In any context where an employment and technology ecosystem is so rapidly evolving – recognising talents, skills and aptitude becomes about as difficult and as (ultimately and) unmanageably complex as acquiring or maintaining them.
What interests me here is a second-order semantic analysis: there is such an efflorescence of salient wisdom and clever advice available, so much insight and problem-disentangling creativity on hand, but how on Earth can we possibly incorporate and actualise all of this?
I have a browser with almost 100 open tabs, each full of useful information and profound insights that I work hard to find enough time to do more than meaningless skimming. This is a symptom: we are drowning in information and each new entity or artefact and idiom generates more degrees of freedom and more paths (through entropy) towards disorder and confusion.
How do we usefully compress all of this information in ways that can provide actionable insight without merely adding more dissonant, turbulent confusion? I think this is a critical question that requires answering in reductive ways, in usefully optimising methods and logic suggests a paths forwards here. This, itself, could be a useful skill.
The only (or at least the primary) sense in which the dynamic flow and intrinsically adaptive essence of entropy is bad is as viewed from within a paradigm and worldview that treats imposed order and control as intrinsic, innate, inevitable. Most negative effects of a probabilistic drift into disorder are directly proportional to the extent that mechanistic order and teleology is asserted as privileged and ascendant.
There is a “sweet spot” and resonant discontinuity of structural disassembly that invokes self-organisation, homeostasis and growth. Most ideological systems, to be frank, spend inordinate amounts of time and effort attempting to compress the incompressible, to force the square pegs of control into the round holes of reality.
A physics of complexity and a logic of information (and associated abstractions) indicates that organisations, cultures and psychologies (or, indeed, the hyper-extended cognition of technologies) will autonomously self-organise into optimal configurations and system-states, given sufficient degrees of freedom. Entropy is a measure of those degrees of freedom and logic, physics and nature have a tendency to find their own best solutions.
Daedelus Kite 