The Entropy Tax

The fight is not about answers. It is about which question gets to be the default—and who bears the cost of justification.

In a previous essay, I argued that many of our most heated disagreements are not disagreements about answers but disagreements about questions—that the apparent conflict between "colorblindness is racist" and "colorblindness is the only non-racist position" dissolves once we recognize that each is a correct answer to a different question wearing the same costume.

But this raises an obvious follow-up: if both answers can be correct, why do we fight about them? Why does the colorblindness debate generate such heat? Why do participants on both sides feel not merely that they are right, but that their opponents are obviously, perhaps culpably, wrong?

The answer lies in understanding what is actually at stake. The fight is not about answers. It is about which question gets to be the default.

Every act of justification costs something. To defend a position requires marshaling evidence, constructing arguments, anticipating objections, and—crucially—submitting yourself to the judgment of your interlocutor. You must play the game on a field you do not fully control. There is always some probability that your justification will fail, that you will be found wanting, that you will lose.

This is what I call the entropy tax. Whoever holds the default position does not pay it. They can simply assert, shrug, gesture at obviousness. The burden falls entirely on the challenger.

Consider: if "colorblindness is the correct ideal" is the default assumption in a given context, then the person arguing for race-conscious policies must justify their deviation. They must explain, at length, why the obvious position is wrong. They must overcome the presumption against them. They pay the entropy tax.

But if "race-conscious policies are necessary given historical injustice" is the default, the situation reverses. Now the colorblindness advocate must justify. They must explain why we should ignore context, why the ideal matters more than the present reality. The tax collector has changed.

The answer itself has not changed. The question has not changed. What has changed is who bears the cost of justification.

This explains the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of people fighting bitterly over positions that are, on reflection, not mutually exclusive. They are not fighting about the truth of the propositions. They are fighting about which proposition gets to sit in the privileged position of "default"—the position that requires no defense, that can be asserted without argument, that places the burden of proof on everyone else.

This is what makes "just asking questions" such an effective rhetorical weapon. The person "just asking" pays no entropy tax. They have made no claim that can be evaluated, no argument that can be refuted. They have merely forced their interlocutor to justify, to defend, to pay the tax. It is asymmetric warfare conducted under the flag of innocent inquiry.

The Socratic method, in its debased modern form, has become a mechanism for imposing costs on others while bearing none yourself.

We need a model for how defaults change. The metaphor of the "Overton window" gestures at something real, but it is too static, too binary—as if there were a clean line between acceptable and unacceptable discourse.

Better to think of it as a probability distribution over utterances. At any moment, certain statements have high probability—they can be made without cost, they are default, they are what everyone assumes unless given reason to think otherwise. Other statements have low probability—they require justification, they mark the speaker as unusual, they must overcome the presumption against them.

The distribution shifts continuously as the culture processes new information, but expression tends to snap between discrete states rather than glide smoothly. This is because of social costs: the first person to say publicly what many believe privately pays an enormous premium. They are "ahead of their time," which is a polite way of saying they will absorb punishment that later arrivals will not.

So the weights update gradually, but the behavior changes suddenly. One day, the position is unspeakable. The next day, it is mandatory. The day after that, it has always been mandatory, and anyone who remembers otherwise is engaging in historical revisionism.

This is not a one-directional ratchet. The word "retarded" moved from clinical default to taboo within a generation, but other terms have made the reverse journey. What seems like permanent moral progress is often just the current position of an oscillating system.

The "culture war" is, in this framing, a war over the probability distribution itself. The combatants are not trying to determine which answers are true—that would be too easy, too resolvable. They are trying to determine which questions get treated as default, which framings require no justification, which assumptions can be asserted with a shrug.

To control the default is to control who pays the entropy tax. It is to make your opponents work harder, justify more, risk more—while you sit comfortably in the position of mere obviousness.

This is why the fights are so bitter and so interminable. Truth can, in principle, be settled. Defaults cannot. Defaults are not true or false. They are strategic positions in an ongoing negotiation over the costs of discourse.

So what do we do with this analysis?

First: refuse to pay the tax silently. When you find yourself required to justify what should be obvious, note that the requirement itself is a political act. The defaults that make your position costly were not handed down by some committee. No one person set them. They emerged—as Engels put it, "What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed." Or as Adam Ferguson observed a century earlier: "Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."

The defaults are systemic. They arose from countless micro-interactions, none of which intended the macro-pattern. This does not make them neutral. It makes them harder to see and harder to contest.

Second: notice when you are collecting the tax. The positions that feel obvious to you, that require no defense, that you can assert with a shrug—these are not obvious because they are true. They are obvious because they are default. The feeling of obviousness is not a signal about reality. It is a signal about the current distribution of priors.

Third: recognize that there is no single Overton window. There are many—perhaps infinite. When we speak of "the" window, we are assuming a shared context that may not exist. The defaults in a sundown town in Alabama are not the defaults in Los Angeles. The questions themselves differ. The set of possible questions that the window even covers may have no overlap. Two people can be operating with entirely different distributions, talking past each other not because they disagree about answers, nor even because they disagree about which question to ask, but because their respective windows don't contain the same questions at all.

Fourth: do the work to surface the actual question. Most apparent disagreements are not disagreements about answers but disagreements about questions. Before you pay the entropy tax on your answer, verify that you are answering the same question as your interlocutor. You may find that the disagreement dissolves—or that it relocates to a more fundamental level where it can actually be addressed.

The entropy tax is real. Someone always pays it. The only question is whether we pay it consciously, understanding the game we are playing—or whether we pay it blindly, believing ourselves to be engaged in a pure pursuit of truth while actually fighting over who gets to define what "obvious" means.