs as a result of different players forms coalitions. In cooperative games the players (or should I say politicians) share a common interest in achieving a specific outcome. The cooperative game needs an information exchange ( resources, preferences, constraints etc) to identify how the game is going to be played – and if your thinking “it sure has been a lot about information exchange (google, some, digital identification etc you’re on your way to understand why I think people need to understand Game Theory. The cooperative game also needs the players to agree on a binding contract. This might be the reason we see a world of entropy, because it seems to be a conflict in understanding each others goal – or it might not be and just a part of the game. Non-cooperative games on the other hand focus on predicting payoffs on the individual level, and there are no binding agreements or rules between the players -very much as in a very competitive society e.g. how information is acquired by the players. I for sure observe the political scenery happening today in the world as different strategies of games going on, and therefore I recommend the book “The Art of Strategy” by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff if you want to understand what is going on in plain sight and also what is actually happening under the surface. If you find it interesting you can also read my previous post about The Art of War by Sun Tzu it will give you an understanding of what kind of historic scenery going on at the moment. Strategic entropy might be interesting to analyse these days. What I observe in the world today is high-entropy (unpredictable) vs low-entropy (deterministic/predictable), so although I don’t watch the News very often I do follow up on the News once in a while observing and analysing what is going on if you see through a lens of game theory.
Entropy in energy and information
If we look into the concept of entropy we will realise that we as humans actually creates a lot of entropy e.g. chaotic decisions to the environment etc. In fact entropy and systems theory is necessary concepts to look into to understand how open and closed systems work. According to Sir Karl Popper is closed societies e.g. totalitarian societies determined to fail the human evolution, because these kind of societies fail to understand the need of critical rational thinking and falsification of politics which is the fundamental values in an open society. If you think “yes, this is what I experience in the world today” you’re quite right. What we are witnessing today is an entropy of closed systems or let us say; it is nature telling us that totalitarian political systems are unnatural to human evolution. So observing it all from that perspective – what we experience today is the old paradigm is crashing and a new paradigm is already on its way. Whether humans want it or not – the new paradigm is evolving, and I very much look forward to the transformation. The transformation is very much about change in energy and information, and if you look into it; the old paradigm is very much about “harvesting, controlling, consuming, selling etc ” human information and energy. The reason is as I mentioned above in the cooperative game, but it is also, what I think many people seem to ignore, that human energy and information is a resource as everything else in this world. So in the old paradigm it’s about harvesting information and sell it (as google, meta etc does) – so to speak as you are harvesting everything else corn, meat, milk. Victor Frankl warned us a long time ago about the manipulation of human energy getting humans hooked on Entertainment, so creativity stagnate.
