Reply #324: I agree with you on both points.

[BrklynLiberal]

Pres Obama had no ill-will in his heart.
and
I believe that DU is suffering the inevitable symptoms of a system that evolves and changes.
Entropy...which is an index of the tendency of a system toward spontaneous change is irresistible.
DU, as an organism is changing, and there are those of us who may or may not be happy with the changes.


http://www.nexialinstitute.com/social_entropy.htm
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy of a naturally occurring system always increases. If we use this statement to help to understand a human society, a question arises immediately: Why is human society not chaotic on the whole?. The answer appears to rely on society’s own ability to create organized systems and sub systems by using intelligence. Let us take any well defined human society for our analysis. A nation or any major political unit will do. We know that there are rules that must be obeyed by all people in such a system (at least in theory). These are the political laws that they obey. In<4> this way, political, economic, cultural and social rules must (or should) be well defined and assembled in theory and practice in order to avoid / prevent totally chaotic systems. To the extent that these laws are observed and followed by the individuals within the system, the system will be orderly, “regular” and avoid chaos. Those individuals who do NOT obey the laws introduce disorder / chaos into the system. Thus the disorder is a precise measure of expressed disagreement with and dissatisfaction with the rules / laws of the society. All these variables may configure a social response, that is to say, a degree of dissatisfaction or satisfaction with the current system. As a matter of fact, if the social rules are arbitrarily applied in favor of minorities, the social entropy will increase with time more rapidly, compared to other social systems where justice favors no one and applies to everyone, particularly to large majorities. Those who do not obey are criminals, and must be dealt with as such. This forces conformity to the laws, the rules of behavior, and applies a correction / motivation to prevent chaos.

One of the key points for a rapid increase of the social entropy is the degree of civil disobedience, expressing information about internal dissatisfaction and encouraging chaos and giving rise to the eventual “birth” of leaders in a particular scenario. Consequently, we may see that social disorder comes from social dissatisfaction, hence social entropy exists and may be calculated if we are able to deduce mathematical relationships for it. Fortunately for us, we did not have to dig too deep in order to find it.

<snip>

Apparently, there are two ways for a political system to force to an apparent social order, which is by being honest and open, giving voluntary compliance with rules, or by making use of the force, which is characteristic of dictatorial regimes; but the last one works only for a very short period of time; because DSb will start increasing leading undoubtedly to the social dissatisfaction.

Human society has coined several sayings which is a sophisticated way of stating the second law of thermodynamics: remember for example: “There is no political malady which will last 100 years, and there is nobody who will go along with it”(simply because social entropy increases). Would you please remember Montesinos and his “partner” as an pathetic example?. Or remember the disorder of Alan Garcia before that?, just to rely on the Peruvian case.






http://matei.org/ithink/2008/12/12/a-social-entropy-vision-of-wiki-collaboration/
A social entropy vision of wiki collaboration

Posted by Sorin Adam Matei on December 12th, 2008 | Article had 115 views

Despite the fact that diverse and equal participation of members is considered to be the essence of true online communities, no compelling index has been proposed to measure the degree of diversity in terms of contributions of content to online social environments. The primary purpose of the paper is to reintroduce to the communication field a tool particularly suited for measuring diversity and equality of participation. This paper argues that the notion of social entropy, as defined in information theory, can be applied to measure participatory diversity and is especially suitable for characterizing online groups. Adopting social entropy researchers can better and more systematically (i) estimate participatory diversity of online communities or groups; (ii) compare different online groups in terms of participatory diversity; (iii) evaluate changes of contribution over time; (v) understand online interaction dynamics at small and large group scales.