I think what you’re pointing at is adjacent to many interesting or useful things. For instance, poincare recurrence and how predictions of boltzmann brains can be a death-knell for any model of the world. Or the technique of solving for equillibrium, which if everyone internalized would probably prevent us from shoving ourselves even further away from the pareto frontier. Or the suprising utility of modelling a bunch of processes as noise and analysing their affects on dynamics.
But the idea that everything either reaches a steady state, a periodic sequence of states, or becomes noise seems useful only insofar as it lets us see if something is noisy/periodic/steady-state by checking that it isn’t the other two. (I’m not sure that this is true. The universe may well have negative curvature and we could get aperiodic, non-noisy dynamics forever.)
What exactly do you mean by “the technique of solving for equillibrium”? I would’ve said I ‘internalized’ it but you’re making me wonder if I actually have.
Solving for equillibrium is when you analyse the impact of a proposed action by asking what the resulting equillibrium solution looks like. Internalizing it means that you automatically notice when/where to apply this skill and do it without conscious effort. It also includes noticing when a system is already in equillibrium. A side-effect of this is noticing when an equillibrium doesn’t make sense to you, indicating that you’re missing some factor.
I think what you’re pointing at is adjacent to many interesting or useful things. For instance, poincare recurrence and how predictions of boltzmann brains can be a death-knell for any model of the world. Or the technique of solving for equillibrium, which if everyone internalized would probably prevent us from shoving ourselves even further away from the pareto frontier. Or the suprising utility of modelling a bunch of processes as noise and analysing their affects on dynamics.
But the idea that everything either reaches a steady state, a periodic sequence of states, or becomes noise seems useful only insofar as it lets us see if something is noisy/periodic/steady-state by checking that it isn’t the other two. (I’m not sure that this is true. The universe may well have negative curvature and we could get aperiodic, non-noisy dynamics forever.)
What exactly do you mean by “the technique of solving for equillibrium”? I would’ve said I ‘internalized’ it but you’re making me wonder if I actually have.
Solving for equillibrium is when you analyse the impact of a proposed action by asking what the resulting equillibrium solution looks like. Internalizing it means that you automatically notice when/where to apply this skill and do it without conscious effort. It also includes noticing when a system is already in equillibrium. A side-effect of this is noticing when an equillibrium doesn’t make sense to you, indicating that you’re missing some factor.
Oh yes I think I do that all the time. “How will that settle out?” and “How is it staying like this idgi”