I was going to write that this comparison makes me think of largely-wrong “surprising truths!” airport non-fic books, but I see on further reading that the author is way ahead of me and this analysis includes those in its scope.

To the formulaic-ness of it, there’s the recurring ha-ha-only-serious quip from the If Books Could Kill podcasters that the more bad self-help, political hack, and trendy “science” books they read, the more sure they are that they’re all actually the same book.

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I believe that we process facts in a narrative. If you look at a bare fact, your mind automatically creates a narrative.

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That narrative takes place in a framing story.

'Science', among other things, is a very detailed framing story that modern society uses to evaluate facts.

An individual's framing story includes all of their history and biases and motivated reasoning and incentives and all the rest of the fallacies.

So yes, bad science is fiction, but even good science is narrative. If this feels wrong, go re-read a paper. Look at a figure or a sentence in the abstract. Your mind constructs a narrative.

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