Bulldozer00's Blog

In “Entropy Demystified“, Arieh Ben-Naim states an often forgotten fact about entropy:

The entropy of a system can decrease when that system is coupled with another system (e.g. a heating system connected with a thermostat). The law of ever increasing entropy is only valid in an isolated system.

In the figure below, the system on the left is coupled with the external environment and its members can use the coupling to learn how to adapt, dynamically self-organize, and arrest the growth in entropy that can destroy systems. In the isolated system on the right, which models a typical corpo mediocracy run by fat headed and infallible BMs who ignore everything outside their cathedral walls, there is no possibility of learning – and entropy marches forward.