Entropy And Evolution: An Introduction to Systems Thinking with Alex Danco

In his latest Interintellect salon, Alex Danco explores systems thinking, and the paradox of order amongst chaos. 

Here is a puzzle:

There’s only one thing we know for sure about the world, and that’s the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy always increases. The world is continuously trending towards disorder: in the long run, potential energy gets spent and ordered structures break down. If you take a wide enough view, the universe is a giant furnace, slowly consuming itself as fuel.

But that is not our everyday experience. Our experience on Planet Earth, both within the context of our lifetimes or within a broader view of the past million+ years of history, is the world isn’t running down. It’s running up! Ordered structures are continually built, and continually persist: from the building blocks of RNA lifeforms to our built-up cities.

What makes ordered structure persist, in a world that’s continuously breaking down?

This may seem like an impossibly large question, but it may have direct applicability to your life: if you’re a parent, how do you keep your kid’s room clean, given the universal law of parenthood that orderly rooms + time = disorderly rooms? How does a clean room stay clean? How does an organized art scene with understood social norms and structures remain orderly? How do businesses held together by motive and loyalty maintain their orderly structure amidst a changing world; or for that matter, governments and nations?

Discovering the answer takes you on an interesting journey, into the world of Systems Thinking.

In this Salon we’ll explore the basics of systems thinking, starting with unlearning Cause-and-Effect thinking (the crutch that holds us back from real discovery), learning how stocks, flows, and steady states work, and learning how to think in layers. It will get confusing, and halfway through this Salon you will wonder if there’s any point to this. And then – hopefully, if I do my job as host right – something important will click into place. And you’ll see the world – simultaneously running down, into disorder, and running up into higher order, in harmony – in an interesting new way.

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