Back to AtD : Yashmeen

[Mark Kohut]

Paul M. writes (convincingly to me):
Just guessing of course, but Yashmeen's putdown of Boltzmann and entropy as merely statistical (producing only probabilities) may reflect an earlier age's still somewhat skeptical attitude toward statistics as a serious scientific tool. Yashmeen wants the exact answers of pure mathematics.

We do know of course that Yashmeen puts too much faith in the efficacy of pure math to solve world problems. And she also apparently didn't fully appreciate how statistics and probability WERE changing the world.
This is not to minimize the big part eventually played by math as well.

Anyway, the final sentence of section seems to foreshadow Yashmeem's later full blown susceptibility to male allure, despite intellectual differences.


P

One source, for Entropy as an influential metaphor came from Gibbs, the guy Henry Adams borrowed the idea from to overuniverslaize, think most these
days. In Adams' Degradation of the Democratic Idea he devotes two virtually unreadable essays now to trying to spread the concept
of entropy to human action, to societies, to the universe, etc....

That is before Yashmeen's AtD time, of course, so she does dismiss entropy (maybe) but I do think Paul was insightful when he spoke of her
moving the terms to 'the exact answers of pure math", which TRP ain't gonna sign off on in his vision.

And, still to come, is how the statistics and probabiliity that Paul focusses on is changing the world by changing Reef's karmic casino terms.....