"What is entropy?"

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Recently, there was an article titled "Is it Worth Entering Paid Communities? You Might Have a Different Perspective After Reading," which discussed some views on paid communities. Among the content, student Er Liang suggested that we could delve deeper into the discussion from the perspective of entropy.

So, what is entropy?

Most people's exposure to entropy comes from the second law of thermodynamics, which is the law of entropy increase. So, what is the law of entropy increase? The explanation of the law of entropy increase:

Entropy can be understood as a measure of a system's "intrinsic level of disorder." If a system is not maintained by external forces, it will tend to become chaotic and disordered. In other words, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.

Butter Cat Paradox

The most famous perpetual motion machine is the Butter Cat Paradox. It was discovered that if a cat falls from the air, it will always land on its feet.

According to Murphy's Law, the specific content is "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong," meaning that if you throw a buttered toast into the air, it will definitely land butter-side down.

Then, a clever friend discovered that if you butter a toast and stick it to the cat's back, and then throw it into the air, to comply with the above two laws, the cat cannot land on its feet because the buttered side of the toast will always land down. Similarly, the buttered side of the toast cannot land down because the cat will always land on its feet. Refer to the image below:

Then, a perpetual motion machine appears...

How to Reduce Entropy

As mentioned earlier, if we do not maintain ourselves with external forces, we will continuously experience entropy increase, meaning we will increasingly tend toward instability. The methods to break the entropy increase have been mentioned before: one is an open system, and the other is to introduce external forces.

Open System

When we put various data cables into our pockets, they always come out tangled and chaotic. As soon as the weekend arrives, we cannot get up and sleep on time, always sleeping until noon. When we walk into a supermarket wanting to buy a bottle of milk, we end up coming out with two large shopping bags.

When we stop learning, stop reading, stop exercising, and exclude useless things from within us to absorb new things, we become a closed system. The internal energy will begin to become chaotic according to the law of entropy increase, which is what we often refer to as feeling increasingly depressed.

Once we get used to a certain lifestyle, we tend to stay in our comfort zone. At this point, the system will also become increasingly closed. Therefore, breaking this phenomenon involves stepping out of the comfort zone and using new methods to optimize the old ones, achieving an effect of entropy reduction.

Many times, we work very hard. You can tell anyone, "I think you're not working hard," and they will definitely refute you because they are already working hard. But we all know that water needs to reach 100 degrees to boil, so the 99 degrees before that cannot show results; even being 1 degree short won't work.

However, many times we only boil to a few degrees and then give up, and start rushing towards those who are already drinking coffee made with boiling water, hoping to drink the same. The result is just reboiling water that doesn't boil.

Introducing External Forces

The earlier mention of learning new knowledge, exercising, etc., is all about introducing external forces. We live in a socially interactive society, so external forces can also come from others. If doing something is about breaking the closed system from the inside out, then introducing external forces is about breaking the closed system from the outside.

When we cannot independently grasp a piece of knowledge, we can consult others to help break the system's closed nature from the outside. Then, through external forces, we can get the system's internal flow going, breaking the original sense of balance.

This is also why many people feel relieved after communicating with friends when they are in a bad mood; the essence of entropy reduction is to reduce uncertainty. We have many ways to reduce uncertainty, one of which is through payment.

For example, if you want to learn how to drive traffic on Douyin, and you open Baidu, you see a pile of materials and articles, and you are still confused.

Then, to eliminate this uncertainty, you organize the information and find that driving traffic involves several steps, such as placement, content, transitioning to private domains, etc. At this point, you are still confused, but it's a bit better than before; at least you have some images in your mind.

Then you feel that searching for free resources takes too much time, so you decide to enroll in a course, only to find that there are too many courses, and they all teach differently. So you pay to join some communities, and then you see experts or seniors in this field, and through their recommendations, you learn about the business process and find suitable courses to study.

The above process is a continuous elimination of information uncertainty. Of course, we have many other ways to eliminate uncertainty, but I won't elaborate on that here.

Finally

So, is entropy increase necessarily bad? It seems that the existence of life is meaningless because we must constantly strive against entropy increase. For the universe, your life indeed has little significance. However, for the people around you, your life has meaning.

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