Understanding the World as Entropic - Part 1

This was a post that got kind of out of hand, so now it's a series. Here's Part 1 of 3

Intro to Thermodynamics

These days, I'm noticing that many people - adult people with serious jobs who make important decisions controlling unthinkably vast sums of money, affecting nearly everyone in society, do not understand physics.

I'm not referring to the formalised version of physics taught in classrooms, where you get a piece of paper after to demonstrate you have studied physics. I mean the instinctive gut-level, bone deep understanding of physics that every tennis player or gymnast shows when they perform a serve or do a perfect handspring, an understanding that every one of us should also have, because we all experience physics every moment we're alive.

Even without knowing the equations of kinematics or Newtonian physics, most of us develop basic intuitions about bodies in motion - we mostly understand that if you get in the way of an object in motion which is fast or heavy, you will have a Really Bad Time. Most of us have good-enough intuitions about kinematics because we navigate these physics every time something moves around us. But despite equally universal applicability, many of us do a lot worse at thermodynamics.

The first law of thermodynamics - energy cannot be created or destroyed. Nothing can be made from nothing.

The second law is that entropy always increases when there is a change in energy over time. Entropy is a measure of disorder within a system. Imagine a cup of tea - hot, straight from a kettle. We know it will cool down over time, but energy cannot be created or destroyed, so the heat is going somewhere - into the environment around the cup.

The second law is concerned with the direction of the heat transfer and predicts that our hot cup of tea will never suck additional heat from the air around it. It is the observation that when some object accumulates energy, the universe conspires to redistribute it with the surroundings, via the shortest possible path. Water flows downhill to 'spend' its gravitational potential energy, and so does the heat in the teacup. To reheat your tea, you spend more energy from whatever form you have it in - use more electricity, burn more fuel, etc.

Thermodynamics is a bit of a weird field in physics. The language used was decided not neutral, because it was invented by people who were studying how to burn coal to drive turbines - this shows in their names. The type of energy which represents trapped potential, the heat in the teacup, useful for the designs of mankind, was called Work. Conversely, the heat crossed the boundary and went into the surroundings and couldn't be re-captured easily was called Waste.

The energy has not been destroyed, but in the transformation from Work to Waste, we, the engineer, have lost something. This is the essential meaning of increasing entropy.

I learned about this when I was seventeen, in an advanced chemistry / pre-university class in my final year of high school. I remember being absolutely haunted by this new understanding of the world. Thermodynamic systems are defined by humans and always, inherently, come with human preferences and wants embedded in the framework. I want my tea to be hot. I want my engine to work. I want to be alive.

The act of drawing the lines and studying the behaviour of these systems always, inevitably exposes the truth that the universe does not work how I would like it to and is hostile to me. Merely maintaining the margins of my own survival within this universe demands Work.

It's a cold day - so I want a hot cup of tea to help me warm up and maintain my preferred body temperature of approx. 37°C - the cold environment saps the heat out of me and my tea. It's a hot day, so I want to cool down my home - but the act of moving the heat away from me generates even more heat that has to be vented away.

Entropy is hard to define - a lot of the common attempts use words like 'disorder' or 'uncertainty'. My gut-level, emotional definition is incompatibility with my target state. Life is suffering, a never-ending cycle of acquiring what we want, and having those acquisitions stripped away by the fact of increasing entropy.¹

Entropy within a closed system will always increase - meaning, what we can use for Work will run out, and what remains is Waste. Equilibrium is the state of the universe being at rest, with no regard to how that affects me. Being alive means burning fuel to maintain homeostasis - maintaining a set of conditions necessary to be alive and an even stricter set of conditions to also have a good time - fighting that futile fight against entropy.

You - all of us - must spend energy to maintain your homeostasis. If you reach equilibrium with the universe, you are dead. We should all know this. Every time we eat, move, breathe, rest. Every time we have to boil the kettle again, do the dishes again, vacuum the floor again, refuel the car again. Things get dirty, things get worn, things get spent. To be alive is to spend all your time pouring energy into things that get spent as you move about your day, and then you have to top it up again.

This is not optional. We all do this from the day we are born to the day that we die. All of us, with no exceptions, using up the useful heat to Work, generating useless heat as Waste.

This is why I find it incredibly strange when I read about something that happened when not just one, but many people did, because of a poor grasp of thermodynamics.

The PlayPumps Fairytale

Have you heard of PlayPumps? A well-intentioned South African advertising man, who'd previously witnessed difficulties that rural women had in procuring clean water, encountered a PlayPump demo in 1989.

Field had been struck by how unfair this was. There simply must be a better way to do this, he thought. Now he was witnessing a potential solution. Stuiver's invention seemed brilliant. Instead of the typical hand pump or windmill pump found in many villages in poor countries, Stuiver's pump doubled as a playground merry-go-round. Children would play on the merry-go-round, which, as it spun, would pump clean water from deep underground up to a storage tank. No longer would the women of the village need to walk miles to draw water using a hand pump or wait in line at a windmill-powered pump on a still day. The PlayPump, as it was called, utilized the power of playing children to provide a sustainable water supply for the community.

He bought the patent and worked to get sponsors to get them installed in rural villages. He quit his job to focus on this charitable endeavour - each pump was $14,000, but he at times paid for them out of his own pocket, and over the course of ten years he managed to get fifty pumps installed across the country and won an award for "innovative, early-stage development projects that are scalable and/or replicable, while also having high potential for development impact."

But the pumps were awful for actually pumping water.

Two damning reports were released, one by UNICEF and one by the Swiss Resource Centre and Consultancies for Development (SKAT). It turned out that, despite the hype and the awards and the millions of dollars spent, no one had really considered the practicalities of the PlayPump. Most playground merry-go- rounds spin freely once they've gained sufficient momentum — that's what makes them fun. But in order to pump water, PlayPumps need constant force, and children playing on them would quickly get exhausted. According to the UNICEF report, children sometimes fell off and broke limbs, and some vomited from the spinning. In one village, local children were paid to "play" on the pump. Much of the time, women of the village ended up pushing the merry-go round themselves — a task they found tiring, undignified, and demeaning.

I don't think that this was like a meme stock, or some cynical grift. Some of the backers were people like the CEO of AOL and Bill Clinton, and Trevor Field himself didn't seem to have benefited much from this. He gave up an advertising career, over ten years of his life and invested his own money into this. I buy that he genuinely and sincerely believed that it worked and really wanted to improve the lives of the less fortunate, but just did not have a working understanding of the world he sought to improve.²

Despite us ostensibly living in the same universe, some people don't understand physics, especially entropy. Maybe this comes from a belief that they don't need to - but possibly they're just too privileged to realise that their worldview is missing something vital. I think what unites Field and the Clintons and committee that hands out development awards to charities, is the fact that none of them have ever personally relied on a hand pump for water. To them, clean drinking water comes out of a tap in their nice upscale homes. They have no idea what's on the other end of the tap. It might as well be the magical clean water fairies.

In this view of the world, PlayPumps was a story that made people feel hopeful and warm and fuzzy, and people who have never seriously thought about how water is delivered to their homes were able to uncritically insert "kids playing on a merry-go-round" into their model of how drinking water is transported. Also, if they backed this thing, they would be good and clever people. Narratives make everything sound convincing. Lots of people really, really wanted to believe in some kind of reverse-Omelas reality, where playtime for kids could incidentally solve complex engineering problems.

In other words, people invested in a fairytale. Unfortunately, the magical clean water fairies failed to materialise, and countless communities now live with these incredibly shitty devices taking up a spot where an actually functional system could have been installed.

Iris Meredith wrote about how Anglosphere societies have nothing but contempt for materiality and material reality.

The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care of sufficiently important people. In cases where this belief is deeply held, it can even extend to an unwillingness to even pay attention to materiality, with the person preferring to live in a world of ideological constructs, gut feelings and half-remembered lessons rather than observing the conditions and phenomena that are actually happening. In short, they tend to prioritise ideology over material realities, and have nothing but contempt for those who persist in pointing these realities out.

We live in an entropic world. PlayPumps and its ilk imply a free lunch - we have an inexhaustible source of Work, which generates no Waste. Anytime someone comes up with an idea that rhymes with that, it pays to be skeptical.

Still, for every ineffective charity like PlayPumps, there surely is another charity with a really workable idea that toils in obscurity. PlayPumps failed in material reality, but was a smashing success in image and narrative, at least until the material reality catch up. This isn't that surprising - it was, after all, the pet project of an ad man.

Somehow, within the dominant Anglosphere culture these days, there is a very high demand for a particular skillset - of spinning convincing narratives. Storytelling.

This skill is not useful for interfacing with material reality - the universe doesn't have a heart and mind that you can sway, you can't fast-talk it into working how you'd like it to. But narratives influence people, and storytelling is the core skillset that convinces other humans to do something in the world - work, vote, buy something, boycott something, protest, even do violence - on behalf of some narrative.

In the next post, I will discuss narratives, fantasy planning and how those factors interact with complex systems. See ya then!³