Ergodicity 🚜 & Myth 👹
Trying out a shorter format
Summary
This week I’m trying out an experiment in brevity recommended by a friend. For the essay I’ve put the idea of ergodicity in my own words and applied it to an example of harvests. For the book review I’m summarising what I took from Myth & Meaning by Claude Lévi-Strauss. I’d love any feedback that you might have on this structure vs. my usual approach - feel free to reply directly to this email.
Ergodicity
Ergodicity is a way of thinking about the randomness of a system across time. A system is ergodic if nothing fundamentally course-altering can happen. We can think about this using a system (like below) where there is some probability of moving between states. A system is ergodic if, on a long enough time scale, it will return to every state. If at any point however, a state in the system becomes unreachable then it is non-ergodic.
This can be illustrated through the example of an annual harvest. On a farm each year, you have some likelihood that the harvest will be good or bad, influenced by the previous harvest*. Given enough time, you can always expect to see good years and bad years. This is an ergodic system. Say, however, you start using a fertiliser that increases the probability of a good harvest but also creates a small probability of the land becoming barren as you deplete its nutrients. Now you could end up stuck in a new state where the land never returns to a good harvest. This is a non-ergodic system. The majority of systems we encounter, despite our best optimism, are in fact non-ergodic. We should treat them with care.
*I’m not a farmer though so I don’t actually know if it works like this 👨🌾 🤓
📘 Book Review: Myth & Meaning
This is the first book I've read by Strauss. Strauss deals essentially with myth. Unlike contemporaries such as Jung or Eliade, he is not looking for truths, psychological or otherwise, that are 'hidden' in myth. Instead, he is trying to understand their structure: how the elements of myth operate systematically to give a scaffolding within which we can think. Strauss references cybernetics and I expect he was influenced by the first waves of complexity science. He uses the underlying systems of mythical thinking to understand the current systems of scientific thinking. I'm excited to read more.
Thanks to Casey Li for reading a draft of this email.
