They included all seven engineers on the team that maintains the code library that supports Facebook’s apps. “Facebook’s recent decision to not act on posts that incite violence ignores other options to keep our community safe. We implore the Facebook leadership to #TakeAction,” they said in a joint statement published on Twitter. “Mark is wrong, and I will endeavour in the loudest possible way to change his mind,” wrote Ryan Freitas, identified on Twitter as director of product design for Facebook’s News Feed. He added he had mobilised “50+ likeminded folks” to lobby for internal change.
Far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics underpins the emergence of life, but how has been a long-outstanding puzzle. Best candidate theories based on the maximum entropy production principle could not be unequivocally proven, in part due to complicated physics, unintuitive stochastic thermodynamics, and the existence of alternative theories such as the minimum entropy production principle. Here, we use a simple, analytically solvable, one-dimensional bistable chemical system to demonstrate the validity of the maximum entropy production principle. To generalize to multistable stochastic system, we use the stochastic least-action principle to derive the entropy production and its role in the stability of nonequilibrium steady states. This shows that in a multistable system, all else being equal, the steady state with the highest entropy production is favored, with a number of implications for the evolution of biological, physical, and geological systems.