Convincing others and finding the truth are like drafting and editing. The different modes appear separately. Yet one rarely lives entirely without the other. And there are moments of blending them about equally, and effectively - real moments, but difficult to bring about intentionally.

Negentropy is a physics term that fell out of fashion. It's the opposite of entropy. If the latter is "chaos" or "disorder" or "decay" (not exactly, but usable impressions) then negentropy is "order" or "efficiency" or "usable energy." My understanding is that entropy is better seen as uncorrelation, negentropy as correlation. If the moving parts in a gadget get out of sync, if a gear slips, or if systems decouple entirely, that's a boost in entropy, which is the number of independently moving pieces (or else how independent they are - entropy sort of means "units of independence").

The Big Bang is the ultimate example of negentropy, because everything was correlated together into the same point, form, location, time: little to no freedom as to where anything was. Before exploding in all directions (a vast increase in entropy which still continues), it was the ultimate in focused energy - aka, negentropy. The image below (from an article at The Conversation called "A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother") goes in reverse - entropy on the left, negentropy on the right. The tangle on the left is more difficult to describe exactly than the neat alignment on the right, which is why entropy is associated with information. You could store data in different types/patterns of tangle. You can't really store any data where there's only one allowed pattern. No options means no message. But firmly coordinated energy, as on the right, is also how to make things happen. To call it "also necessary" is a big understatement! Batteries supply negentropy. So does food. So does the sun.

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Writing with the letters of the alphabet gets more "tangled" (or entropic) than leaving a pristine sequence of identical dots. That's how language carries messages - via the entropy/tangle. But the letters versus dots example isn't about how simple a dot is compared to a letter. Choosing letter after letter from the alphabet to construct a message also involves more tangle than pasting a picture of the Mona Lisa over and over and over: as with the dots, you can't send a secret message with identical copies of the Mona Lisa in a perfectly uniform row. The key is in the choosing, moment to moment. When you can choose, you can leave a message. If all your cards are the Mona Lisa and you must play, and there's only one way to play any card, there's no message when you play Mona Lisa. That's negentropy: everything lined up perfectly, so inflexible that no meaning can get through. However, the unity can be used as a battery or pair of tweezers. (More on this in a moment.)

You might notice that the tangling on the left (in the picture) takes up more room, and it seems easy to imagine it moving while the lines on the right stay stable. No coincidence! Both space and time are ways Nature tracks interrelationships that are more elaborate and involved than "all is one" (pure negentropy, perfect correlation in all things).

That's a simple (maybe overly simple) but intuitive explanation for why matter and energy seem to stretch space and time, or even generate it. The universe needs space and time for interactions between pieces that aren't all unified. If they were all fully unified, causality wouldn't occur, and the universe wouldn't need space or time. And it seems weird and unrelated to the social process theme in the article, but black holes show that connection. Maximum data storage capacity and computing power (components of all interaction), according to black hole physics, depend on the quantities of mass-energy and spacetime. Furthermore, a certain amount of space can only hold a certain amount of stuff (mass-energy in a pattern), even if that stuff is bunched into a small piece of that space. Information and spacetime, if you believe cosmologists, are intimately connected and almost the same thing.

While this admittedly goes far beyond any expertise I can claim, spacetime seems to relate to the number of patterns available to stuff, which relates to the amount of stuff (and not, as you might think, to some preexisting background emptiness unfolding or "watching" through time regardless of what's in it). Matter, energy, patterns, space, and time interact and depend on each other. Spacetime seems to be how Nature allows multiple possibilities for arrangement, and then allows some of them to happen. Arguably spacetime warps and stretches around and inside a big blob of stuff (like a black hole) because the pieces of energy can't all ever fully unify, and keep making more space for themselves, and more timeline.

Anyway, look at the picture again, imagine the movement on the left (and maybe a little vibration on the right, as nothing is ever in complete stasis), the left being entropy and right being "negentropy," and that's a good mental model to get started.

Technically negentropy isn't negative entropy, but very little entropy, which is why the term fell out of fashion. It's a misnomer to call it "negative." Yes, an energy source can be used to tidy things up and reduce local entropy: the entropy of the energy flowing in is relatively close to 0 but still positive. This is a lot like ice-cold water, which always carries some heat (even ice would), yet freezes your hands. Cold water is hot compared to dry ice, yet it will cool your warm hands down - that's similar to the "negative" in negentropy.

The photons in a laser beam are highly correlated - so, nearly 0 entropy. They're almost just a bunch of the same photon copy-pasted over and over (remember the negentropic Mona Lisa game?). And they're all going the same direction. If that neat laser is used to jostle atoms one by one into a neat row, then, well, maybe this won't surprise you: in that tiny area, the low-entropy laser is, just there, reducing entropy. The atoms get less scattered. So the effect appears as if a negative entropy were acting.

But that's just how it seems. If you melt scissors or tweezers, you've increased the freedom or entropy of the metal atoms (the metal "relaxes" and flows around) so far that you can't use the tool. But the scissors' metal has some positive entropy either way. Neither scenario resembles all the metal scrunched into one point like the moment of the Big Bang, and even scissors have a lot more individualistic shape than a laser. Now, the opposite of scissors crushed to form a black hole (negentropy) would be an expanded vapor. That would be lots of entropy, perhaps maximum entropy. Even if you melt scissors, the metal atoms gain freedom, yes, but the metal certainly hasn't vaporized and evenly coated the whole universe, like oxygen filling a scuba tank (that would maximize its entropy). So it's by virtue of a low-ish entropy that scissors have a definite, non-uniform appearance - some specificity, shape, and clear unity. The atoms are correlated into a scissors pattern.

With this low amount of freedom (the metal is still gently vibrating, which gives some freedom), you can rely on the atoms to be in certain regions, and can rely on the scissors to hold their shape so that work can be done. Similarly, the laser carries positive entropy, just not much, and its low quantity of entropy, ie, the predictability of its shape, can be used like a scalpel or tweezers. When we talk about laser focus and its ability to cut precisely, we're talking about using negentropy.

Another perhaps helpful comparison is centrifugal force (how things seem) versus centripetal force (almost the opposite - the physically real, operative force, which is pulling, not pushing). Negentropy is a way things can look, whereas entropy is always positive as far as we know. That in theory was true even at the moment of the Big Bang, when the entropy of everything was at its minimum.

Just about everything we find interesting is a pretty balanced blend of entropy and negentropy. That's often called "complexity." Things that grow and develop are complex.

The sustainability problems of modern industry and society can be understood in terms of entropy, negentropy, complexity, etc. It's a useful lens.