- Samuel McKee on how our brains are wired to survive, not to find truth;
- Adam Gopnik from 2012 about an Elaine Pagels book on Revelations;
- Jonathan Chait on how falling standards of behavior in Washington;
- Brief items about tariffs on people moving to Texas, and a bailout to coal plants.
This piece isn’t news, but it is something core to my own understanding and themes, and something which I suspect is not widely understood.
IAI.tv (Institute of Art and Ideas), Samuel McKee, 4 Nov 2025: Our brains evolved to survive, not to find truth, subtitled “We are social animals, not truth-seeking ones”
Intro:
We like to believe that reason is our pathway to truth. Yet from Popper’s demand for falsifiability to Darwin’s doubt about the mind’s origins, a more unsettling picture is emerging. Our brains were shaped not to perceive reality, but to survive within it. Evolution has optimized us for social cohesion rather than accuracy, leaving false beliefs not as evolutionary errors but as features of our survival. In an age that prizes truth, philosopher of science Samuel McKee argues that our greatest obstacle may be the very mind that seeks it.
McKee’s essay begins:
Karl Popper’s famous demarcation criteria helped shape how we assess true and false beliefs. In deciding whether to give the prestigious status of “science” to ideas such as communism, astrology, and psychoanalysis, Popper asked if they were falsifiable: could they be proven wrong? If not, they weren’t scientific.
Epistemological claims, their truth value, and how we assess the veracity of someone’s ideas would never be the same. Though specifically targeting science, Popper’s revolutionary approach can be applied effectively to everything from science to religion and everything in between. When someone states emphatically that theirs is the truth of the matter, we should respect the opportunity to probe a little deeper. The problem is, even when confronted with falsification, we are reluctant to let go. Though at any one time we can acknowledge that at least 20% of what we currently hold to be factual will sooner or later be let go by us, we still cling to it. Why we cling to false ideas may be the fault of evolution, for better and worse. In our post-Popperian age, we like to think of ourselves as optimized for reason, but, as social animals, we can often benefit from sharing false beliefs too.
I can only see a bit more; I’m not a subscriber to the site. This piece turned up in my Facebook feed today.
Again, “emerging” is a tad misleading; I’ve been aware of this for at least a decade, and it’s well-understood by all modern writers who accept evolution as an inescapable foundation of the contemporary world. Once this principle is understood, all sorts of other phenomena comes into focus: the human mind’s propensity toward biases and illusions, conspiracy theories and the urge to spread them, and most of tribalism and politics.
To appreciate the reality behind these perceptions requires acknowledging these propensities and trying to *think around them,* using brute-force mathematics and rigorous, self-correcting investigatory methods (i.e. science). Science fiction has not always done this very well, which is a theme of my book.
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Here’s another item, from way back in 2012, that popped up in my Facebook feed today. (Or was it an item at the bottom of another article?) This again isn’t new, and in this case ideas about the origins of pieces of the Bible have been understood for hundreds of years (e.g. Thomas Paine) in ways that undermine the literalist beliefs of so many.
The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, 27 Feb 2012: The Big Reveal, with the image caption “The Book of Revelation has all the elements of a Hollywood action movie.”
The occasion of the essay was a new book by Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, published in March 2012. Pagels, like Bart D. Ehrman and Reza Aslan, is an intellectual not interested in debunking religion so much as understanding the origin of certain holy books. It is far more complex, and interesting, than simply taking the holy books literally, at face value, as so many believers do.
While Adam Gopnik, a writer of books and magazine pieces for decades, isn’t, I would say, a believer nor a debunker; I would apply the word critic, in the purest sense of the word, to him. Or may iconoclast. I’ll quote his first paragraph from this 2012 piece:
The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience (“I don’t get it — when did he say he was coming back?”), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place. That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.
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Descending into politics.
The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 3 Nov 2025: What’s a Scandal When Everything Is Outrageous?, subtitled “Trump’s ballroom blitz is blatantly corrupt. The fact that no one seems to care shows just how low the standards of behavior have fallen in Washington.”
The revelation that Donald Trump has demolished the East Wing, with plans to rebuild it at jumbo size with private funds, provoked an initial wave of outrage—followed by a predictable counter-wave of pseudo-sophisticated qualified defenses.
“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” editorializes The Washington Post. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board have similar assessments: We should all calm down, put aside our feelings about the president and the admittedly flawed process by which he arrived at this project, and appreciate the practical value of the new facility.
Chait compares this to the Clinton Foundation scandal of a decade ago.
Like pretty much any other pre-Trump complaint, all of this sounds quaint today. But the actual facts of the case are at least as damning. The solicitations for the $300 million ballroom (as of press time—the cost keeps rising) are being made not by a candidate but by a sitting president. The money is going not to charity but to a public project that will, in part, underwrite Trump’s luxurious lifestyle. (Imagine if the Clinton Foundation had been building gold-embossed ballrooms for Bill and Hillary to entertain guests in!) While the Clinton Foundation disclosed all its donors, Trump has kept many of his ballroom donors secret.
And concluding:
I sympathize with the mainstream media’s inability to properly capture the breadth of Trump’s misconduct. The dilemma is that holding Trump to the standards of a normal politician is impossible. The Times would have to run half a dozen banner-style Watergate-style headlines every day, and the news networks would have to break into regular programming with breathless updates every minute or so. Maxing out the scale of outrage has the paradoxical benefit of allowing Trump to enjoy more generous standards than any other politician has.
Still, although holding Trump accountable to normal expectations of political decorum may be impossible, surely we don’t need to praise him for merely committing normal-size scandals. The people losing perspective here are not the ballroom’s critics, but its defenders.
This too is about human nature, and not established standards, like the standards of the Enlightenment, of the US Constitution, that were designed to circumvent the worst aspects of human nature.
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From the Fringe.
- JMG, 4 Nov 2025: Abbott Vows “100% Tariff” On NYers Moving To Texas — — Um, tariffs on *what*? Are these people dim?
- JMG, 3 Nov 2025: Trump Admin Gives Coal Plants $100 Million Bailout — — investing in a past that soon will no longer exist
