Overlapping reading: Cortical and Limbic democracies

Vortex (Last book in the Spin trilogy) 

by Robert Charles Wilson (2011)

“Cortical and Limbic democracies” Ways of implementing consensus governance. Neural augmentation and community-wide Networks had made possible many different kinds of decision-making. 

In “cortical” democracies, the brain areas interfaced are clustered in the neocortex. They used noun-based and logically mediated collective reasoning to make policy decisions. 

In “Limbic” democracies the Networks modulated more primitive areas of the brain in order to create an emotional and intuitive (as opposed to a purely rational) consensus. 

“To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.”

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI 

by Yuval Noah Harari (2024)

“What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interconnect pre-frontal cortexes. Social media companies are incentivized to create interconnected limbic systems—which is much more dangerous for humanity.””

Moral Luck

I want to tell you how amazing my Son is; the story won't start out sounding that way; please be patient with me; it is also a story of a father's tendency to belabor the point.

Several years ago, he was following me so I could fill up his car with gas; just before we got to the station, he rear-ended my car. Nobody was hurt, but the bumper bears the scar to this day. This story might have been a typical tale of a minor accident, but there is a deeper issue: he knew the brakes were not strong and/or failing, and he kept driving it in that condition. I saw an opportunity for some parental guidance, so I introduced the idea of Moral Luck into the telling of the accident (knowingly driving impaired and not injuring someone is just morally lucky; if you hurt or killed someone while driving impaired, you would be thought of as a monster).

For my part, I have declined to fix the rear bumper, leaving it as a conversation piece, giving me an excuse to tell the story and introduce more people to the idea of Moral Luck.
 

Over the years I doubt a month goes by without me telling this story in some way or another. Often, while my Son is present, he has repeatedly informed me that he understood my point and has even taken up the mantel to explain the idea of Moral Luck to coworkers and customers in his job as an auto mechanic. Despite this apparent parental success, I keep telling the story, believing the world is made better by sharing stories and tools for thinking, and Moral Luck is a big idea.

Here is the amazing part: The other day, we were at an appointment together, and I launched into another Moral Luck seminar. I know it makes him uncomfortable, but social progress isn't always comfortable. On the drive home, he informed me that I should stop telling this story, not because it makes him uncomfortable, but because it looks like I'm bullying my Son in public and making the other listeners uncomfortable.

I'm still processing his advice, but I wanted to capture his empathetic insight into the effect I was overlooking in my listeners, as well as his persistence in insisting that his father listen to his advice.