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Chapter Summary
Chapter 24 is a short essay on the inbuilt flaws of the human mind. It begins with perceptual illusions like a spinning black and white disc that appears to flash all the colors of the rainbow and the Eiger's north face which is a massive cliff that looks from directy below (it's as if you're standing right at the base of it) to be only about a thousand feet high. You only see its true height when you're a good few miles away, because the point is that our thinking is the same, and we're all afflicted with all sorts of cognitive biases like anchoring, the availiability heuristic, sunk cost, and above all overconfidence. The scientists have only recently began to name these errors and even knowing about them doesn't in any way help us to avoid them as they are universl and they are predictable. The chapter then goes on to suggest that ideology itself may be a cognitive illusion, a 'necesary fiction' we all have to have in order to make sense of a world that is too vast and overwhelming. We are never really rational, science and philosophy being the only attempts we have made to get there. The chapter finishes ominously in that it all describes the normal sane mind and that when sanity is lost things can go very wrong, and in the novel it's a metaphor for the climate crisis. If market ideology is one of those "necessary fictions," Robinson implies that solving the climate crisis means not only new technology but also seeing past the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. I chose Chapter 24 because it's the only chapter in the novel that sort of stops the story to talk directly about how our brains word, and as a finance and economics student, I kept noticing that the biases Robinson describes, like sunk costs and overconfidence are the same ones that shape how markets and governments make decisions about energy. That made me wonder if Robinson says our cognitive biases are "incorrigible," how does he think humanity can solve climate change at all? My tentatitve answer is that Robinson doesn't believe we can think our way out. Instead, he argues for building institutions and financial incentives that work around human psychology rather than trying to fix it
How does this chapter function throughout the entire arc of the novel?
I think Chapter 24 is like a pivot in the novel where the book opens with a heat wave in India that kills millions, and afterward the world mostly keeps going as before. Here, Chapter 24 explains that why, where if our brains anchor on the present and discount slow threats, then a catastrophe isn't enough to change our behavior. If biases can't be fixed then the solution has to work around them, and I think that's why the book focuses on institutions and money rather than persuasion. Throughout the novel, we see Mary and the Ministry spend a lot of time pushing central bamks toward ideas like the carbon coin, building systems that are less biased than the people in them. I also think this Chapter pairs quite well with Chapter 28 because Chapter 24 says we need better systems because we can't fix our minds, while Chapter 28 says those systems still depend on ordinary people acting at the right moment.
24
Just as we are all subject to some perceptual errors due to the nature of our senses and physical reality, we are also subject to some cognitive errors, built into our brains through the period of human evolution, and unavoidable even when known to us.
The perceptual illusions are easy. There are certain patterns of black and white that when printed on a paper circle, and the circle then spun on a stick, the paper will flash with colors in the human eye. Slow the spinning down and the printed pattern is obviously just black and white; speed it up and the colors reappear in our sight. Just the way it is.
Foreshortening is another perceptual distortion we can't correct for. When standing under a cliff in the mountains and looking up at it, the cliff always appears to be about the same height- say, a thousand feet or so. Even if we are under the north wall of the Eiger and know the wall is a thousand feet tall, it still appears to be about a thousand feet tall. Only when you get miles away, like on the lakefront in Thun looking south, can you actually see the immense height of the Nordwand of the Eiger. Right under it, it's impossible.
Everyone can accept these optical illusions when they are demonstrated; they are undeniably there. But for the cognitive errors, it takes some testing. Cognitive scientists, logicians, and behavioral economists have only recently begun to sort out and name these cognitive errors, and disputes about them are common. But unavoidable mistakes have been demonstrated in test after test, and given names like anchor bias (you want to stick to your first estimate, or to what you have been told), ease of representation (you think an explanation you can understand is more likely to be true than one you can't). On and on it goes-online there is an excellent circular graphic display of cognitive errors-a wheel of mistakes that both lists them and organizes them into categories, including the law of small numbers, neglect of base rates, the availability heuristic, asymmetrical similarity, probability illusions, choice framing, context segregation, gain/loss asymmetry, conjunction effects, the law of typicality, misplaced causality, cause/effect asymmetry, the certainty effect, irrational prudence, the tyranny of sunk costs, illusory correlations, and unwarranted overconfidence-the graphic itself being a funny example of this last phenomenon, in that it pretends to know how we think and what would be normal.
As with perceptual illusions, knowing that cognitive errors exist doesn't help us to avoid them when presented with a new problem. On the contrary, these errors stay very consistent, in that they are committed by everyone tested, tend toward the same direction of error, are independent of personal factors of the test takers, and are incorrigible, in that knowing about them doesn't help us avoid them, nor to distrust our reasoning in other situations. We are always more confident of our reasoning than we should be. Indeed, overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence, is one of the most common illusions we experience. No doubt this analysis is yet another example: do we really know any of this?
Oh dear! What do these recent discoveries in cognitive science mean? Some say they just mean humans are poor at statistics. Others assert they are as important a discovery as the discovery of the subconscious.
Consider again the nature of ideology again, that necessary thing, which allows us to sort out the massive influx of information we experience. Could ideology also be a cognitive illusion, a kind of necessary fiction?
Yes. Of course. We have to create and employ an ideology to be able to function; and we do that work by way of thinking that is prone to any number of systemic and one might even say factual errors. We have never been rational. Maybe science itself is the attempt to be rational. Maybe philosophy too. And of course philosophy is very often proving we can't think to the bottom of things, can't get logic to work as a closed system, and so on.
And remember also that in all of this discussion so far, we are referring to the normal mind, the sane mind. What happens when, starting as we do from such a shaky original position, sanity is lost, we defer to another discussion. Enough now to say just this: it can get very bad.
The north face of the Eiger
Annotations and Hyperlinks
"spun on a stick.....flash with colors": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fechner_color_effect
This refers to Benham's top, which is a disc that's half black, and the other half is white with short black arcs drawn on it. When you spin it at a certain speed, most people see faint colors like pale red, yellow, green and blue, but there's no color anywhere on the disc. Instead, it's your eyes and brain that are creating it. I thought it was creative how Robinson uses this example to show that knowing the truth doesn't change what you perceive. I think this is a setup for his main claim later in this chapter that cognitive biases work the same way, like learning about anchoring or sunk costs doesn't stop your brain from doing them.
"lakefront in Thun....immense height of the Nordwand of the Eiger": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiger; https://www.britannica.com/art/foreshortening
The Eiger is a 3,967 m (~13,000 ft) peak in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland. Norwand is german for "north wall," and it's one of the most famous climbs in the world. It was first climed in 1938, and because so many climbers died on it, people nicknamed it the "Mordwand" or "murder wall." Also, I thought this was cool, but Robinson is a serious mountaineer and Switzerland matters a lot in the novel. So, I think the Eiger isn't just a random throw in, but something he is very familiar with. Additionally, this effect he is describing here is called forshortening. For example, when you look straight up a wall, the higher parts tilt away from you, so they get squished together visually. To me, this sounds like a climate change connection he is making here, because we experience weather one day or one year at a time, and climate is defined by roughly 30 year averages. So, living inside it is like standing at the base of the wall where you can't see the full height of the change.
"an excellent circular graphic display": https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/cognitive-bias-codex/; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg
The Cognitive Bias Codex was created by Buster Benson in 2016, and he made this to sort Wikipedia's huge list of cognitive biases into groups. Then, designer John Manoogian III turned it into a circular graphic. This Codex has about 180 biases arranged around a wheel, and it went viral and is now one of the most shared images about psychology online. Benson grouped biases by the problem the brain is trying to solve: 1) When there is too much information, so we filter it. 2) When there is not enough meaning, so we fill in the gaps. 3) When we need to act fast, so we jump to conclusions. 4) When we need to remember something, we simplify and edit memories. Here, I think the chart works like an ideology because later in the chapter, Robinson calls ideology a "necessary thing" that helps us "sort out the massive influx of information," and asks whether it's a "necessary fiction." It's interesting how Robinson uses this almost like an analogy to show how our brain works and how that impacts our knowledge of the environment. I think we can also see that throughout the novel with the characters. Additionally, the Codex does that because it sorts an overwhelming amount of information into a neat shape. So, the graphic is a small version of his big point because we need these organizing systems to function, but they're never as accurate as they look.
"the tyranny of sunk costs": https://carbontracker.org/wasted-capital-and-stranded-assets-press-release/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
While looking up sunk costs, I expected to find mostly psychology examples, but I came across Carbon Tracker's stranded asset report, which I think made the idea more solid. A sunk cost is the money, time or effort you've already spent and can't get back. The fallacy is letting that spent money push you to keep going with something, even when it no longer makes sense. In economics, only future costs and benefits should matter for a decision, so what's already spent is gone either way so it shouldn't count. Economists calls this "letting bygones be bygones." An example of this was when Britain and France kept funding the Concorde supersonic jet for years after it was clearly going to lose money. Part of the reason was that they'd already spent so much on it, and Robinson calls this "tyranny" because it doesn't nudge the choices but traps it. I think this idea explains a lot about why smart peole keep making bad climate decisions, because walking away from something you've poured billions into feels like you are admitting failure. Then there are stranded assets like fossil fuel reserves, power plants, pipelines, and refineries that may lose their value early if the world gets serious about climate. A 2013 report found fossil fuel companies were spending about $674 billion a year developing reserves that might never be usable. Once a construction is built, its construction cost is sunk, so what matters is the cost of running it, which can be low. That's why running an existing coal plant can make financial sens even when building a new one wouldn't, and this is what economists call a negative externality (the choice is rational for the company but not for society). So, fossil fuel infrastructures eventually wears off and must be replaced, and each replacement is a chance to build renewable energy and sustainable transport instead of rebuilding the old system. If societies can accept the loss on stranded assets rather than protecting them, the labor and money locked into those systems can then be redirected into technologies that pay off for the future rather than the past.
"incorrigible...knowing about them doesn't help": https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/bcreg20250117a.htm; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-power-of-the-nudge-to-change-our-energy-future/; https://www.econ.puc-rio.br/mgarcia/Macro%20II%20-%20Mestrado/KydlandPrescott1977.pdf
After reading about stranded assets, I wanted to know whether any institution had ever successfully worked around human bias, which led to looking up information on central bank independence. "Incorrigible" means a person who can't be reformed, and here, Robinson uses it in a technical sense to show that you can't correct these errors by learning about them. So, if biases can't be fixed by education, then trying to convince everyine in the world to think clearly about climate change won't work. I think what this means is that the fix has to work around human psychology instead of trying to change it. For example, two economists Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott showed in 1977 that governments are tempted to print money before elections for a short-term boost, even though it causes long-term inflation, and interestingly enough, they won the Nobel in 2004 partly for this work/analysis. The solution was to hand monetary policy to an independent central bank and tie the politicans hand. Again, I think this analogy is one of the ways Robinson uses to explain climate change because if politicans are biased toward the the short term, then give climate policy to institutions that are protected from that pressure. If biases are "incorrigble," Robinson thinks that we can't fix ourselves, so we should build systems that are less biased than we are.
"Could ideology also be a cognitive illusion, a kind of necessary fiction?": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193133; https://phys.org/news/2012-05-yale-apathy-climate-unrelated-science.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson
I was curious why Robinson would call ideology a "necessary fiction," so I looked into his background and found that he did his PhD at UC San Diego under Fredric Jameson, one of the most famous Marxist literary critics. That made me wonder whether science could prove Robinson's point, which led to a 2012 Yale study by Dan Kahan. The brain doing the filtering is full of built-in errors, like anchoring, availability and overconfidence. Ideology is then built out of these errors which makes it a cognitive illusion, and without it, we couldn't function. This is most likely why Robinson called it a "necessary fiction." Most climate writing assumes the problem is that the other side has an ideology that blinds them. Robinson is saying everyone does, including climate activists, scientists and him, which makes this more unsettling. For example, in a 2012 study, Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues tested whether people who are better at science and math worry more about climate change. They found that on average, they don't. Instead, people with more science literacy and numeracy were more polarized. Highly skilled liberals worried more, and high skilled conservatives worried less. Kahan explains that this is called "identity-protective cognition," which is when people use their reasoning skills to defend the views of their group, not to find the truth. Kahan shows that ideology defends itself, and more information makes the defenses stronger. If that's true, you can't convince people into a new ideology, so again, that's probably why Robinson relies a lot on institutions and money instead of persuasion.
Works Cited
Britannica Editors. “Foreshortening.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/art/foreshortening.
“Eiger.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiger.
“Fechner Color Effect.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fechner_color_effect.
“Federal Reserve Board Announces It Has Withdrawn from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS).” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 17 Jan. 2025, www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/bcreg20250117a.htm.
Kahan, Dan M., et al. “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks.” Nature Climate Change, vol. 2, 2012, pp. 732–35, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1547.
“Kim Stanley Robinson.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson.
Kydland, Finn E., and Edward C. Prescott. “Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 85, no. 3, 1977, pp. 473–91, https://doi.org/10.1086/260580.
Lotz, Sebastian. “The Power of the Nudge to Change Our Energy Future.” Scientific American, 27 May 2016,
www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-power-of-the-nudge-to-change-our-energy-future/.
Manoogian, John, III, and Buster Benson. “Cognitive Bias Codex.” 2016. Wikipedia, de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Chapter 24.” The Ministry for the Future, Orbit, 2021.
“Sunk Cost.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost.
“200 Cognitive Biases Rule Our Everyday Thinking.” Big Think, bigthink.com/neuropsych/cognitive-bias-codex/.
“Wasted Capital and Stranded Assets Press Release.” Carbon Tracker Initiative, 4 Dec. 2013, carbontracker.org/wasted-capital-and-stranded-assets-press-release/.
“Yale Study Concludes Public Apathy over Climate Change Unrelated to Science Literacy.” Phys.org, 27 May 2012,
phys.org/news/2012-05-yale-apathy-climate-unrelated-science.html.
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