- The three themes of my essay;
- Items about the Pope, Trump firing black officials, MAGA’s presumption of carrying out the “Lord’s work”, how the Trump administration has quietly reinstated many of the CDC staffers it recently fire, how Trump thinks Biden was president on Jan. 6th and how Watergate was an “illegal hoax.”
- NY Times essay about binary thinking;
- Washington Post essay about irrational thinking.
Time to circle around from the themes of the past two posts, to some conclusions I’ve reached about how the limitations of human nature (including the limitations of our senses) influence what might be presumed to be the relative objectivity of science fiction.
These are the three key themes of that essay I wrote for Gary Westfahl, for a book that’s coming out any week now, called Reimagining Science Fiction: Essays on 21st Century Ideas and Authors (McFarland). These three themes are how the consequences of our human nature, influenced by the limitations of human experience, can undermine science fiction.
• Matters of scale. Human intuitions focus on scales of size and duration that match human experience, while we lack intuitions enabling us to quickly apprehend, or compare, very large numbers. Our numerical sense is linear, not exponential. This is sometimes called the “bias toward small numbers.” Thus the common indifference between million, billion, and trillion. Scientists use exponential notation to discuss very small or very large quantities because even they have no intuition about such numbers. Richard Dawkins wrote “All our intuitive judgements of what is probable turn out to be wrong by many orders of magnitude.” 31 Related is the concept of “prognostic myopia,” Justin Gregg’s term for the inability of people to anticipate future outcomes, especially long-term ones.32 These effects are routine in superficial science fiction, where the reality of the vastness of time and space is misunderstood or simply disregarded. On the other hand, when science fiction is able to truly evoke the vastness of time and space, there lies the potential for sense of wonder.
• Matters of causation. The chief culprit here is the “narrative bias” and the related “just-world” hypothesis, the former stemming from the human tendency to see everything as a narrative of cause and effect, or a story. It’s a useful trait for any species trying to understand the world around them: looking for patterns of causation. But it can overfire, and result in perceptions of cause and effect where only randomness or coincidences lie. Thus so many superstitions and conspiracy theories, and the idea that “everything happens for a reason.” Even worse is the sentimental expectation that beginning-middle-end narratives end “justly,” without innocent characters falling to tragic ends; life should make sense, even when it so often does not in reality. These biases affect not just science fiction, of course, but can make it difficult for science fiction to confront and understand a presumably objective physical universe that does not necessarily conform to human desires.33
• Matters of change. How things change over time; how things are different in many places from the familiar. Factors here include the availability bias, similar to the anchoring effect, in which people are influenced in their thinking by what comes immediately to mind, or the first evidence provided. The range of anticipations about the future range from the pessimism bias, to the status-quo bias, to the overconfidence effect and optimism bias. Effects in science fiction range from far futures similar to the mid-20th century; spaceships that move like familiar jet fights; and vast space stations in orbit by the year 2001. In the middle is a resistance to change, or the assumption things won’t change, an inclination that leaves many people uncomfortable with science fiction. On the other hand, as with matters of scale, acknowledging the pace of change, and the wide variety of possible cultures that are different from our familiar ones, have resulted in many powerful science fiction visions.
I’m leaving this here for now to ponder.
Now a batch more links, where even those from sources other than JMG (which obviously is motivating to collect examples of right-wing thinking that’s hostile to gays) illustrate the themes of the last two posts.
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Salon, Sophia Tesfaye, 12 Oct 2025: Pope Leo takes aim at MAGA’s false gospel, subtitled “The American Pope is confirming MAGA’s worst fears”
Even the Pope has noticed that the policies of Trump and MAGA bear little resemblance to most of the ideas of Jesus (never mind Paul). Very roughly, along the binaries I’ve been describing, MAGA aligns with the OT and base tribalism (other tribes are for exterminating), while Jesus added ideas of compassion for others and what the right dismisses as “wokeness.”
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Front page of NY Times today.
NY Times, 10 Oct 2025: Trump Fires Black Officials From an Overwhelmingly White Administration, subtitled “Separately, in the administration’s first 200 days, only two of 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the most senior jobs in government were Black.”
How is this not tribalistic white supremacy? If you claim that these were all DEI hires… then you’re presuming these people were unqualified, and you’re back to white supremacy.
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The Hill, 12 Oct 2025 (via JMG): Jordan says ICE agents ‘doing the Lord’s work’
The tribalistic presumption here is that the Lord, too, is a white nationalist. Or on MAGA’s side.
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CNN, 12 Oct 2025: More than half of CDC staffers recently fired by Trump administration have been reinstated
NY Times, 11 Oct 2025: Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Scores of C.D.C. Experts Fired in Error, subtitled “Friday’s layoffs swept up scientists involved in responding to disease outbreaks and running an influential journal. Officials said the mistaken dismissals were being rescinded.”
Bumbling fools? Or because they earn brownie points from their anti-government followers for cutting the size of government, then rehiring many knowing that those followers will never hear about them?
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Mediaite, 12 Oct 2025: Trump Forgets He Was President During Capitol Riot, Blames ‘THE BIDEN FBI’ for Jan. 6 in Dead-of-Night Post
Trump has become incompetent, senile, and/or demented, but his fans don’t care. MAGA is all about loyalty to a leader, not competence.
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One more from JMG:
Trump Now Claims Watergate Was An “Illegal Hoax”
Everything Trump doesn’t like is a “hoax,” but *Watergate*?? Also, what’s the difference between an “illegal hoax” and a legal one?
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Two more relatively substantial pieces.
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This is about simplistic, binary thinking, which was my third point in Friday’s post.
NY Times, Mark Edmundson, 12 Oct 2025: Why Americans Disagree on Everything
America’s deep division just keeps deepening. A new Times/Siena poll shows a stark increase in the number of people who believe our country is too polarized to solve its problems. We may not have needed a poll for this. Look around: Binary thinking (often informing binary rage) is everywhere in our country.
The writer is skeptical.
David Lenson, my wonderful teacher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, once gently called my classmates and me out on our predilection for binary thinking. “So,” he said, “do you think that chocolate is the opposite of vanilla? Do you think that dogs are the opposite of cats?” Are wrestling and boxing truly opposites? Sweet and sour? David thought that this hunger for binaries was a cultural matter, and overall, I do too.
Our culture is amok with binaries. We have two major parties, just two, and they are forever opposed. When a group tries to start a third party, it can be summarily disabled by the existing powers. We love sports, generally the most binary of activities. One side wins; one side loses. Root hard for your squad and the devil take the opposition. We savor debates where one side wins and one side loses.
But binary thinking can be a valuable first step in clarifying complex situations.
Binary thinking is not always destructive. It can clarify complex situations and help us get oriented and make decisions. But when all thought is binary, we are in trouble. It can result in crude and insensitive conclusions. And it can be an inducement to conflict.
But this, I would say, simply takes us back to simplex thinking, to Kahneman’s System 1, which needs to be supplemented by his System 2, considered, reflective, rational thinking, without which serious problems cannot be solved.
After discussing Jacques Derrida and Buddhism, the author concludes,
I’m not saying we need to give up binary thinking. It’s helped us in the West to achieve a great deal. In a trial, the two sides contend in a contest that often yields justice. The scientist brings his findings to his community and invites accord or rebuttal. But binary thinking shouldn’t be the only way we think. Mr. Derrida and the Buddhist sages can teach us that there are times when we should loosen up, take a breath, stop judging. We might even go as far as to look at our supposed foes, whether they be Mr. Kirk or Mr. Trump, and say to ourselves: That, too, I am.
(We all have seeds of primitive, binary, tribal human nature residing deeply within us.)
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Here we are again about the portion of humanity that is irrational.
Washington Post, opinion by Sohrab Ahmari, 9 Oct 2025: Trump is in power. Somehow, the wackos aren’t satisfied., subtitled “Even a populist presidency can’t stop the online right’s slide into irrationality.”
Irrationality like this has been around for a while; arguably, it’s always been around, and has simply been amplified by social media.
Not long ago, when people still listened to the radio in their cars, you could tune into some freaky talk late at night. “We know a third of us are star children, implanted by the visitors,” the anchor might drawl matter-of-factly. “What we’re learning now is, there’s two groups of star children — two tribes of visitors — and they’re butting heads. And we’re in the middle of it, y’know? Iraq, Obama, recession, it all goes back to the star children …”
Writer Abe Greenwald dubs this genre of late-night crankery “star-child radio.” These days, you don’t need to take a long drive through the middle of nowhere to catch it. It is everywhere online. Indeed, much of right-wing media now resembles star-child radio: a vast chamber of oft-malignant fantasies, where even once-reasonable minds go to get euthanized.
Long piece, including discussion of pundit Michael Shellenberger. The writer comments:
I have spent much of my career pointing out the ideological blind spots of center-left outlets: their near-total alienation from the Bible-believing sectors of society; their tendency to select and present stories in the light least likely to help the right.
But ultimately, the Times and NPR are not star-child radio. There is a difference between a progressive (or conservative) worldview coloring the framing of stories and the quest to “prove,” as the some on the right have, that the president of France’s wife is a man. The first is just cause for anger and, in a competitive media environment, offers grist for daily partisan contestation. The second corrodes people’s sense-making capacities and ability to discern reality.
The star-child right is obsessed with they. Concluding:
Enter star-child radio: What if things aren’t going well for us because they are assassinating dissidents such as Kirk? What if they have a mountain of kompromat material with which they blackmail Trump? What if they did 9/11? What if they control our minds through the occult?
Whatever the cause — an epistemic disaster of this scale has many fathers — the potential effect is alarming. This media system promotes mental degeneration and a sense of learned helplessness that can only yield destructive politics. People convinced that an amorphous they controls events are unlikely to take political responsibility for the shape of our common life — and far more likely to fall in thrall to demagogues and dictators.
