Because rational people like to think people are rational. Rational people then go on and write their great sci fi works.

People writing satire know people are irrational. Otherwise they wouldn't be writing satire, would they?

To quote George Carlin: Take an average idiot on the street, then realize half of people are dumber than them.

GPT-3 says: In mathematics, there is a search for a satire-to-satire mapping function with the longest cycle length. These are called N-quines.