This chapter asks how voters react to political messaging and, crucially, sometimes change their minds. It begins by reviewing experimental psychology, neuroimaging, and artificial intelligence research showing that the brain reasons in two distinct ways: Recognizing patterns (fast or Type 1 thought) and constructing logical arguments (slow or type 2 thought). It then argues that the first mode almost always dominates political thought. The paradox is that humans have evolved to feel pleasure both in confirming old patterns and in being surprised by new ones. This means that while political messaging is often repetive, humans are also susceptible to messages that feature large departures from current orthodoxies. Because of majority rule, politicians will normally prefer messages that appeal to large numbers of voters. This explains how even highly-polarized electorates can sometimes realign around new issues to restore a more centrist politics.

This chapter explores narratives that informed two influential attempts to automate and consolidate mathematics in large computing systems during the second half of the twentieth century – the QED system and the MACSYMA system. These narratives were both political (aligning the automation of mathematics with certain cultural values) and epistemic (each laid out a vision of what mathematics entailed such that it could and should be automated). These narratives united political and epistemic considerations especially with regards to representation: how will mathematical objects and procedures be translated into computer languages and operations and encoded in memory? How much freedom or conformity will be required of those who use and build these systems? MACSYMA and QED represented opposite approaches to these questions: preserving pluralism with a heterogeneous modular design vs requiring that all mathematics be translated into one shared root logic. The narratives explored here shaped, explained and justified the representational choices made in each system and aligned them with specific political and epistemic projects.