Entropy: Entropy Reduction In Depth Part 2

This post is Part 2 of Entropy Reduction in Depth. Part 1 is here. And the Entropy category link is here. In these posts, and other posts on Entropy in Human Achievement, I am developing the concept that the removal of Entropy (disorder, dissipation of energy) is a key component in all human achievement, and has been articulated, in countless ways, by all the great authors and speakers on human achievement.

Use existing processes until measures dictate otherwise
In my previous post, I mentioned the opposite principle: “Abandon processes if measurements dictate”. Though it seems I am suggesting the opposite now, these two processes are “twin processes”, and both produce entropy reduction: that key quality that eliminates the extraneous impediments to “useful work” and channels energy into productive paths. You must not abandon a process that is working without good reason. And that reason should be measurable. If a process has not been in place for long, one should not expect the measurement of success to be large, however, if the success is nonzero, and at all measurable, and if, from that measure, you can deem that process to be taking you in a nonrandom direction, consider keeping the process going. If you have not lost a pound in 4 years, and you change your eating and exercise habits, and then, after 30 days you have lost 1 pound, that may seem like a small victory. But, it is in fact a non-random result which is matching your goal and your plan. You should not change that process, although there is reason to attempt “Spiral Development” of that process

Develop your processes iteratively; Spiral Development
When I was involved in a creative field, I never quite knew when a piece was “done”. This is because creativity is oftentimes an iterative process. From the germ of an idea, a first draft is made, or a few lines are written. These initial outputs act as the beginning of a feedback loop into the artist’s brain, which then produces related and refined outputs which enrich and expand the initial germ of an idea. Ultimately, the artistic work is born, not artificially, but organically, as a spiral path toward a finished project.

Similarly, we can reduce the entropy, or disorder of our success processes by going deeper into the implications of any plans that seem to have promise. We can proceed along the “lines of least resistance”, i.e. digging deeper into those elements that seem most promising, exciting, or effective at a given (current) stage. Which elements of your plan are working? Which elements could be doubled? Tripled? Which elements would expand with a little extra equipment? With the help of a consultant? Maybe a plan is working, but needs better and more exhaustive metrics so othe shape of the whole can be perceived with more detail; so the overall direction can become clearer.

Developing spirally means reflecting on the current state of a good plan to make it better, rather than shifting to a new plan.

Bach did not seem to get tired of composing fugues, and, as a matter of fact, was still writing one as he lay on his deathbed. Spiral development becomes ever more fascinating as the output becomes more successful. Another example might be Amazon.com. This company has spirally developed its core competencies of inventory, delivery, search, convenience, etc from its beginnings as a bookseller to a huge, multi-line retailer. And then they spirally developed their back-office processes into still more businesses. Again, all grown organically. Spirally.

More entropy reduction techniques in Part 3

Entropy: Entropy Reduction In Depth, Part 1

My series of posts on Entropy in Human Achievement is growing, so I will refer you to this category link for previous posts.

I recently discussed Productive Entropy and how to add to productive entropy. We are truly blessed in this digital age , to have so many sources of information available to us, from the familiar Books, TV, Radio, to podcasts, blogs, Google searches, etc. Properly deployed, the huge amount of input we get can be streamlined: the Productive entropy of all these inputs cam be further turned into the Negentropy of organized behavior. What tools do we have to reduce entropy, to magically transform all of our inputs, ideas, new knowledge, speculation, advice, etc into “the capacity for useful work”? I recently listed 50 techniques. Here is an in-depth discussion of a few.

Debrief/Review
A key tenet of modern military practice is the debrief or the after-action review. The faster our “turnaround cycle” for learning from previous experience, the faster we can make progress. By scrutinizing, categorizing, and contemplating recent experiences from the outside world, we can elucidate general principles, practices we want to implement next time, and new pathways for productive activity. The next time we go out into the battle, we will be taking a little less entropy with us. A great book that includes the debrief process is James Murphy’s Flawless Execution: Use the Techniques and Systems of America's Fighter Pilots to Perform at Your Peak and Win the Battles of the Business World.

Metaphor
“An atom is like a little solar system”. Person “A” is “like” person B. Centrifugal force is “like” a ball on twirling on a string. A biological cell is “like” a microprocessor. “As you stretch, visualize yourself has a marionette bending on a string”. Using metaphor can temporarily transform the raw data of our senses into a form which allows us to implement the data productively. Quantum, physics suggests to us that the physical world does not, in a sense, even exist until we measure it. The equations of physics are replete with representations of “forces” , “fields”, ”spin”, ”charm” and other designations, about which scientists actually know very little, except that they make sense mathematically. Yet the “standard model” of quantum physics is the most accurate model of any physical process yet discovered. And it’s all metaphor. What metaphor does is highlight selected and essential characteristics of an object or process, temporarily focusing on the similarity to other objects/processes. By eliminating other (dissimilar) aspects, the mind is able to concentrate and operate on the object in an "as if" state. For instance, a “heart patient” is similar to other “heart patients” even though the patient may be totally different from other heart patients in a variety of respects. But, for the purposes of “right now”, we are not treating the patient’s race, religion, occupation, or reading habits. We are focusing on the “heart patient” metaphor.

Reduce “Local” Decision-making
What if you decided one day to abandon all habits and made new decisions for each action you took? When to get up, when to brush your teeth, how much toothpaste to squeeze out of the toothbrush, whether you would go to work today, which route you would take, etc? In all likelihood, your life would come to a standstill, overwhelmed by entropy. We make sense out of our lives by reducing that entropy through categorical decision-making. This does not mean we cannot take plenty of time and thought to make decisions, but that, once we do, we should use the power of those decisions to reduce the level of “disorder” (entropy) in our lives. Making frequent decisions carries a “cost” in time and also in probability. For instance, if you know the donut place runs out of sprinkled donuts by 9am, you know your chances are better if you get there before 9am. Sure, you can take a chance, sleep late, and, from time to time, they still have the sprinkled donuts at 9:10. But you have re-sequenced your whole routine, spent time thinking it over, perhaps got a little uneasy “feeling” about the outcome of the new decision, and also reduced the probability of the sprinkled donut being there when you get there. Remember, you don’t have a probability series for getting there at 9:05, or another one for 9:10, etc. You actually don’t know the probability of anything but 9am. So you have sacrificed the probability, changed your routine, and spent time on a decision when you could have been putting on your shoes and being out the door already.

This kind of “local” decision-making adds up. If you continue to re-schedule meetings, skip classes, change your exercise routine, buy items on a whim, buy stocks on “hot tips”, this will continue to cost energy, time, money, and efficiency. A classic case would be the case of compound interest. All those people looking for a quick way to wealth, who change their ideas, careers, and investments rapidly, and without a “categorical” decision on what they are going to do long-term, are at a disadvantage compared to the slow, steady investor who consistently makes a good return, and takes fewer losses. Compound interest requires a removal of “entropy”. When this entropy is removed, and the investor sticks to their categorical decision over a period of decades, the slow, steady, mathematical process of wealth accumulation procedes like a juggernaut. I am indebted to the ideas of Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge And Decisions, which goes into these concepts in great depth, and at the highest possible level.

Abandon Processes if Measurements Dictate
As the old saying goes, “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”. The cessation of measurably bad processes is a positive act: the reduction of entropy. There are plenty of creative ways to try new processes, new people, new careers, new approaches. The beauty of “Productive Entropy” is that the current digital age provides a nearly unlimited (and nearly free) supply of possible solutions to any problem. We want to remove the entropy around productive processes, to allow them to flourish; we want to discard processes (no matter how ordered or determined) that, by measurement, show a lack of productivity. Discarding processes that measure poorly is discarding entropy.

I will consider more entropy reduction processes in depth in part 2.

Success Master Skills: Adding "Productive Entropy"

This is my fifth post on Entropy in Human Achievement The others are :

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

I have suggested in earlier posts that achievement is related to the reduction of entropy, or disorder, in our lives, so that our energies can be focused and re-focused on the important “leverage points” that can potentially bring about the best outcome in our lives.

But there are also times and situations when we need to “shake things up” a bit. We need to add entropy, not remove it. We need to widen the view. We need to search for gold in different lands.

In today’s world, where new business models and new business concepts can spring up overnight, where technology can change in an instant, we can only find new entrepreneurial niches by casting the widest possible net, so that, later, we can reduce entropy, and mine the “gold”. Here are a few ways to add Productive Entropy.

Study a wide range of topics, especially early in life.
Some people call this ”priming the pump”. You never know where a good solution will come from. Innovation expert Phil McKinney subscribes to huge numbers of magazines. Thomas Schweich , in his book Staying Power : 30 Secrets Invincible Executives Use for Getting to the Top - and Staying There, recounts the careers of many successful people who kept their options open early in their careers, which, he says, allowed them to gain a wide variety of connections and experience.

One great example is Warren Buffett, now a multi-billionaire specializing in what he terms a small “circle of competence”. While his current entropy content is reduced, allowing him to focus on his unsurpassed investment style, it was not always so. In her remarkable book The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, author Alice Schroeder uncovers the fact that Buffett was involved in innumerable business activities before turning to stock investments: he owned a tenant farm, owned a gas station, sold used golf balls, and managed newspaper circulation, all the while devouring mountains of business information at a breakneck pace and with incredible focus on detail. Furthermore, although somewhat socially awkward in his youth, Schroeder’s biography makes it clear that he made friends wherever he went, often with people a generation or more older than him. Again, adding variety, and “disorder” (entropy) into his life.

The point is, he first had the drive and opportunity to “add productive entropy” by taking in both practical and theoretical knowledge, for at least a full decade in his early life prior to settling on stocks and investments as a career.

Acquire and Use Multiple Mental Models
This is a “blind man and the elephant” idea, very much understood and taught by Warren Buffett’s longtime associate (and fellow billionaire) Charlie Munger. Munger excels at viewing human events through a multitude of conceptual lenses: mathematics, probabilistic, psychological, biological, evolutionary, and others. Another method Munger uses is “inversion”: viewing a problem in reverse, to get a different perspective. Again, this adds “Productive Entropy”, i.e. disruption, or “creative destruction", into the problem-solving arena.

Read, Read, Read
Alice Schroeder (again in “the Snowball”) quotes a description of the young Charlie Munger as “a book with legs”. This refers to his lifelong addiction to reading. If there is one characteristic that seems to be the most highly correlated with success of all that I have studied (except, perhaps, for the concept of entropy reduction itself), it is the “productive entropy” of reading. The “entropy” of reading adds new facts, new procedures, and, with any luck, new overarching principles by which you can better understand and effect the events in your life. Then, again, after the exposure to the “entropy” of the new material, you remove the entropy by fitting the best ideas into your own goals and plans.

Music and Art
Music , Visual Art, Theatre, Poetry often deliberately disrupt in order to then re-order reality. The poems of John Donne, with their startling metaphors “short-circuit” the brain, allowing it to view an object on a wholly different light. I have listened to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” all of my adult life, and often feel hat there is an “order behind the order” of the brilliant counterpoint. Multiple channels of information creating a new information stream (if God talked, would it be in multi-part music?). My point is, the jaw-dropping experience of great art makes us “normal” people have to use different “mental muscles” to convert the data into a stream we can comprehend and appreciate, very much like the task of slowly removing the “entropy” surrounding a task. Even scientific research seems to indicate that music , specially, can add to IQ and productivity.

Go Where the Action Is
The brightest minds in business know to go where the business is. Wherever the best and the brightest in a particular field congregate, that is the "casino" where a “roll of the dice” has the greatest probability of landing on “7”. There is maximum “entropy, in the sense of a lot of ideas brewing and bubbling in busy, populous area. Silicon Valley is a good example of “productive entropy”. A million projects, a billion ideas, a million people, disorder waiting to become order.

Go to conferences and seminars, watch webinars
You add “disorder” by coming into contact with unknown people, companies, and concepts. This effect is multiplied exponentially by the increasing number of conferences that archive their videos. From the Singularity Summit to Stanford University, to the Cato Institute, new ideas by brilliant minds pour onto the web every day. If we take the time to sample these new inputs, our own brains will re-integrate the information, removing entropy, and fashioning new tools for productive pursuits.

Browse forums in (and out of) your field
Scroll through the forums in your area of business. As a trader, I have found innumerable trading ideas online, as well as new friends, books to study, and other unexpected gems.

Lists, Brainstorming, Idea-Generation, ”Capture Mechanisms”
The mind can continuously improve its idea-generating capacity with practice. Productive Entropy in this case is the free-flowing generation of ideas: Hurson’s “Divergent Thinking” (Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking). Many successful businessmen, artists, writers, keep an “idea capture” device (voice recorder, notebook, etc) with them at all times. The external world (people, signs, events) and the internal world (internal dialogue, dreams, flashes of inspiration) are often sending us solutions, new directions, new inputs, in an ”entropic” fashion. We need to ‘love” the “disorder” of recording any remotely relevant input, for later entropy-removal, (i.e. the transformation into “useful” inputs to a process). Currently, anything useful that comes in to my field of view usually ends up in my personal wiki: websites, ongoing transactions, GTD categories, article links, etc. That way I can find it later, tag it, link it, etc.

I feel it is urgent to take in new ideas (“Productive Entropy”). Others don’t. I run into people constantly who drown out new directions, alternatives, solutions, etc in the din of their own (internal or external) monologue. “Not Invented Here” is alive and well. But , without new inputs (“Productive Entropy”), we are simply a self-justificatory entity: we have the “order” of living in a changeless mental landscape, comfortable, predictable, but frozen and inflexible.

We, as human beings, are privileged to be the only known creatures on Earth who can consciously and rationally adapt to the changes we ourselves make in the Universe. These changes will, whether we like it or not, inject entropy into our lives: our jobs, relationships, procedures, and relevance/irrelevance of our state of knowledge. We need to get out ahead of that tidal wave as much as possible by welcoming the entropy, and incorporating it into our goals, plans and achievements

Success Book Reviews: 3 Quick Takes

I took the audio versions of Fox's book and Pickens' book along on a recent car trip across country. Fox's book was a truly outstanding and exhaustive treatment of client service, promotion, and self-management techniques, clearly written by a master. I found the sheer volume of ideas to be indicative of an incredible generosity. Fox is clearly a master and an insider, and this book is the next best thing to a world-class course in "How to Make The Sale Happen", with a minor in "How Not to Look Like An Idiot In Business".




Pickens' life end exploits are hugely entertaning. In one sense, his life reflects a habit of thinking big, learned at an early age,which, by its very nature, produced knock-on effects throughout his careeer. That lesson alone was worth the price of the book.








I have just begin to read Buffet's book, and I'm loving it. There are fascinating parallels with Alan Greenspan in some facets of Buffett's early development, notably facility and interest in data and statistics, while Buffett's Omaha-based practical streak added a penchant for making money and salesmanship, which led in a diferent direction. I plan on further comments at a later date.

Success Master Skills: Can Entropy be Good?

In the previous posts about entropy in human achievement (here, here, here), I have portrayed entropy as a villain: as the seeping disorder that destabilizes our plans, and often our lives. I’ve urged that we become aware of the sources of entropy in our lives and that we take measures to control the process. The less “noise” we allow into our lives, the more we can focus on what really matters to us. We not only free up time, but we allow the brain the time it needs to slowly iterate through our subject matter, producing more and better outputs the longer we fixate on a particular task.

So, are there any areas where entropy is good in our lives? Any ways in which we should be (gasp!) adding entropy? Is there such a thing as “Productive Entropy?”

Of course. Perhaps my favorite book of the year, Tim Hurson’s Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking describes the methods of “convergent/divergent” thinking. In the ”divergent” phase, we add entropy: we open our minds to all sorts of solutions, alternatives, fantasies, questions, etc in search for the proper frameworks of problems and solutions. Then, Hurson leads us to the “convergent thinking” zone, in which we carefully sift and sort through the ideas we have discovered, in a sense, removing entropy to find the “gold” in the ideas.

There are times when entropy (disruption, variety, surprise, distraction, shocks of one kind or another) is crucial to the unfolding of our existence. There is the well-known story about the discovery of Penicillin, accidentally, because a culture of bacteria had mysteriously died in the presence of certain mold. There was also the hugely disruptive “failure” of the Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to detect an “ether wind”, thus leading to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and a revolution in physics.

In terms of bettering our own lives, adding entropy allows a re-ordering of knowledge, of experience, of implications and possibilities, often leading to positive outcomes. For instance,whenever a client’s ”normal” supplier is unavailable, a new supplier might be able to step in. A blind date might lead to romance and marriage, A Paradigm Shift (for instance, from electro-mechanical relays to transistors) can open whole Universes of opportunity. Author Clayton Christensen goes so far as to describe an “innovator’s dilemma” because of the continual encroachment of new methods and technologies moves up the value chain, disrupting business models as it goes. One of the first books I reviewed on this site, Carr's How to Attract Good Luck
is, in essence, a manual for selectively adding “productive entropy” into one’s life. As Carr describes it, the concept of luck could be deconstructed to mean “chance meeting the prepared mind combined with a positive, adventurous outlook and a willingness to be flexible”.

In an upcoming post, I’ll describe some methods to add “productive entropy” .