

Ask HN: Why is it so hard to create and so easy to destroy? - Throwaway74


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gvb
Because creation fights the second law of thermodynamics, destruction "goes
with the flow." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy>

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Throwaway74
I don't get it, could you elaborate further? By that premise, isn't creation
just another form of destruction, just arbitrarily more complex because we see
it that way?

To put it another way, someone, somewhere once said that luck was people
taking probability personally.

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endtime
No single given state of the universe is more likely than any other single
state, but very few states are actually interesting.

Here's an analogy: If you were to generate a random bitmap, there's a
possibility it could look like the Mona Lisa, or a picture of Obama tapdancing
next to Churchill, or the exact schematics of Iran's Natanz nuclear
facility...but it will almost certainly just look like random noise, because
that's what the vast majority of states are.

If you start from an interesting state and make random changes to it over
time, obviously you'll tend towards a random state. And as I described above,
randomly selecting a state has a high probability of yielding an uninteresting
state.

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Throwaway74
So, given that the universe is mostly made up by randomness and noise,
anything path to noisiness is easier than a path to order ? Is this a fair way
of putting it?

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apedley
Technically there is no difference. I guess it is how we perceive things.

When we destroy we expect no specific outcome, hence you have a very large
scope on what you will see as destruction. You can just blow something up and
see everything fall down around.

With creation you expect a specific outcome or result and hence the range of
what you can do is generally more limited. I want to blow a small hole (create
a hole) in a wall will require more planning.

The basic actions to create or destroy are no different.

So you could say destruction is done by those with no specific vision and
creation is done by those with a well defined vision.

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technomancy
This is approximately the question G.K. Chesterton's "The Man who was
Thursday" addresses. I won't spoil it and probably couldn't do it justice if I
tried, but it's a compelling story.

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Throwaway74
Will definitely read the story, thanks!

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swombat
Why is this from a throwaway account anyway?

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Throwaway74
Posting anonymously somehow 'feels right' for this question. It was posted out
of a sense of dispair, more of a dramatic scream at the universe really :)

