Apologies for the relative silence here for the past few weeks. I had a major piece of work on – the writing of a chapter for an edited book (entitled ‘A democracy unable to learn cannot endure: Towards a ‘Cognitive Republic’ of dialogue, experiment, and self-correction’); this chapter will be published in the coming months (deets to follow). The chapter is available at the bottom here via a link for all paid members both as a pdf and as an epub suitable for an epub-reader (like Kobo, Kindle, or whatever: this chapter is a fairly beefy piece of work – about 5.5.k words). Additionally, a pdf of the slides of a recent talk I gave on the Cognitive Republic are available as well for paid subscribers.

The core thesis of the chapter is democracies should be rewired as systems capable of learning and adaptation – an idea animating this whole Cognitive Republic project.

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Generally, political thought and philosophy usually begins with analyses of power, rights, institutions, or interests; instead, I begin with the cognitive capacities that make learning and adaptation possible in the first place: perception, memory, imagination, judgement, and error correction. These capacities allow individuals to learn from experience; democratic institutions are typically designed along other normative lines, but rarely designed with our collectively exercised cognitive capacities as animating principles in the first place.

Over the next essays here, I will build out this argument into a framework for thinking about how democracies perceive, remember, anticipate, revise and adapt across very different political settings. I will try and reduce the ideas here to a vital few premises, so the core ideas are clear, and I’ll go further – to try demonstrating how this theory effectively tackles modern democratic backsliding, populism, and other pathologies of our time.

People often recognise the symptoms of democratic failure long before they have a theory to explain them: democracies make the same mistakes time and again, useful criticism is ignored or deflected, but rarely used as a source of learning; institutional memory weakens as the evidence good governance needs is corrupted, and empirical evidence loses its force as a means to decide what is true in favour of whatever is the ideology of the moment, ending with policy that feels increasingly performative rather than effective. Elections may still happen and formal institutions may remain intact, yet the system’s capacity to respond intelligently to changing conditions can steadily deteriorate.

Most tellingly, nobody seems able to say, ‘we were wrong; let’s try something else.’

I won’t be writing here yet another ‘democracy is in trouble because X’ diagnosis. There are already countless versions of that general argument. Instead, I am reaching for a post-populist theory of democratic society capable of surviving successive electoral majorities because its deepest commitments are no longer owned by one side by proposing a unifying framework: democracy as a learning system, one that values experimentation, feedback, error correction, institutional memory, and revision, with the idea of the Cognitive Republic as its clear conceptual centre.

I want to emphasise a particular set of underlying ideas: that democracy is much more than elections, courts, parties, and procedures; or a mechanism for choosing governments; democracy can also be thought of as a distributed system for producing knowledge, exercising judgement, and correcting collective error, and even more deeply, democracy is an abstract collaborative cognitive system for reversible collective decision-making – if we deliberately design it to be so.

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Thus, I approach the problems in our democracies using ideas around learning, memory, feedback, adaptation, error correction, biases, and cognition. I will develop the argument in stages, by first considering the basic minimal set of premises of this political philosophy, and then trying to apply these principles to some imagined cases: to articulate these ideas in a way that reaches to a homemaker in the former east Germany, a factory worker on short hours in Birmingham, a Le Pen friendly conservative in France despairing of current electoral alternatives, to someone working in tourism in Italy who is educated but without prospects, to a farmer in Brazil, and to a road-sweeper in Tralee: my aim is a post-populist theory of democratic society capable of surviving successive electoral majorities because its deepest commitments are shared by all – and this is quite a stretch, if I am honest.

Contemporary discussions sometimes seem to (implicitly) assume a choice between living with decisions made by citizens or experts. Again, this is a false dichotomy, because the relevant unit of analysis isn't the citizen or the expert – I argue what matters instead is the learning capacity of the system as a whole.

A variant on worry this is the risk that some will hear ‘cognitive’ and think: ‘Ah, this is another argument for handing power to experts or algorithms, my answer is absolutely: ‘No. Experts don't solve the problem. The challenge is building institutions that learn with citizens and from experience’. I am actually making the contrary argument!

The issue is not that citizens are irrational and biased and should be bypassed: rather, the argument is that we should treat our institutions as cognitive communities, and they should be designed to learn with citizens and from experience. The central problem of democracy is not representation, efficiency, participation, or trust alone (now, to be clear, these do matter and are vital). The central problem is how democracies institutionalise and internalise learning and adaptation.

I contend a good democracy doesn't need infallible citizens any more than a good scientific community needs infallible scientists. What it needs are institutions -cognitive communities - that can:

•         detect mistakes

•         retain knowledge

•         compare alternatives

•         update beliefs

•         learn from failure

•         and do so while remaining accountable to the public.

Isn’t that a much more interesting proposition than ‘let the experts decide for us?’

Critics might say: ‘citizens are biased’. Well, psychologists know experts are biased too. Bureaucracies are biased. Scientists are biased. AI systems are biased. The relevant question is therefore not: who is unbiased? but: what arrangements currently exist to allow errors to be discovered and corrected and learned from?

Science works remarkably well not because scientists are uniquely rational, but because criticism, replication, record-keeping, and continuous revision are built into the enterprise. The scandals that occasionally beset science happen because science is working – the scientific work of others is scrutinised, tested, disagreed with (often very vehemently) and in public. The process is messy, but works because science is decentralised, leveraging the fact that people disagree with each other, and often.

I ask here: ‘could democracies become better at doing the political equivalent?’ And that is very different from replacing citizens with experts, because the goal is never to bypass citizens; the goal is to help democracies remember better, evaluate better, and learn faster.

Democratic performance rarely, if ever, considers the dependent variable of learning capacity: instead, the focus is on measuring trust, participation, inequality, media, polarisation, leadership, constitutional design, and so on. But I suggest these are in fact downstream of whether the system can learn effectively from experience – everything else is a downstream consequence.

A voter in Poland, Hungary, India, Brazil, the United States, Ireland, or elsewhere may disagree about causes and remedies, but all can ask: does our democracy learn effectively from its mistakes? Does it deliberately try to experiment to solve difficult problems? Does it build routine learning cycles into governance: such as legislating that a new initiative undergoes a ‘propose → test → measure → revise → scale (or stop)’ cycle?

Learning is a meta-capacity. A democracy can improve representation, deliberation, trust, expertise, participation, and accountability if it can learn from its mistakes.

So, what I’m trying to do here is to reframe familiar debates and devise a new democratic language.

Most people ask:

• How do we make democracy more representative?

• How do we make it more participatory?

• How do we make it more trustworthy?

• Etc.

I’m asking instead:

• How do we make democracies better at learning and adapting?

In other words, I want to establish democratic learning as a fundamental lens through which we understand, diagnose, and improve democracy. I believe we need a new democratic language, a new way of doing democracy; the way we are doing things now doesn’t work very well any more.

The claim is straightforward: the long-term success of a democracy depends not primarily on the wisdom of its leaders, the virtue of its citizens, or the design of its institutions in isolation, but on its capacity to learn. Democracies endure when they can detect problems, remember experience, evaluate outcomes, correct errors, and adapt their behaviour in light of evidence while maintaining legitimacy and public participation. The central challenge of democratic governance in the twenty-first century is therefore not simply representation, participation, or expertise, but the construction of institutions enabling societies to learn with citizens and from experience.

This means I want to sidestep partisan explanations, so I don’t to start by asking:

• Which side is to blame?

• Which leader is the problem?

• Which ideology is at fault?

These are reasonable questions when confronting political failure, democratic backsliding, or bad governance, but really there’s a crucial issue – behind these questions is a persistent failure of collective learning and adaptation. Why should we expect a society to flourish if its institutions systematically forget, ignore feedback, reward short-termism, and fail to correct errors?

Instead, if this political philosophy became widespread, people would start to expect these conversational turns as normal in political life:

•         “What would show you you’re wrong?”

•         “What’s the denominator and the timeline?”

•         “Who bears the cost?”

•         “What are the stop/go/reverse rules?”

•         “What did we learn last time, and where is it written down?”

These questions change what politics is, making it harder to run on charisma, tribalism, performative outrage (without requiring everyone to become a policy expert)

Once stated that way, the central claim feels almost obvious (at least to me): ‘a democracy unable to learn cannot endure’. And the converse is also true: ‘a learning democracy is an enduring democracy’.

Next time: a focus on populism – the challenge of the moment.

And for paid subscribers, below the paywall you can download

1. the book chapter ‘A democracy unable to learn cannot endure: Towards a ‘Cognitive Republic’ of dialogue, experiment, and self-correction’ in pdf and epub form

2. as well as the slides of my recent talk “How Much of Your Mind Is Really Your Own? The hidden forces shaping our thinking, our decisions, and our democracy”

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(Two short pieces this week - a slightly elaborated advance written contribution to a conference I was recently invited to speak at, and my spoken script follows).

I want to suggest here that remedies for our current concerns about liberal democracy and our fragmenting public sphere begin in the wrong place, by placing burdens on busy citizens, in particular asking how busy citizens can be taught to think more critically and judiciously, while worrying in the background that the use citizens make of social media use traps them in irreconcilable and immiscible epistemic bubbles.

These are not unimportant concerns, by any means, but they skirt a deeper and fundamental issue: how our democracies construct, test, and revise shared models of reality together. Democracy is not simply intermittently-exercised procedures (elections, courts, party competition); these are necessary, not the end state. What keeps the system alive is whether it allows us to think well together: allocate attention, form beliefs, test them against reality, update, and preserve what it has learned across time.

Most “save-democracy” agendas focus on symptoms - acute crises, opportunistic attacks, episodic surges of distrust - by suggesting we build more; share more; guard more; deliberate more; hope more; but leave the underlying cognitive pathology untouched.

In neuroscientific terms: we are being offered symptomatic relief, not disease-modifying treatment. And this is where cognitive neuroscience has something useful to contribute, albeit not in the form usually imagined. Let me state some good news: our democratic woes have not been “neuroscientifically engineered”. Influence techniques use familiar psychological mechanisms: identity, repetition, social proof, status, threat, conformity, moral emotion, in-group loyalty vs out-group hostility. Digital systems may make these mechanisms easier to observe, test, personalise, and even scale, but they require no sophisticated, deep understanding of the entrainment of neurocognitive function.

More good news: cognition does not happen just inside individual heads - we humans establish what is true largely through our interactions other humans.

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There are also book reviews here for members only.

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and here’s the first in a new and urgent series on cognitive warfare:

I’ll be extending this cognitive warfare series over the coming months, as there is a lot of activity in this area. I will also be extending the cognitive republic mission much further here over the coming months.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence as a reader, perhaps you might now consider taking one of the very good value plans available here.

This is my new home for a new mission: a book-length project written online, in public - a new and scary experience for me, and I hope an exhilarating experience for you - the reader.

Why this? Why now?

The alarm bells are ringing loudly and clearly: democracies everywhere are in polycrisis – simultaneous crises of trust, legitimacy, and governance; crises caused by political stasis in the face of rapid technological, financial, and other changes; crises of belief and confidence caused by the rise of new online media, tools, and techniques shaking the foundations of what we know.

I argue here we need a radically new democratic philosophy – one appropriate to the complex and uncertain times we find ourselves in, and which, upfront, admits that many of the difficulties and problems we face do not admit of obvious and easy solutions, but solve them we must.

Redesigning our democracies as learning systems – capable of testing, adapting, evolving, learning, and delivering, can renew the faith and trust of the public, and surmount the complex challenges we will inevitably face.

This approach builds upon findings in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. When our brains encounter surprising or unexpected inputs, they update their models of the world, learn, and adapt; when societies face unexpected crises, they too must learn, unlearn, and relearn.

I call this approach the ‘Cognitive Republic,’ where we all, together, build an experimenting, learning, evolving society. Cognitive Republic offers a radical reframing of democracy for the twenty‑first century as a thinking and learning system—an ecosystem of experiments, heuristics, and feedback loops, not just a system of checks and balances.

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If you’ve received this by email, take a moment and send this onward to one or two other people who might appreciate the challenge and thinking here - this is the way a project like this grows - by trusted word of mouth.

War has always been fought over land, sea, air, cities, ports, roads, bridges, weapons, supply lines, and bodies. And war has always been fought over “hearts and minds” - but the war for hearts and minds is fundamentally a psychological war - one of perception, fostering changes in allegiance and identity, deception, diverting action by an adversary down irrelevant rabbit holes, imposing opportunity costs, soaking up thinking time, attempting to impose learned helplessness, diverting planning and action and resources to wasted ends, all in the service of victory (a goal state, a tomorrow which has not yet come).

Cognitive warfare is the much newer and more elastic, and probably more useful, phrase for this bundle of ideas, and while a somewhat poorly defined concept, cognitive warfare refers to something real:- the deliberate attempt by one or other parties to a conflict to shape what the other party perceives, believes, feels, remembers, trusts, decides, and does, in the service of winning a war.

Cognitive warfare is, therefore, war fought as a contest of knowledge and metaknowledge - what you know, what you think you know, what your adversary thinks you know, what you think they know. These are the cognitive systems that war is fought under: you need to know what the enemy or adversary is doing, and you need to know how to deceive, confound, fool them in order to prevail - war is fundamentally a cognitive event long before it becomes a physical and kinetic event.

An alternative phrase is ‘cognitive domain operations’, which is a little more neutral, and has a greater range of applicability, as it refers to battles for hearts and minds in all sorts of other contexts.

Cognitive warfare is generally not ‘kinetic’ in nature, although of course it may employ kinetic means as feints to fool an adversary in some way. Equally, cognitive warfare is not simply the ‘weaponisation’ of public opinion, whatever that means - while it might embrace attempts at weaponising public opinion, but, as a century of research on behaviour and attitudes has shown, this is a very difficult thing to do in a sustained and predictable way.

Fundamentally, cognitive warfare is war conducted through the political, social, and related systems channeling and directing human behaviour during conflict, with a focus on targeting how fundamental cognitive processes such as attention, emotion, memory, identity, prediction, trust, and judgement are deployed collectively in the service of continuing a conflict effectively.

Cognitive warfare is both a direct challenge to the ideas and ideals of the Cognitive Republic, and an under-recognised challenge to our collective defence of the liberal democratic order. I will show in subsequent pieces both why we both should be and should not be alarmed by cognitive warfare.

(My interest is cognitive warfare arises in part from our recently funded €10.4 M European Research Council Synergy research grant: Project Justice, which you can read all about via this link)

To step back a little, then, cognitive warfare focuses on the fundamental collective cognitive processes of an adverary - cognitive warfare seeks to slow-down and weaken decision-making, destroy confidence, fracture trust, inflame grievance, delegitimise institutions, confuse perception, misinform, and prepare the ground for other forms of action.

Cognitive warfare is therefore close to the deep Clausewitzian idea: war as the continuation of politics by other means - war as a clash of wills and motivation and endurance.

The targets are thoughts and feelings, the sense of shared reality among a group, a polity, a nation. The means are non-kinetic, making use of informational, epistemic, cognitive tactics with the desired result the direct or indirect control over the behaviour of an adversary, diverting their thoughts and actions in ways that would otherwise not have occurred, with the aim of eventually overwhelming them and defeating them.

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cognitive warfare is a new front in war - not just cyber

The traditional operational domains of war are land, sea, and air. Cyber and space have joined them as the new and obviously modern domains. Cognitive warfare is sometimes incorrectly and inappropriately, even lazily, treated as an extension of cyber, because so much of information now moves through digital systems: social platforms, bot networks, hacked material, targeted messaging, synthetic media, AI-generated content, and behavioural analytics.

What was one of the greatest acts of cognitive warfare in history - Operation Mincemeat, where the Axis forces were led to believe by Allied actions that a major land, sea, and air operation was going to take place at sites other than the intended site - happened long before cyber warfare was possible.

Cognitive warfare can use cyber means, but its target is cognitive and social: these might be attempts at a rumour whispered in a village, slogans repeated on the radio, speeches designed to humiliate the enemy, or forged documents placed in the right file, or a flood of contradictory claims released at the right moment: each can be part of a cognitive operation.

The channels for cognitive warfare are manifold, but the human problem remains: it is people that must notice, interpret, remember, trust, decide, and act.

Cyber may be part of this, but often cyber attacks are conducted for other purposes - attacking electrical grids, healthcare systems, information systems, banking and finance systems.

Cognitive warfare is perhaps best understood as the ongoing attempt to interfere with an adversary’s capacity to make sense of the world, and to interfere and degrade their ability to act upon the world.

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the message as invitation

A useful phrase from recent writing on cognitive warfare/cognitive domain operations is: “the message is the invitation”, which captures something important about how these epistemic influence operations, to be effective, must work. A message must do much more than deliver content: it must invite multiple people into something new; it must entice, linger in thought, bedazzle in some way; it should offer an emotion, an identity, a role, a future, status, rewards - something other than a bald statement regarding something - a studied ambiguity that allows the recipient to infer something. Or, as the writing advice puts it: ‘show, don’t tell’.

The same invitations can equally become a door into fear, resentment, fatalism, suspicion, pride, or action. A message can make an enemy seem near, a betrayal seem obvious, defeat inevitable, institutions corrupt, or even violence necessary. It can ask a person to see themselves as abandoned, heroic, humiliated, threatened, chosen, or avenged.

The deeper question is: what mental posture does the message invite? What kind of person does it ask the listener to become? What future does it make imaginable? Cognitive warfare succeeds when the target begins to think, feel, remember, and act from inside the frame offered to them.

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what does ‘cognitive’ mean?

The word “cognitive” should not be a decorative synonym for propaganda; after all, a serious account of cognitive warfare requires a serious account of what we mean by cognition. A reasonable definition is that cognition is the active, distributed process of transforming information into adaptive action; cognition is therefore the abstract psychological processes by which we know, represent, understand, and act upon the external world.

Three broad ways of considering cognition matter here:

1. The standard human information-processing model treats cognition in stages: sensory input is encoded, held in working memory, interacts with processes of encoding and retrieval from long-term memory, and used to guide behaviour. This older model remains useful because it clarifies how information is received, stored, retrieved, and acted upon.

2. The predictive processing model treats the brain as an anticipatory system, where the brain continually generates expectations about the world and updates them when reality produces error signals. Perception is therefore active inference, not simple reception.

3. The collective cognition model examines cognition as it is distributed across people, tools, institutions, and cultures. Groups remember, reason, and decide through shared practices, records, technologies, conversations, and social roles.

Cognition comprises many component processes, and these are the target of cognitive warfare. The target may be attention: what becomes salient and what disappears into the background. It may be perception: what seems to be happening. It may be emotion: fear, anger, humiliation, pride, disgust, fatigue, suspicion. It may be memory: which past is retrieved, rehearsed, and weaponised. It may be identity: who “we” are, who “they” are, and what “people like us” must now do. It may be trust: which sources are believed and which are dismissed before they speak. It may be prediction: what future seems likely, unavoidable, or already lost. It may be decision-making: which options feel available and which feel unthinkable.

social identity

Cognitive warfare, in one form, is the hostile engineering of social identity. Much political manipulation works by sharpening the boundary between in-group and out-group. Demagogues have known this for centuries. They do not need a formal theory of social psychology to discover people can be mobilised by stories of threat, betrayal, humiliation, and revenge. They test slogans, enemies, rumours, grievances, and symbols. What works is repeated. What fails is discarded. Over time, a practical technology of mobilisation emerges.

stress as terrain

Cognitive warfare feeds on existing stresses. It may work best where people are already tired, anxious, angry, humiliated, distrustful, economically pressed, or socially fragmented. One way to describe this is the parasitic exploitation of allostatic load: a chronically-stressed population has fewer cognitive reserves for careful judgement. It may become more receptive to simple explanations, vivid enemies, emotional shortcuts, and conspiratorial thinking.

A cognitive attack does not need to cater to every grievance, but can amplify selectively an important already present grievance. It can take old resentments, class injuries, ethnic memories, religious fears, national humiliations, institutional failures, economic precarity, or moral disgust and give them a sharper target. The most effective cognitive operations often work with local material. They are parasitic on the emotional ecology of the society they enter.

This is why cognitive warfare best arrives through what people already fear, already remember, already suspect, or already long to hear confirmed.

precision cognitive warfare

The best example of precision cognitive warfare remains Operation Mincemeat, which I will examine in detail in a subsequent post.

In 1943, British intelligence wanted the Germans to believe the Allied invasion of southern Europe would fall on Greece or Sardinia rather than Sicily. They placed false documents on a corpse dressed as a British officer, and manouvered circumstances to ensure the material reached German intelligence. The deception was audacious, theatrical, and meticulously controlled.

The importance of Mincemeat as cognitive domain operations lies in its remarkable and coherent epistemic discipline. Mincemeat had a particular and carefully defined target: German strategic judgement. It had a desired false belief which it wanted to implant in German strategic thinking: that an attack on Sicily was a feint and the real target lay elsewhere. It had a particular behavioural goal: that enemy forces and attention would be displaced away from the true invasion site. It had a time horizon: the deception only needed to last long enough to assist the Sicily operation. It had a way of being assessed: German reactions could be monitored through intelligence channels.

Most importantly, Mincemeat had an internal truth boundary. The British knew the lie was a lie, and Allied planning remained anchored in reality. The false documents were designed to enter the German model of the world, not the Allied model of the world. The deception was aimed outward; ground truth was preserved internally.

Mincemeat worked because the Allies lied to the enemy without lying to themselves.

Operation Mincemeat constructed a plausible world. The British did not simply assert that the Allies would invade Greece or Sardinia rather than Sicily. They created an evidentiary ecology in which German intelligence could infer that conclusion for itself: a dead courier; personal letters; military documents; bureaucratic texture; human messiness; the appearance of accidental disclosure; a body found in Spain; channels through which the material would predictably pass.

That is the genius of the operation: Mincemeat allowed the German system to complete a set of patterns in their pre-exisiting thnking - it was confirmation bias writ large - providing a glimpse into a world in miniature, and allowing them, never ever telling them, to draw the wrong conclusions.

People and institutions as cognitive communities are often more powerfully persuaded by conclusions they believe they have reached themselves. The operation exploited expectation, confirmation, source credibility, narrative coherence, and institutional habit. German intelligence already knew Sicily was the obvious target. They also knew that the Allies knew Sicily was obvious.

A deception suggesting that Sicily was a feint therefore had a certain higher-order plausibility, because it fitted an expectation about deception itself.

Mincemeat also worked because the evidence appeared costly, contingent, and accidental. A random broadcast saying “we will invade Greece” would have had little value. A corpse carrying private correspondence that seemed to have been lost by accident was cognitively richer. The Axis forces could tell themselves: ‘this was not sent to persuade us; we found it’ and that distinction was, collectively, cognitively decisive.

The deep lie succeeded because it was embedded in mundane realism: a named officer, his personal effects, tiresome ordinary paperwork, all too plausible personal issues (money, relationships, the usual), bureaucratic detail; all the little details, the bits of pocket litter, dated theatre stubs, demands for an overdraft to be settled promptly, all giving the falsehood the texture of a significant and important life as a military officer.

The lesson: good deception does not overpower the target’s thinking, but instead supplies the right materials at the right time, and lets the target mislead themselves.

This is the first in a multipart series on one of the most important issues confronting democratic societies today; if you would like to support this work and be deeply informed about what is the oldest and newest front in warfare, just click below:

Cognitive Warfare

Most future pieces on cognitive warfare will be partially or completely paywalled.

I’m reviewing two books this week on the related theme of Northern Ireland: Rory Carroll’s Killing Thatcher, published by Mudlark in 2023, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, published by William Collins in 2019. The latter book is now especially well known, not least because of the television adaptation. The books bear reading together; each illuminates the violence, secrecy, memory, and moral injury of the Troubles.

I’m not a historian, but did grow up during the time of the Troubles, but at a remove on the island - in Galway, where Northern Ireland felt at once terribly far away, and yet so close as well. The shadow of death fell across the whole island.

In summary, the Troubles were a long civic, political, social, and, of course, individual, family, and community catastrophe: a conflict of identity, sovereignty, religion, memory, territory, policing, and fear, lived out in the routines of everyday life. The Good Friday Agreement did not abolish grief, grievance, or historical dispute, but it gave Northern Ireland a means of containing them politically, rather than violently. That uneasy settlement is one reason these books now read with such force: they describe a past that is close enough to touch, yet already beginning to pass into history.

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no polity can afford brittle cognition

How do we make sense of politics? Contemporary politics is often analysed by political scientists as a contest of interests, policies, institutions, nationalities, or ideologies; it’s also often analysed by media blowhards as a horse-race - who’s up, down, leading the polls, who’s in, who’s out, or whatever.

While sometimes useful, these ways of viewing the world completely disregard a deep and underlying layer of explanation: namely, how politics is determined by the conditions under which societies organise themselves to think:- how societies allocate attention, treat evidence, process dissent, correct mistakes, and preserve memory as a guide to future actions. But public life generally does not ensure our institutions are designed so that they can learn in public under conditions of low trust, limited attention, and even under conditions of persistent bad faith.

The deep risk we run in society is not a conflict over interests (for these will be always and ever present), but instead a deep conflict of mutual illegibility: where our differing political systems come to no longer share enough epistemic ground to interpret each another’s actions reliably.

Democracy doesn’t fail because people disagree (disagreement can be very valuable); democracy fails when we lose the shared methods for finding out what’s true, and fixing what’s broken.

When a polity’s conditions of thinking, learning, and processing information shift over time, polities do not simply change their policies and behaviour: they also change their epistemic metabolism - they begin to inhabit different cognitive worlds from each other, which in turn often leads to mutual misunderstandings and a subsequent loss of shared realities and shared assumptions about the nature of our political and social worlds.

Last time:

MAGA is an ‘identity-centred’ political form - take it seriously

I call the environments by which polities differentially process and prioritise cognitive ecologies, a phrase intentionally blending ecological and psychological terms.

‘Cognitive ecology’ does not mean some sort of “essential national character”, or (worse) some ‘fixed’ cultural essence; it simply means the designed-and-evolved environment in which collective minds operate within polities: and this includes the information provisioning and processing architectures, institutional memory systems, incentive regimes, legitimacy norms, legal systems, correction routines, and time horizons shaping how a polity attends to reality and acts under uncertainty. And ‘differentially’ simply recognises that there are differences that really matter a lot in between these differing cognitive ecologies.

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In some systems, information is shaped to pay obeisance and homage to the great, all-knowing, leader - even if this means violating the fundamental rules and logic of simple arithmetic. This sort of idiocy wouldn’t be tolerated in a Vegas casino or by mortgage providers for calculating changes in interest rates on bank loans; systems that shape information like this come apart in the end, of course - reality can only be evaded for a while, but can’t be avoided indefinitely (the bond market will find you out…).

Cognitive ecologies are not just a background to politics and political life; they are one of politics’ primary determinants.

A cognitive ecology is the structured environment in which collective minds operate: the information architectures, institutional memory systems, incentive regimes, and legitimacy norms that shape how a polity attends to reality, forms beliefs, processes disagreement, and corrects error over time.

This definition:

• Treats cognition as situated in times and places

• Makes cognition institutional rather than focusing on individual cognitive biases

• Keeps the unit of analysis collective, not individual, as the collective (political parties, legislatures, gatherings, etc.)

Cognitive ecologies matter because the acute and repeated failures of many liberal democracies look less like one-off errors than like systemic cognitive dysfunction:

• Repeated crises are processed as spectacles rather than learning opportunities

• Policy becomes a performance of certainty, rather than a disciplined encounter with uncertainty

• Error correction becomes a humiliating process, and therefore admissions of error and changes of course are rare

• Institutional memory decays with election cycles and staff turnover

• Citizens, facing cognitive overload, increasingly outsource meaning to tribal narratives.

Talking Heads

The resulting politics is not simply “polarised” (although it most certainly is); politics, political life, and political thinking are epistemically degraded, no longer able to deal with our problems, except reactively and very often inadequately.

When cognitive ecologies diverge (because of different time horizons, different treatments of dissent, different norms for admitting error) mutual illegibility and incomprehension occurs.

Actors will find they struggle to read one another’s constraints and signals reliably: restraint can be misread as weakness; compromise as deception; uncertainty as incompetence; dissent as collapse. We can see this in real time at this very moment - the US and Iran are working from fundamentally different operating assumptions about the nature of the world, and of the strengths of their own and the opposing regime.

(Available below the line: the core claim; dimensions of a cognitive ecology; mutual illegibility; familiar cases - housing and low-emission zones; against the rules-based order; a methods-based order; answering a persistent and corrosive scepticism; and an exclusive link to a downloadable Cognitive Ecology Diagnostic Grid to allow easy measurement of differing cognitive ecologies)

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Here are recent pieces - a mixture of free to read and subscriber only.

1. ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words)

2. ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words).

3. Democratic operating systems are glitching everywhere: Let's (not) patch and repair them (2109 words)

4. Trump at Davos: How Democracies Lose - and Recover - Their Minds (3000 words)

5. What if our societies were (deliberately) built to learn? (1800 words)

6. Abundance (Klein & Thompson) reviewed: a conventional success; but really a disappointment that does not deliver

7. MAGA is an ‘identity-centred’ political form - take it seriously (2900 words)

There are many more pieces coming this year. I argue that the to survive and prosper, liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems, ones continuously experimenting, measuring, and adapting. I call a society oriented in this way the Cognitive Republic.

Please forward this email to anyone you think might be interested.

It seems obvious to me that: democracy depends on shared methods for knowing: evidence standards, dispute resolution, revision norms, and memory; when our shared epistemic infrastructure weakens, rules become rhetorical weapons and legitimacy becomes tribal. In turn, our politics becomes faith-based: “trust me” (strongman) or “trust us” (technocracy).

Liberal democracies are facing polycrises (financial shocks, pandemics, climate volatility, housing shortages, geopolitical coercion) outpacing current state capacity to deal with them. Moreover, trust is declining in our institutions, and a prominent political response is ‘mobilise anger, promise restoration, blame outgroups for failure, repeat’. The result is a legitimacy gap: citizens see elections, but not effective power; process, but not delivery; debate, but not learning.

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Fundamentally, I argue that democratic failures are cognitive: our failures are breakdowns in collective cognition rather than single policy mistakes - weaknesses include: attention allocation, learning, prediction, correction, and institutional memory.

I am trying here to think in a new way about reviving our democracies: developing a a new language, a new underpinning philosophy, a new operating system for democracy, by drawing on cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. This will allow us to rethink ‘adaptive governance’ to rise to the challenges of the 21stC by reinventing democracies as living, adaptive, systems.

We need a new way of doing democracy, designed for how people think together.

This point seems obvious, but the great works of political philosophy, our laws, our democratic procedures tend to ignore foundational insights from psychology and neuroscience that we humans have limited or bounded attention (people can’t monitor everything; institutions must be legible by design); we are hardwired to pay attention to identity and are very sensitive to status (people will only update their beliefs when it’s socially safe to do so, and our politics must therefore reduce any humiliation costs of learning to zero); we engage in motivated reasoning and group reinforcement (so we must build institutions rewarding learning and pluralistic scrutiny, not purity tests); and we are social learners we follow the lead of trusted peers (so our systems need diverse messengers and visible local proof, not elite lectures from on-high).

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The upshot: we should never require civic heroism or individual courage to make our democracies work; instead, we need to build systems of civic ergonomics to empower us all.

I would be most grateful if you would subscribe: you will learn a new and useful way of thinking about our democracies, and join this effort to create a Cognitive Republic.

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We should take MAGA very seriously indeed. You might wonder why. It is the dominant political orientation of the current US government and of a significant fraction of the US population. Famously, Leon Trotsky allegedly said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”. Well, you might not be interested in MAGA, but MAGA is interested in you, and MAGA impacts you. The US National Security Strategy and National Defence Strategy are both clear about who the in-group and out-group members are. If you’re European or Canadian or whoever, then you’re in the out-group for sure.

Gerry Adams, formerly President of Sinn Fein, and allegedly IRA Army Council member once remarked when asked ‘what about the IRA?’ ‘They haven’t gone away, you know’. Well, notwithstanding the US Supreme Court decision, the tariffs on friendly nations haven’t gone away, nor have the threats to annex territory of a NATO ally. Nor have the visits to those who threaten the integrity of the EU gone away, nor the promises of US government funding for so-called ‘patriotic parties’ - but don’t assume this embrace will be reciprocated, as Janen Ganesh of the FT argues here.

And the Munich Security Conference speeches by VP Vance and SoS Rubio, while varying in their stridency and emollience, are directionally similar in their underlying thrust - Europe is in the out-group, it’s committing civilisational suicide, and all the other empirically-unmoored hyperbole decorating these kinds of speeches.

We’re seeing something new coming out of the US; something we haven’t seen before. We find ourselves looking at a president making economic warfare on the US’s closest neighbours and friends - for no reason at all. We see a USA which seems to be transforming into something new: no longer a reliable friend, a constant ally, the backbone of the international order - despite the many mistakes it has made over the decades.

Instead, we hear the crazy, acquisitive, imperialist, talk of taking Canada, Greenland, Panama; of rows with the Prime Minister of Denmark (fgs), of arbitrary tariffs because of the tone of voice of the Swiss PM (39%). The swingeing tariffs on India surely drove it to purchase 114 Rafale jets from France - especially as the EU has just concluded a huge trade deal with India (I assume this is why Ireland has done a likewise defence deal with France, citing a ‘trusted partner’). And there’s still meaningful no focus on the major adversaries of the democratic order at all – the USA turning away from its role since 1945. The whacks are directed at friends.

And there is the whining too: seeing the multimillionaire Howard Lutnick saying without shame, insight, or embarrassment at the WEF that the last 80 years have been a disaster for the US – seemingly not at all conscious that the USA became the richest, most powerful, technologically-advanced and militarily strongest country in the world – nay, the known Universe – over that time!

What counterfactual case is he considering? Hard to know, to be honest - but really all he is demonstrating he is part of the MAGA in-group, unafraid to stick to those lousy out-group foreigners.

MAGA’s current organising logic is personalist and, in important respects, patrimonial. “Personalist” here is locating political legitimacy from impersonal rules and procedures to an embodied leader, where authority experienced as personal someone rather than impersonal something. “Patrimonial” captures the tendency (in personalist systems) for offices and enforcement to be treated as instruments of loyalty and spoils rather than as neutral constraints.

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What is going on? I think there’s an answer, and it’s an answer with universalist roots, drawing deep on underlying, all-too-human, cognitive, affective, and social processes. For my present purposes, I’ll focus less on the particular policies (these change quickly – often in the course of an hour), and more on the shared psychological processes underpining MAGA. And to be clear, I see these processes not as something peculiarly and oddly American. There are differing versions of MAGA all over the world, and people the world over more or less possess these self-same psychological traits making them more-or-less susceptible to MAGA-style politics.

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an ‘identity-centred political form’

I contend here MAGA is usefully analysed less as a coherent ideology than as an identity-centred political form—a coalition held together by belonging, status, and shared antagonisms toward a variably-defined outgroup, and much less by a stable set of policy propositions.

This way of looking at MAGA, this kind of framework for thinking about this political phenomenon, draws on social identity theory: the idea that people derive part of their self-concept from group membership, leading them to cherish and defend their in-group standing, and interpreting their social life through “us–them” distinctions that can become emotionally and morally charged. In conditions of high identity salience, “politics” is secondarily a debate over policies and programmes, and more as a contest over recognition, hierarchy, and threat perception.

The key point here is that stepping back and trying to identify some of the underlying psychological processes allows us to understand a bit more of what might be going on at a deeper level, and stops us engaging in a useless game of mutualised opprobrium.

An extensive body of work in social psychology on group identity, motivated reasoning, and affective polarisation suggests political allegiance is a vital and important source of belonging and status for some/many individuals, where identity comes first, and policy commitments come second.

We have known for at least forty years that:

“policy attitudes generally do not have strong cognitive representations, are eminently changeable, and once they are changed, an individual's cognitive autobiography is revised so as to render the changes invisible.”

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The University of Michigan tracks these perceptions:

Partisan differences in consumer attitudes and expectations are well documented and date back to at least the Reagan administration. The data consistently showed that consumers affiliated with the political party in the White House tend to have higher levels of sentiment and more favorable expectations than those whose party is not. These differences are not limited to attitudes, and in fact, scholarly research has documented similar partisan patterns in consumer spending and entrepreneurship. Like sentiment, these behavioral outcomes also flip for Democrats and Republicans when the White House changes party.

I think some think this inconsistency is shocking: that the lack of policy consistency reveals some deep hypocrisy. It might do, or it might simply be that requiring policy consistency forces you to continue fighting old battles when people have clearly moved on, and don’t care anymore.

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Gotcha politics based on attacking a group for the apparent hypocrisy of ‘revised policy attitudes’ will simply not have traction. People move on. Moreover - all the shouting in the media by journalists regarding ‘gotcha’ moments over apparent inconsistencies in people’s attitudes and political positions over time is just that - howling into the void. People do change their views through time - and why not? Life changes you.

The purpose of our memories is not to accurately log the past: instead, our memories are designed to allow us to adapt to the present and anticipate the future.

Beyond that, we do not - repeat, do not - have a specialised cognitive faculty which tracks changes in our memory through time, comparing what we thought at time A to time B to time C, and which allows us to rationally account for those changes in memory.

Orwell nails it - from 1984:

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

change dynamics

The dynamics here are subtle, because individuals may form deep parasocial relationships with the leader (perhaps less with the party), loyalty to a leader becomes moralised, even sacralised in some deep way, and manifest absurdities become important loyalty tests (‘yes, I believe, contrary to evidence and common sense, that the election was stolen, and I choose not to consider how the leader who was in office at the time, allowed it to be stolen in the first place’), and hostility toward an outgroup supply in-group cohesion even when policy preferences are internally diverse (‘yeah, not too certain about these tariffs, but look, we all really hate those guys who told us tariffs were going to make stuff more expensive, because they oppose what the leader wants, so yes I support tariffs actually’).

The outgroup category will remain broad and adaptable, not by design, but because elastic boundary-marking allows new events to be integrated into a stable ‘us–them’ frame. This is consistent with a model in which shared narrative and group reinforcement sustain a common ‘reality’ within the coalition, while institutional constraints are treated as conditionally legitimate—binding when convenient, illegitimate when constraining the in-group or its leader.

The underlying psychological point is not that every supporter consciously endorses these ideas, but that the movement’s practical, pragmatic, social and decisional ecology encourages conditional rule-legitimacy: constraints are experienced as legitimate when they bind opponents and illegitimate when they bind the in-group or its leader. Hence the Trumpian rage when the Supreme Court said no to the tariff policy, or the demand to ‘discipline’ economists for not following the party line (the point here being not these economists are empirically-correct, but that they disagree! -independence of thought is undesirable, it would seem.)

As the famous line puts it: ‘there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect’  (‘Wilhoit's law’). This is obviously an unstable and untenable long-term equilibrium; people really do care about fairness (perhaps not so much inequality). The law needs to apply equally without fear or favour to all.

stability

Can we specify the cognitive mechanisms by which such a form holds together despite internal policy diversity? Here’s a framework.

First, the evidence on motivated reasoning suggests our reasoning often serves identity and goal-protection as much as it does an attempt at empirical accuracy: we humans selectively search, credit, and interpret information in ways defending our desired conclusions and preserving our social standing.

Second, research on identity-protective cognition suggests we can and do unconsciously discount evidence threatening our affiliation with a valued group (‘honestly, we don’t cheat – it was just a little infraction of no consequence’).

Third, the literature on affective polarisation shows that partisan animus can intensify even when policy preferences are not maximally extreme; hostility itself becomes a driver of cohesion. It just doesn’t matter too much what the policies are: these are mere vehicles for driving extremes of behaviour.

Put these strong tendencies in our thinking in combination, then it is unsurprising contradictions are not falsifiers or error signals, but are instead loyalty tests—moments where the primary question is not “is it true?”, but “how do I show my loyalty to the leader?” And a willingness to abase yourself by stating things that are manifestly, empirically untrue is also important: the rewards of office, status, and shared belonging, or just the simple shared feeling that ‘our side has triumphed/beaten/smashed the other lot’ which can then be picked over, time and again, in mutually-affirming conversation.

The deep fissures within these kinds of personalist movements will really only be exposed by succession – especially if the leader takes an ‘Après moi, le déluge’ attitude of indifference to who takes over afterwards, there will be a slug-fest to ascend to the throne.

constructing an enemy

Outgroups in identity-driven politics can be broadly and variably conceived and changing over time, not because there is any centrally-planned strategy of enemy identification, but because elastic boundary-marking solves a coordination problem: it allows new events, institutions, and actors to be assimilated quickly into a stable moral schema (“they are doing this to us”) without requiring doctrinal or policy consistency. These are just clothes to be worn and discarded, as needed.

Affective polarisation research also suggests outgroup dislike can function as the strongest common denominator across heterogeneous in-group policy bundles. The result is a movement whose coherence is less propositional than relational - "coherence-found-through-antagonism”.

The leader-follower relationship adds another stabiliser: parasocial attachment. Repeated media exposure can generate the felt intimacy of a relationship without reciprocity - of “intimacy at a distance.” Under conditions of high salience and constant mediated presence, attachments can fuse with individual and group identity, amplifying protective devotion to the leader and in group, and give rise to a kind of moralised loyalty.

Identity-fusion research provides a useful lens to understand this intensification: in certain contexts, people can experience a visceral oneness between personal self and group, enabling unusually strong pro-group commitment. The analytical claim is not that all supporters are “fused,” but that movements of this kind can contain a core in which attachment to leader-and-group becomes identity-defining, while a periphery is more instrumental or episodic.

epistemically – what is happening?

These dynamics converge on what can fairly be called epistemic closure: a social-psychological process in which in-group reinforcement, motivated reasoning, and threat sensitivity reduce openness to disconfirming evidence and elevate conformity to the demands of the group as stated and required by the leader.

Neurocognitive work cannot, should not, be used to claim there is something like a distinctive “movement brain.” But such work does support a general point: competition in intergroup contexts reliably recruits mechanisms of attention, valuation, and empathy that bias perception and learning toward in-group favouritism and outgroup suspicion.

In a politics organised around a permanent war against ill-defined outgroups, these biases are a recurring and governing feature of thinking, and as the outrage against one group necessarily wanes, it is necessary to find another enemy, and another, and another.

implications

Two implications follow, and these are uncomfortable for liberal democrats¹ precisely because they deny the usual comforting remedies.

First, fact-checking and procedural sermons are category errors. Where identity-protective cognition dominates, more information can backfire or be assimilated as further evidence of outgroup manipulation. You can’t assume mere information provision will solve what’s happening. If it did, there wouldn’t be any smokers or antivaxxers.

Second, MAGA cannot and should not be treated as a pathology, for it is an all-too-recognisable form of governance, cropping up time and again. MAGA competes successfully as an alternative legitimacy regime, offering a ‘cognitively efficient’ civic experience: one of moral clarity, belonging, and an evolving if stable map of blame—at a time when pluralist democracies often feel cognitively expensive, slow, and humiliating. And the reality of human history has been that patrimonial, personalist systems organised around in-group/out-group differences have been very common indeed - all you need to do is look at the history of European monarchies.

a design diagnosis

The Cognitive Republic frame offers a design diagnosis. The core democratic vulnerability is a degradation of collective cognition: the public system’s capacity to remember (policy memory surviving turnover), imagine (anticipatory capacity that binds decisions), learn (feedback that is intelligible and timely), and correct (reversal without stigma). When those functions fail, politics defaults to “trust me” (whether offered by a personalist leader or by a technocratic administrative class) because citizens are left as spectators rather than co-participants in inference and correction.

A Cognitive Republic response therefore competes on the terrain MAGA exploits without imitating its authoritarian form, replacing appeals to trust with visible correction:

• forecasts with ranges,

• measurable commitments,

• and pre-declared conditions for stop/go/reverse

thereby institutionalising falsifiability as shared civic learning and respect. Moreover, the Cognitive Republic ethos lowers identity temperature, not by asking people to abandon attachment, but by offering a new, non-tribal, belonging through shared projects that ‘close the loop’ into policy forecasting and policy revision:- a form of participation designed for bounded attention rather than heroic civic labour.

The Cognitive Republic hardens institutions against personalist takeovers by building an “automatic spine” of conflict-of-interest tripwires, procurement transparency defaults, and protected oversight - so democratic resilience does not depend on individual episodic courage (expecting cowards to stand up to bullies is not a recipe for safeguarding democracy, now is it? Better to have defaults to punch back with).

And the Cognitive Republic does not compete for the cognitive commons by policing belief, or by requiring acts of public obeisance; it competes by altering our incentive architectures to focus on provenance, transparency, and institutional reasoning chains making governance legible enough to be judged by collectively-agreed, empirical standards.

The bet here is simple: if MAGA’s strength lies in coherence-through-loyalty and epistemic shelter, then liberal democracy must rebuild something new, grounded in public method, measurable competence, and corrigibility. The point is not to “restore trust” as a mood, but to earn trust as an outcome of systems that can learn in public, correct without humiliation, and give citizens a meaningful role in the ongoing work of shared reality.

The Cognitive Republic is an argument for a different democratic operating system. Liberal democracies were built to legitimise power through procedures: fair elections, free parties, independent courts, and inalienable rights. And these all remain indispensable.

But the world we’re in is different now: complex and complicated, and procedures alone no longer guarantee competence, nor do they sustain legitimacy when error is inevitable and reality changes faster than institutions can adapt. Invocations of the ‘rule-based order’ aren’t helping either when the game has definitively changed (next time I’ll discuss the Cognitive Republic alternative to the rules-based order - the need for a methods-based order).

The Cognitive Republic begins from a new and different premise: democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems—explicitly experimental, measurement-disciplined, and publicly correctable—designed around cognitive first principles: attention, prediction, learning, adaptation, falsifiability, and institutional memory.

Legitimacy, in this view, does not demand trust; legitimacy is earned by showing the work:- forecasts with ranges, denominators and timelines, and pre-declared conditions for revision when reality contradicts intention.

Democracy thus becomes less a periodic ritual of voting, and more of a continuous practice of collective cognition:- a system of adaptive governance system that corrects itself without humiliation and learn across time. It does mean that we will need a new operating language, and a new way of thinking, as I will elaborate here over the coming weeks and months.

This piece will get you going on what this means: “What if our societies were (deliberately) built to learn?”

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1. I mean this phrase in the generic political sense, not the narrow US sense.

Part One – the Cognitive Republic response to the past week

What a week. I joked to a friend in a text last Tuesday (20th Jan) that we might be able to meet Friday (23rd Jan) assuming the zombie apocalypse hadn’t happened by then because of all the crazy swilling about the place.

Well, zombie apocalypse avoided, I suppose, at least for the moment. Trump backed off his plans to take Greenland, and I presume the idea that a NATO country would invade a NATO country is off the table for the moment. What a grotesque scenario.

Mark Carney’s remarks that the events of the past months signal a rupture, not a transition, feel on point. Tony Connelly of RTE News offers an excellent rundown of the week’s events here.

The post-1945 order is sundering; America First means America tries to go it alone; allies are learning to treat integration itself as a vulnerability, because it can be weaponised against you (today brings the news that Trump is threatening a sovereign nation – Canada, its neighbour – for behaving as a sovereign nation, wanting to make trade deals with other partners (Canada can’t give in to such threats, and I assume won’t give in); the EU (+medium power allies) are talking openly about strategic autonomy in energy, minerals, finance, and supply chains. Febrile times, indeed.

What would a Cognitive Republic response be to the past week (and indeed months)?

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Now, we don’t have an actual Cognitive Republic anywhere yet – the idea that hardwired into our democratic operating systems and firm-wired into our everyday language, thinking, and background assumptions, that to survive and prosper, liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems, ones continuously experimenting, measuring, and adapting.

This means that from top-to-bottom, our democracies, need to redesigned around:

1. cognitive first principles (sensing/attention, learning, prediction, adaptation, measurement, falsifiability/correctability, and collective (institutional) memory) coupled to 

2. government-by-experimentation (policy trials, feedback loops, error-correction; institutions designed to learn across time (past/present/future);

3. with legitimacy derived and maintained through transparency, participation, and safeguards against capture.

To this way of thinking, democracy is not just a set of procedures, occasionally exercised (voting every so often, for example): it’s a collective cognitive system  - an adaptive learning and governance system. Votes and courts and political parties matter, but they’re not the end - they’re start. The world is complex, and the hard-won settlement of the past century - universal franchise, etc - is no longer enough.

What keeps the system alive is how we think together—pay attention, form beliefs, test them against reality, update, and remember what we have learned.

Modern liberal democracies are failing at that cognitive layer, and I argue this cognitive failure is central to everything else that is going wrong.

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Modern democracies are trying to govern a world of fast, deep, repeated shocks, of high complexity with institutions built for slower times and for reasonably predictability based on electorates that behave in predictable ways – they are not trying to govern for the times we find ourselves in.

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And these are the results: short-termism, policy amnesia, crises all the time, allied to the default political demand—explicit or implicit—that citizens trust in whatever the political classes place before them: trust the strongman, trust the expert class, trust the party, trust the brand.

The authoritarian temptation and the technocratic temptation are now converging in the same place (as we discussed last time). It’s not good enough – and our current consensus is visibly failing us now.

The Cognitive Republic shifts the legitimacy bargain - legitimacy doesn’t come from demanding trust, or intermittent voting one lot out and the other lot in. Democracy gets legitimacy every day when people can see how decisions are made, what evidence is used on, what could change the decisions taken, and how and when the system will reverse course if it is wrong.

That requires treating citizens as something more than spectators.

Not full-time participants (an impossible attentional, cognitive, and behavioural burden), but by designing institutions respecting the constraints of real human cognition in the wild: bounded attention, finite time, cognitive load, identity threat, and the social pull of narratives.

A learning democracy is one that spends citizen attention carefully, doesn’t outsource meaning to outrage machines, and builds interfaces with clear measures, timelines, and decision points - allowing ordinary people to judge competence without needing to master every detail.

At the heart of the Cognitive Republic is a deep and profound commitment to explicit methods (see last time; this point will be developed further in future pieces). In science, you earn authority by stating claims in a way that can be empirically tested – that reality can refute. In engineering, you test, iterate, and redesign. In healthy organisations, you retain institutional memory and build routines that prevent repeating the same errors.

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A Cognitive Republic brings those norms into democratic life as the underpinning widely-shared philosophy: decision-making disciplined by priors, evidence, and direction correction, visible and transparent for all citizens to inspect.

In this way, our democracies become explicitly experimental in a particular and disciplined sense: trying policies at the right scale, measuring outcomes honestly, comparing ideas against alternatives, and continuous, active, adaptation. The promise is learning and adaptation the public can verify and trust.

Instead of pretending every policy is destiny, the system treats policy as a hypothesis, making reversals normal, rather than humiliating; error correction becomes a sign of competence rather than weakness. And it makes it harder for opportunists to weaponise inevitable imperfections into a case for authoritarian command.

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This is also a theory of collective democratic intelligence. Institutions are what brains do together over time: they store memory (law, precedent, practice), coordinate attention (what gets prioritised), and shape the narratives through which societies interpret events. When those cognitive functions degrade, governance degrades and people lose faith in those who govern us.

When those functions are strengthened, democracy gains a strategic advantage over authoritarianism: adaptation. Authoritarian systems can be fast, but they are epistemically brittle because they punish bad news and concentrate correction in narrow channels.

A Cognitive Republic distributes correction, makes it safer to surface reality, and builds competence by learning in the open.

The Cognitive Republic does not seek the chimera of a “perfectly informed public”, because it wants something more achievable and more powerful: a publicly intelligible learning regime—shared standards for evidence, explicit trade-offs, measurable commitments, and predictable correction when reality disagrees.

This way of doing democratic business transforms pluralism into an adaptive system: disagreement doesn’t disappear, because the method for handling disagreement—epistemic accuracy, testability, revision—becomes part of the social contract. In fact, good faith disagreement is desirable, as a stultifying consensus is epistemically dangerous, preventing novel information and thinking from being surfaced.

In a world of compounding shocks and unpredictable shifts, here’s the real dividing line: not left vs right, not even technocracy vs populism, but democratic systems that learn in public versus systems that demand belief. The Cognitive Republic is the bet that liberal democracy survives and outcompetes the alternatives by becoming the first kind of system - one that learns - an experimenting society whose legitimacy rests on accuracy, humility, and correction, all made visible at human scale.

Greenland/Davos episode

From a Cognitive Republic perspective, the Greenland/Davos episode on a human and standard political level is, of course, diplomatic melodrama (and for the Greenlanders, absolutely existential – Trump wants to kick over the Westphalian order, and simply ignore the usually accepted inviolability of borders, and just take their stuff).

But Greenland/Davos is also stress test of collective cognition under coercion: a powerful, unpredictable, bullying, impulsive leader using threats (of tariffs, of force) to compress time, scramble attention, and this forces improvised responses. The dangers are, firstly, giving into Trump’s demands (he’ll be back for more, and more), but secondly, you must ask what this tactic does to decision-making within the EU (+ its medium power allies): crises like these cause shortening of time horizons, cause forced rewarding in the form of flattery, and making “trust me” the only workable interface for dealing with him.

But trust is in short supply, and trust in the end isn’t enough; credible commitments are. Trust in Trump is gone, if we’re honest, to be replaced by a worried wariness.

The sequence: Trump revives his Greenland demands, then threaten tariffs and force, then “climbs down” after Davos and announces a vague “framework” with NATO, brokered largely through Mark Rutte’s shuttle diplomacy, with markets and unity of the EU (+ its medium power allies).

The point is not whether the crisis is “resolved.” The point is that the EU (+ its medium power allies)  just learned, again and publicly, that its direction of travel can be captured by attention shocks and deadline brinkmanship, and that it has the means to do something about this.

It just hasn’t thought them through yet.

A Cognitive Republic response to Trumpian tactics

A Cognitive Republic response has three parts: (1) protect attention, (2) harden correctability, (3) build anticipatory capacity—openly.

1.      Protect attention: treat coercion as an attack on the alliance’s cognition

The EU (+medium power allies) must stop treating these incidents as one-off personality dramas and start treating them as a recurring class of events: coercive attention hijacks. Trump’s aim is to monopolise the agenda, split the coalition, and force decisions before deliberation and verification can occur. Divide and conquer is the underlying tactic.

So, the first move is constitutional in the Cognitive Republic sense: allocate attention by rule, not by impulse. This means ahead of time creating a “coercion protocol” with pre-authorised lanes:

• a fast lane for de-escalation and military safety

• a verification lane for claims and motives

• a decision lane for proportional response.

This all sounds procedural, until you realise it’s an epistemic shield. A pre-agreed, pre-gamed, automatically-implemented and pre-committed protocol prevents improvisation from becoming policy, and allows anticipation and predictability of response - both sides will know what happens next.

The anti-coercion instrument is a good example of this kind of protocol - but the instrument had to be repurposed from its original intentions.

Scenario testing effectively means gaming out lots of different scenarios and possibilities. And realists - not nostalgics or idealists - realise all bets are off - the predictable world we have lived in is gone.

2.      Harden correctability: make the EU (+medium power allies) response falsifiable, timed, and reversible

Connelly’s piece and the surrounding reporting show that Trump’s leverage depended on three things: the threat of imposing credible economic pain, the hope that the EU (+medium power allies) would fracture, and imposing early deadlines (e.g., tariffs from February 1).

A Cognitive Republic approach turns the EU (+medium power allies)/NATO response into something measurable and pre-committed, not vibes:

• Publish decision thresholds for instruments like the Anti-Coercion Instrument: what would trigger it, what would pause it, what would escalate it. (The EU (+medium power allies)  was already debating the ACI as the “bazooka”; the cognitive shift is to make its deployment rule-governed rather than performative.)

• Pre-declare reversal conditions: “If tariffs are withdrawn and negotiations proceed under X verification terms, response measures are suspended within Y days.” This removes the stigma of backing down and turns de-escalation into competence.

• Separate sovereignty from access with explicit contractual metrics. Much of the reporting turns on updating the long-standing 1951 US–Denmark defence arrangement and expanding practical Arctic security cooperation without conceding sovereignty. Make that distinction operational and publicly legible: “access increases by A, B, C; sovereignty unchanged; review every N months.”

• Develop the full suite of EU instruments for every possible scenario (and maybe do so via agreement with the medium power allies) - assume all bets are off, and this scenario will come around again and again (iow, don’t be complacent).

This is the Cognitive Republic strategy: saying “here are your commitments; these are our commitments, here are the tests to show we’re sticking both by them, and – so there is no surprise - here is the automatic response if things change – like you break your word and just walk away”.

And this is preferably said in public, so the commitment is obvious to one and all – thereby raising the stakes, and the seriousness of intent.

3.      Build anticipatory capacity: strategic autonomy as a learning programme, not a slogan

The Cognitive Republic contribution suggests that “strategic autonomy” becomes credible only when it is run as an experimenting society with public scorekeeping:

• Defence capability: treat the rebalancing of burden-sharing (which the NATO leadership is pushing) as a program with timelines, industrial-output constraints, and delivery metrics—not just spending targets.

• Cloud and compute dependence: if EU (+medium power allies)is structurally dependent on a small number of US cloud firms, don’t moralise about it—turn it into a staged portfolio: pilots, migration pathways, interoperability standards, and measurable reductions in single-point dependency over time. (Connelly flags this dependence as a strategic reality; the Cognitive Republic move is public, testable de-risking.)

• Critical minerals: Greenland’s strategic value is partly about Arctic routes and rare earths, but the rare earths are uninvestible (just like Venezuela’s oil). Canada is much more likely source of future minerals.

Citizen legitimisation matters, too: strategic autonomy will require trade-offs, spending, and time. A Cognitive Republic government earns consent by giving citizens full disclosure: what’s being built, by when, at what cost, and what failure would look like.

The meta-lesson: stop needing “Trump whisperers” as the core interface

Multiple accounts emphasise the role of Mark Rutte as an effective intermediary with Trump: flattery, careful brokerage, and attention. When you EU (+medium power allies) relies on charismatic mediation to prevent catastrophe, you are running a system whose stability depends too much on the personal.

The Cognitive Republic aim’s to de-personalise resilience:

• reduce the reward for brinkmanship by pre-committed responses

• make outcomes depend on verifiable conditions

• keep the EU’s attention anchored to long-horizon capability building

• publish what has been learned, and how it can be used in the future, so each episode increases institutional intelligence.

That’s the core strategy: turn these attempts at coercive attention grabs and coercion events into inputs for collective learning. If each crisis teaches the EU (+medium power allies) new playbooks (publicly stated, routinely tested, and periodically revised) then the authoritarian style loses its key advantage: forcing democracies to improvise on the fly.

What’s needed is less “more unity” (you already saw unity appear under threat), and instead new consensual norms: unity around method, pre-commitment, and public learning: so the EU (+medium power allies) stops depending on courage spikes and personality management when the next coercive shock lands.

So – what’s next? How do you make this stick? That’s the story for the next time. It’ll be paywalled -

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My thinking about the Cognitive Republic - that to survive and prosper, liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems, ones continuously experimenting, measuring, and adapting, has at least two origins.

First: I teach a course on policy and the behavioural and brain sciences, where we discuss the use, misuse, and ignoring of data, evidence, and thinking from the behavioural and brain sciences to try solve major social and other problems. There are problems, though: among them, very often the data we have are soft, do not generalise, lack strong causality, do not exist, and probably worse still, our theories, while getting better, are still not very good (sorry, colleagues, but you know it’s true!).

It is often said that there is ‘nothing so practical as a good theory’ - usually because in physics and chemistry, a good theory allows you, for example, to calculate the movements of stars, planets, asteroids decades ahead of time - and you’ll be right (within a margin of error). And if you’ve seen Oppenheimer, or have a vague grasp of 20th C physics, you’ll know that the theory that E=MC2 is the most far-reaching theoretical statement of that century, for it gave us an understanding both of what happens within stars and the means to blow ourselves to bits on a planetary scale.

No theories in the behavioural and brain sciences have this scale, scope, and precision. We’ve got some excellent frameworks for thinking - that’s certainly true - and some very good, but very domain-specific, theories (I’m looking at you, cognitive map theory!).

Second, I’ve been interested in politics and governance (of course! Politics is hard to get away from) for as long as I can remember. In recent years I’ve begun to wonder if the behavioural and brain sciences have anything useful to contribute to how we should think about democracy and governance.

I think the answer is yes, but not perhaps in the way that you might think. Heading down a technocratic, ‘we know what’s best for society’ route is dangerous, and is going to fail. Nobody knows best, we don’t know what we don’t know, and people have opinions, and ideas, and identities, and can’t be reduced to idealised abstractions on a spreadsheet (even though this happens all the time).

There is another way that the behavioural and brain sciences can contribute, but not perhaps in the way that you might expect...

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What if our societies were (deliberately) built to learn?

We can start with what is not an obvious question - what is built our societies in a new way - what if we built them deliberately to learn? This is a major part of the ambition of the “Cognitive Republic” — government by experimentation, adaptation by design, prospering through selection (it’s not the whole story, by any means, but certainly a major part of it).

This view is not original to me, by any means. The concept has interesting intellectual roots, especially in the psychologist Donald T. Campbell’s manifesto on the “Experimenting Society”, which declared public programmes should be treated like laboratory trials, evaluated without mercy, and rolled back when the data disappoint.

Consider how this contrasts with governance by doctrine. In doctrinaire systems (be it a Marxist-Leninist state, a theocracy, or even a democracy captured by a single-party ideology, such as MAGA), the role of public institutions is largely to implement the doctrine and defend it (or be dismembered for failing to implement it).

Failures are often reframed or hidden to protect the doctrine’s prestige; learning is stifled because admitting mistakes can delegitimise the ruling ideology.

By contrast, in a method-focused system, admitting a mistake reinforces legitimacy because it shows commitment to truth and improvement over politics or pride.

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The Experimenting Society

Donald T. Campbell (1916–1996) was an American social scientist, methodologist, and psychologist, renowned for pioneering ideas bridging the social and life sciences. Over a prolific career spanning the mid- to late-20th century, Campbell authored and co-authored among the most frequently cited methodology works in social science, leaving a last impression on psychology, sociology as well as anthropology, biology, and philosophy).

His intellectual reach was broad – he ventured into anthropology (joining fieldwork in East Africa to study cultural transmission), into sociology of science (analysing how scientific communities self-correct), and even into biologically-inspired theories of social behaviour.

Campbell’s overarching intellectual mission was improving how society generates and uses knowledge to ameliorate important social problems. He did not advance a particular political ideology, but instead articulated a way of doing things in politics, offering a vision of a ‘learning democracy’ grounded in scientific experimentation and evidence-based policy. Campbell’s name is not widely known to the general public, seems to be waning within social science, and his lasting influence on mainstream political philosophy seems modest.

However, his legacy in how we design, test, and learn from social programs is profound, especially in the realms of policy evaluation and behavioral public policy.

I will examine here certain of Campbell’s key ideas regarding ‘learning democracy’ and the ‘experimenting society’, as they are very far-reaching, indeed, radical, and far ahead of his time.

Central to Campbell’s thought is the concept of the ‘experimenting society.’ In a 1969 paper (Reforms as Experiments), Campbell argued democratic governments should treat social reforms as scientific experiments: first, trying new policies on a small scale, then rigorously evaluate their effects, and finally adjust course based on the evidence accrued: public policy could advance only if society learned from systematic trial-and-error, rather than from untested ideology or top-down mandates. He described this vision as a ‘utopian ideal’ worth striving for.

An ‘experimenting society’, according to Campbell, has several defining features: decentralization and diversity in policy approaches (encouraging multiple local experiments); an inclination toward action (trying innovative solutions rather than remaining paralyzed); a strong emphasis on honest, transparent evaluation of results; and a willingness to change course by abandoning policies the evidence shows are ineffective.

An experimenting society has other features: in particular, placing a premium on ‘honest assessment based on transparent data’ and ‘a willingness to change theories and values in the face of disconfirming evidence’¹. Campbell was here advocating for a learning democracy: a political system capable of continually learning and self-correcting through feedback by accumulating evidence systematically and rigorously. Importantly, Campbell did not see this learning-by-experimentation approach as technocratic rule by experts; rather, he stressed compatibility with democratic values.

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In his lecture entitled The Experimenting Society, he posed the provocative question: ‘Is the open society an experimenting society?’, acknowledging the possible tensions between expert-driven experiments and egalitarian, participatory democracy, because it may prove dangerous to generate experimental knowledge ‘apart from democracy’ (that is, without the willing consent of the citizens involved): citizens should be active partners in the process of social experimentation.

Campbell outlined mechanisms for democratic field experiments where citizens would act as ‘co-agents directing their own society,’ helping to define policy goals, shape interventions, and interpret results.

He even anticipated practices now common in open science (such as data transparency and replication), suggesting community-led experiments and publicly shared data could improve policy and social science.

Campbell’s idea of a ‘learning democracy’ went beyond advising policymakers to use evidence; it envisioned ordinary citizens learning democracy by doing, by participating in the collective inquiry into ‘what works’ for society.

Campbell advocates for an “experimenting society” – a society that systematically uses experimentation and empirical evidence, particularly randomised controlled trials, to evaluate social programs and policies. Campbell was well ahead of his time - perhaps eternally so - by forcefully suggesting that we adopt empirical methods as the best way forward to understand and hopefully solve big social problems.

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Learning Democracy

Campbell argued that the answers to complex societal problems—such as alleviating poverty, reforming criminal justice, improving public health, and the one hundred and one other issues which continue to nag away at us—are rarely intuitive and obvious. Instead of relying on assumptions or untested theories, he championed the use of empirical and experimental methodologies to design, test, and refine social programs before going for anything like their widespread implementation.

This is a very challenging view of how we should organise our affairs - our societies are very complex, and deep, disinterested, motivated expertise, capacity and capability are, if we are honest, rare - and many of our problems have so many moving parts that any simplistic, reductionistic, view of how to solve them will be one that causes as many problems as it solves.

Campbell’s name is not widely known to the general public, seems to be waning within social science, and his lasting influence on mainstream political philosophy seems modest at the very best. However, his legacy in how we design, test, and learn from social programs is profound, especially in the realms of policy evaluation and behavioral public policy.

Over the next few pieces here, I’ll discuss these ideas of how we can have a learning democracy in detail, provide some readings, and discuss why Campbell’s programme failed to gain meaningful traction.

Some of these pieces will be paywalled - consider joining the Cognitive Republic here.

And over the coming period, I will be developing more deeply the ideas behind what a Cognitive Republic can be - bringing a new language and a new philosophy to bear on how we organise our affairs. I will argue we need to reboot our democracies, top-to-bottom from cognitive first principles:- sensing/attention, learning, prediction, adaptation, measurement, falsifiability/correctability, and collective (institutional) memory coupled to government-by-experimentation (policy trials, feedback loops, error-correction; institutions designed to learn across time (past/present/future); legitimacy maintained through transparency, participation, and safeguards against capture)– all to allow us to rethink liberal democracy as an adaptive learning and governance system.

And this, I argue, is how we are going to save ourselves and safeguard our futures.

Start Here for the Cognitive Republic - Table of Contents

1. ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words)

2. ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words).

3. Democratic operating systems are glitching everywhere: Let's (not) patch and repair them (2109 words)

4. Abundance (Klein & Thompson) reviewed: a conventional success; but really a disappointment that does not deliver (2255 words)

5. Podcast 1: Announcing the Cognitive Republic

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1. Huitema, D., Jordan, A., Munaretto, S., & Hildén, M. (2018). Policy experimentation: Core concepts, political dynamics, governance and impacts. Policy Sciences, 51, 143–159. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11077-018-9321-9

I’ll gradually catch up on all the previous pieces. In the future, these will be behind the paywall so that they are advert-free, but I will start to release them as a public podcast and on YouTube, but they will come with adverts then.

Here’s a start here page for the Cognitive Republic, and previous pieces are listed below:

Each section is available via the link below - basically a ToC:

1. 1. ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words)

   2. ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words).

   3. Democratic operating systems are glitching everywhere: Let's (not) patch and repair them (2109 words)

   4. Abundance (Klein & Thompson) reviewed: a conventional success; but really a disappointment that does not deliver (2255 words)

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Here’s the podcast audio

Listen on Steady

For fun, here’s the Youtube

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Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson (Profile Books, 2025; paperback).

Read, December 2025.

Headline reaction: This was a deeply frustrating read; it really does not deliver on the hype, or what it ostensibly promises, as I discuss in detail below.

Abundance attempts to address the deep malaise afflicting democracy in the USA in a kind of a roundabout fashion: it starts with a future vision of plenty, and then segues to describe the deep and grotesque frustrations and difficulties in the US—in certain states in particular—around the delivery of, and building of needed infrastructure: usually housing; sometimes public transport; sometimes other kinds of infrastructure (tunnels, bridges, road,etc.); sometimes public utilities (clean water, clean energy, etc.); very often badly-delivered government services. The book thereby tells us a lot about what can be done better, without ever tackling the question: to what end?

Abundance comes with plenty of nice slogans—’scarcity is a choice’, and so on—many (maybe most) of which are true. It is generally well written; it is often brisk in expression; and it has that confident, quick-moving, op-ed-on-steroids feel making it engaging and even places exciting. You can get through it in a few hours without too much trouble.

And it has done extremely well in the world: straplined as the “instant New York Times bestseller” (this framing is splashed everywhere); the blurbs are enthusiastic; the Financial Times line about it being “forceful, quick-moving, important” is highlighted too (but is it? As I suggest below, there's less to see here than initially meets the eye).

Previously:

• ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words)

• ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words).

• Democratic operating systems are glitching everywhere: Let's (not) patch and repair them (2109 words)

Currently, there are about c. 6k subscribers to the Cognitive Republic. The open rates for each piece, delivered approximately every two weeks, are close to 50% (way above average) - click here to start.

If this speaks to you: then please subscribe or better yet become a member. Paying is how you back this work—and you get the full thinking as it develops and evolves. There are several levels available – from tip jar support for free pieces as a Citizen Member to the more rewarding engagements of Voter Member and Elector Member.

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Below the line:

• a ‘Serious Book for Serious People’ <sarc emoj>;

• a dull vision of plenty;

• The missing psychology: people don’t just want stuff

• No dark vision; no threat model; naive about the moment;

• The Texan Anomaly

• The world’s irrationality: renewables and the “windmills cause cancer” problem (and much more)

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1. ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words)

2. ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words).

3. Democratic operating systems are glitching everywhere: Let's (not) patch and repair them (2109 words)

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(2109 words)

Previously:

The malaise afflicting our democracies: ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words)

‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words).

Currently, there are about c. 6k subscribers to the Cognitive Republic. The open rates for each piece, delivered approximately every two weeks, are close to 50% (way above average).

Become a member

This piece follows up on the previous ones, and proceeds by examining why the various fixes and patches on offer - abundance, watchdogs, and all the rest of them – are falling short, because the proposed fixes and patches are not adequate to the profound job of cognitive democratic repair we must engage in to survive and adapt to the present moment, and to prosper in the future. Things are moving fast, we have few new useful ideas on the table, and the ones we have to hand are pretty poor, as I discuss below.

Snippets (to learn more, please subscribe):

1.      Our default political response: ‘let’s patch and repair our operating systems, muddle onwards, share things, hope that something turns up to solve our problems.’ This is frankly not good enough, and it’s not going to work. To push the software analogy: democracies are running legacy firmware in a high-velocity and fast-changing world of social media, identity polarisation, brittle state capacity, and planetary risk (to name just a few.)

2.      I argue we need to reboot our democracies, top-to-bottom from cognitive first principles:- sensing/attention, learning, prediction, adaptation, measurement, falsifiability/correctability, and collective (institutional) memory coupled to government-by-experimentation (policy trials, feedback loops, error-correction; institutions designed to learn across time (past/present/future); legitimacy maintained through transparency, participation, and safeguards against capture)– all to allow us to rethink liberal democracy as an adaptive learning and governance system. And this, I argue, is how we are going to save ourselves and save our futures.

From last time – a quick aide-memoire – the patch and repair ideas currently bouncing around:

Abundance treats material scarcity and state incapacity as the spark of zero-sum politics. Shared-prosperity adds that distribution and workplace power are the ignition source: growth without good jobs fuels the very resentments autocrats tap. Rule-of-law actors believe you must constantly police the edges because opportunists exploit every soft spot; electoral reformers contend that structural rules determine whether opportunists ever gain the leverage to do real harm. Watchdog politics can become performative or demoralising if it doesn’t connect to material gains; the solution is pairing rule-of-law defence with abundance/competence so voters see both integrity and delivery. Information reformers think the cognitive commons is the master variable; deliberative democrats argue that identity conflict can be transmuted if people reason together under fair procedures; anticorruption assumes autocracy is a business model that must be made unprofitable. Micawberism hopes that something will turn up!

These various democratic defenders share a deeper assumption: that our democratic systems are in fact fundamentally sound, and just need some tweaks and some patchwork repairs here and there, and everything will be as it was. Yes, these defenders recognise democracy is under pressure (from scarcity, capture, manipulation, disinformation, polarisation), but generally think the underlying core operating principles remain intact and continue to work in principle – there are just some operating glitches to be rectified. The recipe therefore is patch; repair; reinforce; restore; then we can return to the old ways, and all will be well with the world, and all will be for the best in the world (or some such Panglossian nonsense).

If this speaks to you: then please subscribe or better yet become a member. Paying is how you back this work—and you get the full thinking as it develops and evolves. There are several levels available – from tip jar support for free pieces as a Citizen Member to the more rewarding engagements of Voter Member and Elector Member.

Next week for members only: a detailed critique of one of the most disappointing (and yet widely-lauded) books I have read in a while – Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Whatever abundance is, it’s not the cure for what ails us.

Our Uneasy Present

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I promised myself I’d sometimes pair a famous novel with a famous work of history when they’re genuinely in conversation with each other. This pairing happened almost by accident: I reread Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal because I’d been living inside Julian Jackson’s vast biography of Charles de Gaulle. And the two books—very different in ambition and tone—circle the same question:

What happens when a single, determined human being tries to out-think, out-run, out-manoeuvre, the machinery of the modern state?

• Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal (first published 1971; I read a Penguin Kindle edition)

• Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle (Allen Lane, 2018; a Kindle edition)

1) Frederick Forsyth — The Day of the Jackal (1971)

I first read The Day of the Jackal years ago. Coming back to it now, I was surprised by how well it holds up.

It’s a paradoxical book: a fast read that feels leisurely, because it luxuriates in method. Forsyth glories in the granular—roads and railway stations, hotels and border crossings, forged documents, timing, money, weaponry, the texture of a pre-digital Europe where systems are powerful but still clunky. The story regarding the procuring of a passport by the Jackel through impersonating a dead child seemingly led to a change in the law in the UK

The plot “fails” in the only sense that matters because history tells us it must: de Gaulle is not assassinated. So the suspense is never really Will de Gaulle die? It’s How close can the attempt get—and what does that proximity reveal about the effectiveness and capability of the state and its security services? The cat-and-mouse game becomes a guided tour of institutional cognition: how a security apparatus “thinks” through routines, coordination, files, human attention—and all the blind spots that come with those strengths.

The book has been described as a “documentary thriller,” and that’s exactly right: it’s procedural to its bones. What I enjoy most is that Forsyth makes bureaucracy dramatic, by removing glamour, and showing how power actually operates: through files, routines, coordination problems, small delays, assumptions, and missed signals.

Two lines I flagged capture the psychology and the institutional theory in miniature:

• “Like most of us, Rodin could blind himself to facts with sheer belief.”

• “The weakness of all dictatorships is that they are vast bureaucracies. What is not on file does not exist.”

The first is a pin-sharp note on motivated reasoning—belief as a solvent of inconvenient reality. The second is a brutal description of how organisations “see”: they see what their systems can register, and they treat the unregistered as if it were unreal.

Is it great literature? No. Is it a great read? Absolutely. It’s fun—fun, fun, fun—so go read it. You won’t regret it.

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A quick note on the film

Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 adaptation is (still) superbly watchable. The closing crowd sequence remains striking in its restraint: tension without excess explanation, and an atmosphere that keeps tightening right up to the end - de Gaulle attending and saluting the assembled soldiers while the hunt continues - leans into an almost unbearable tension without any dialogue: letting music do the work where you might expect dialogue helps preserve the feeling that the event is bigger than any single speaking character.

[There’s a modern reimagining as a 2024 TV series (Eddie Redmayne, Lashana Lynch; created by Ronan Bennett), which I haven’t watched…]

2) Julian Jackson — A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle

Jackson’s book is—without exaggeration—one of the most extraordinary political biographies I’ve encountered. It is huge, patient, and intellectually fair, but it never loses narrative drive. You come away not with a saint or villain, but with a fully dimensioned human being: difficult, proud, brave, stubborn, intellectually serious, often infuriating, sometimes magnificent.

Jackson makes it hard to maintain easy caricatures: de Gaulle as mere anti-American contrarian, or as pure nationalist romantic. Instead you have a fully realised statesman with a “certain vision” of France—grand, yes, but also strategic: an instinct for leverage, symbolism, timing, and the psychology of nations.

One of Jackson’s great achievements is showing how de Gaulle could be both:

• three steps ahead (in sensing where the tectonic plates were moving), and

• oddly behind (in underestimating how others would interpret him, or how quickly contexts could shift).

Jackson’s biography is, without question, one of the best I’ve ever read—monumental, engrossing, and surprisingly humane given the scale of its subject. De Gaulle led a life on a canvas as large as can be imagined.

I’m writing here as an Anglophone (with poor spoken French), an Atlanticist (now mugged by reality), and a Europhile, and I found it a genuine eye-opener. Jackson gives us de Gaulle as a difficult, truculent, brave, intellectual, human being—driven by idealism and by a deep, uncompromising love of what he took to be the grandeur of France. De Gaulle was not some form of cartoon “strongman,” nor a convenient symbol for France at war and peace, but someone with a complicated, strategic, idealist mind with a taste for theatre and a profound feel for institutional leverage.

I kept finding myself awestruck by his prescience (see the quotes below). Some of his instincts—especially about European security and independence—read less as grandiosity and more as a long-range warning.

One of the most revealing recurring themes is something I only half-noticed until Jackson made it unavoidable: de Gaulle’s willingness to destabilise a stuck situation on purpose. When he didn’t know what to do—and when he sensed that nobody else knew either—he would throw something into the arena, not always as a finished plan, but as a shock to force action, to see what would happen, to maybe then grab an advantage or resolution. He shook things, said outrageous things, to see what moved, who reacted, where the real constraints were, and where the opportunities might be.

That can look like arrogance (and often was), but it’s also a kind of political experimentalism—an instinct for revealing information under uncertainty.

And because the Forsyth novel is in the background while I read Jackson, I couldn’t ignore a darker historical echo: assassination wasn’t merely a thriller’s device. The Petit-Clamart attack (22 August 1962) was real, and terrifyingly close-run; an ambush linked to the violent politics of the Algerian endgame and the OAS milieu.

Ireland, ancestry, and an unexpectedly resonant coda

I was amused—and pleased—to discover de Gaulle’s Irish connections: he had Irish ancestry through the McCartans, and after leaving office he spent time in Ireland (ncluding time in Kerry and Galway) and he was to met President Éamon de Valera in Dublin.

The founding “national myths” of European nations aren’t sealed in by our borders; they cross and mingle in family lines, in memory and conversation, in grievance, and in admiration.

What the pairing reveals

• Forsyth shows the state as a cognitive system: it “thinks” through paperwork, routines, distributed attention, and institutional blindness.

• Jackson shows a singular political intelligence attempting to bend that system toward an historical project—sometimes triumphantly, sometimes disastrously, often theatrically.

There’s a lot more though

1. Institutions as cognition under constraint
   Forsyth dramatises how the state “thinks”: through files, routines, procedural coordination, and distributed attention. Jackson shows how a singular leader tries to bend that machinery toward an historical project—sometimes successfully, sometimes at great cost.

2. The gap between Anglophone assumptions and French political memory
   I’ve found that asking questions in French means being answered in English in Paris: surface cosmopolitan ease can conceal deep differences in political self-conception. Jackson’s de Gaulle is saturated in France’s historical trauma and grandeur narratives—France as an idea that must be made real again.

3. A shared theme: the fragility of modern order
   The thriller’s excitement comes from how small failures and delays can tilt outcomes. The biography’s drama comes from how states can survive catastrophe—yet carry internal fractures forward for decades.

4. If Forsyth is a love letter to procedure, Jackson is a study of legitimacy: how a nation persuades itself to obey, to endure, to re-found itself after collapse.

5. The Jackal fails because systems can learn fast enough—but the novel also shows how contingent that is: a different delay, a different assumption, a different file, and history might have turned.

6. De Gaulle’s prescience on Europe—especially security and sovereignty—feels less like dated grandeur and more like an early articulation of a problem Europe is still trying to solve: how to be allied without being dependent.

And together they nudge me toward a broader point I don’t think Anglophones always internalise: other democracies don’t necessarily experience the modern world the way we do, even when they speak our language back to us in a Paris café. The ease of the surface can hide real conceptual differences about legitimacy, sovereignty, the memory of revolution, the memory of occupation, and the uses of state power.

A contemporary sting in the tail

De Gaulle’s insistence on strategic autonomy—especially on defence—also reads differently in today’s European debates. Historically, he pulled France out of NATO’s integrated military command (while remaining in the alliance politically), precisely to preserve freedom of action.

I made a lot of Kindle highlights; I’m going to group them into themes—because together they reveal the deep logic of de Gaulle’s mind.

1) Memory, grievance, and the long history of states

De Gaulle didn’t simply have opinions; he carried historical layers.

• He “would hold many grudges against the British, some of them dating back hundreds of years” (Jackson, 2018, p. 140).

• He carried “a longer history of France, where the Republic was only one of the forms assumed by the state” (Jackson, 2018).

That second line matters. It tells you why so many Anglophone readings of de Gaulle slip: if you assume “Republic” is the stable, sacred container, you miss that for him the container is France, and regimes are instruments.

2) The limits of solutions—and the limits of constitutions

De Gaulle was unusually frank about political uncertainty, and unusually sceptical about the belief that a text can overpower reality.

• “The most common error of all statesmen is to believe firmly that there exists at any one moment a solution to every problem. There are in some periods problems to which no solution exists.” (Jackson, 2018)

• “We know what constitutions are worth. We have had seventeen in one hundred and fifty years, and the nature of things is stronger than texts drawn up by politicians.” (Jackson, 2018)

I found these bracing, anti-fantasy lines: refusing the comforting idea that cleverness plus paperwork equals control.

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3) Europe as a personality, not a province

A major through-line in Jackson’s portrait is de Gaulle’s insistence that Europe must be something more than a staging area for other empires.

• “What is the point of Europe? The point is that one is not dominated by either the Russians or the Americans.” (Jackson, 2018)

• “Only a multipolar world would permit Europe, and therefore France, to become a player in world politics again.” (Jackson, 2018)

• He warned that if Europe failed to become itself, “American political administrators will come to colonize Europe with their primitive methods and overwhelming pride.” (Jackson, 2018)

• And, more programmatically: to end the “American integration” implicit in the Atlantic alliance, “the Atlantic alliance must be founded on new bases. It is for Europe to propose them.” (Jackson, 2018)

Even if you disagree with the edge and swagger of the language, the underlying claim is clear: without strategic capacity, Europe becomes an object, not a subject.

4) A third way: wolves, sheep, and political economy

This is the quote that surprised me most, because it sounds like a man trying to escape the binary trap before the trap becomes a cliché.

• “The social consequences of capitalism are not acceptable. It crushes the weakest. It transforms men into wolves. Collectivism is no better. It removes from people any desire to fight. It turns them into sheep. We need a third way between wolves and sheep.” (Jackson, 2018)

It’s not a policy programme, but it is a moral psychology of systems: incentives shape character; institutions generate types of people.

5) Dry humour and political theatre

Jackson also shows de Gaulle’s knack for performance—and for the kind of oblique manoeuvre that keeps everyone off-balance.

• A cartoon in Le Figaro has him gazing into the distance: “I think I heard at the back someone not ask me the question to which I am now going to reply.” (Jackson, 2018)

6) Foresight—and the strange timing of de Gaulle

A comment Jackson makes feels exactly right:

• “It was never entirely clear if he was a man of the day before yesterday or the man of the day after tomorrow.” (Jackson, 2018) (He was both, tbh!)

And then there are the prophecies—some of them almost eerie:

• “The young Poles of today will shake off the Soviet yoke. It is written in the stars.” (Jackson, 2018)

• In 1964 he predicted Yugoslavia would not last: it needed a Yugoslav nation, and “there isn’t one. There are just bits of wood stuck together with a piece of string.” (Jackson, 2018)

This is where the biography is more than a life story, becoming a study of how a political mind makes bets about the future—and sometimes gets them right.

7) The hardest discipline: knowing when to stop

This is the most human—and perhaps the most applicable—highlight of all. Yvonne de Gaulle said:

• “People need to know how to give up, heads of state as much as artists… You become too old, little by little, and you don’t notice, and no one tells you. You don’t finish well. You finish badly.” (Jackson, 2018)

These book reviews will be members only in future - behind the paywall.

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The Cognitive Republic is:

a book-length project written online, in public, building to a full length text:

Cognitive Republic: Building Societies That Experiment, Learn, and Evolve.

Animating the Cognitive Republic is the idea that nothing is inevitable – nothing – no outcome is predetermined regarding our political futures. We can choose the world we want to live in.

Here’s a quick reminder regarding the last few posts:

I discussed the malaise afflicting our democracies in ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words, published on 26/11/2025, and I also described the chapters to come)

Next I discussed ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words, 8 Dec 25).

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Cognitive Republic - 2026

I will detail what a cognitive republic is, and how it might function, developing the theme that liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems (deepening ‘the unfinished contract’, above.

Posts will average typically between 1000 and 3000 words, delivered approximately fortnightly, with a pause in August (because, well, you know…).

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The Cognitive Republic is:

a book-length project written online, in public, building to a full length text:

Cognitive Republic: Building Societies That Experiment, Learn, and Evolve.

Animating the Cognitive Republic is the idea that nothing is inevitable – nothing – no outcome is predetermined regarding our political futures. We can choose the world we want to live in.

Here’s a quick reminder regarding the last few posts:

I discussed the malaise afflicting our democracies in ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words, published on 26/11/2025, and I also described the chapters to come)

Next I discussed ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words, 8 Dec 25).

Currently, there are about >6100 subscribers to the Cognitive Republic. The open rates for each piece, delivered approximately every two weeks, are hovering close to 50% (way above average).

Cognitive Republic - 2026

I will detail what a cognitive republic is, and how it might function, developing the theme that liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems (deepening ‘the unfinished contract’, above.

Posts will average typically between 1000 and 3000 words, delivered approximately fortnightly, with a pause in August (because, well, you know…).

My rough plan for the coming year is that about half of the posts will be outside the paywall. The other posts will be paywalled; the paywall also goes up on older posts as well.

Alternative Presents - Books!

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Talking Heads: The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds by Shane O'Mara

In Praise of Walking: The new science of how we walk and why it’s good for us by Shane O'Mara

The Cognitive Republic is:

a book-length project written online, in public, building to a full length text:

Cognitive Republic: Building Societies That Experiment, Learn, and Evolve.

Animating the Cognitive Republic is the idea that nothing is inevitable – nothing – no outcome is predetermined regarding our political futures. We can choose the world we want to live in.

To kind of quote The Terminator 2: “The future's not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

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I discussed the malaise afflicting our democracies in ‘The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die’ (1771 words, published on 26/11/2025, and I also described the chapters to come)

Next I discussed ‘The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”’ (3183 words, 8 Dec 25).

Currently, there are about >6100 subscribers to the Cognitive Republic. The open rates for each piece, delivered approximately every two weeks, are hovering close to 50% (which is way above average).

Cognitive Republic - 2026

Next time, I will start to outline what a cognitive republic alternative is, and how it might function, but by way of critiquing these views further (this will be around 1500 words).

After that, I will pick up further on the developing theme that liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems (deepening ‘the unfinished contract’, above; this will be around 1500 words).

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Cognitive Republic presents a new and dynamic blueprint for governance: one where institutions evolve, policies are treated as experiments, and national identity is continuously reimagined through a regularly updated, shared, collective memory. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Cognitive Republic charts a path toward a political renewal: democracy reimagined as a living, learning, adaptive system.

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Cognitive Republic offers a rich, scientifically-grounded vision of adaptive, democratic, governance – a ‘learning democracy’, based on neuroscience, cognitive and social psychology, evolutionary theory, and political history.

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Cognitive Republic offers a new way to build resilient, experiment-driven institutions responsive to the complex, rapidly-changing challenges we face; this is a vision of democracy as a lived, functional, and fulfilling reality, not as an occasional vote at the ballot box.

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Optimistic Vision and Engaging Narrative: More than a theoretical framework, Cognitive Republic is a call to agency and shared purpose, blending scholarly depth and compelling storytelling to inspire a wide readership—from curious citizens to change-makers—offering a new route to a flourishing democratic future for us all.

Cognitive Republic: Building a Society That Experiments, Learns, and Evolves offers a transformative vision for a future in which democracy is a vibrant, living ecosystem that learns, adapts, and flourishes. Cognitive Republic presents a new and dynamic blueprint for governance—one where institutions evolve, policies are treated as experiments, and national identity is continuously reimagined through a regularly updated, shared, collective memory. Drawing on breakthrough insights from neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Cognitive Republic charts a path toward a political renewal: democracy reimagined as a living, learning, adaptive system. With optimism, compelling global case studies, and transformative, human-centred principles, Cognitive Republic invites us to reimagine our institutions and civic life—ushering in a resilient, inclusive future, filled with greater joy, collective hope, and the full promise of human flourishing.

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(3183 words, 8 Dec 25) 

Last time, I discussed the malaise afflicting our democracies, including the general survey evidence indicating there is grave and great democratic disenchantment with our democracies in many, many countries. And the fire spreading quickly from the edges remains authoritarian illiberalism (usually blended with regressive nationalism). This authoritarian illiberalism/regressive nationalism combo is treated as a serious cure for what ails us by far too many (even though the historical outcomes of implementing this alternative are anything but benign).

This deep democratic disenchantment has generated lots of responses, including liberal-democratic reform programmes, all in various states of articulation and development, and all ostensibly attempting to rescue democracy from a slide into autocracy.

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caveats

1.      In the analyses that follows, I’m being deliberately ecumenical: different camps diagnose differing failure modes for democracy, but you’ll see their claims are often complement rather than compete with each other;

2.      Some of these camps have a principal focus that might be economic, institutional, informational, and/or civic.

3.      This is my read of the current landscape (your mileage may vary; please comment below), and their proponents might regard my summaries as too broad brush stroke.

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OK, so next, let’s summarise and analyse the eight or so families of ideas (yes, eight!) aimed at renewing democracy out there at the moment:

abundance/supply-side

This group wants to make life much less zero-sum by dramatically expanding the material and infrastructural pie for all (and, really, who can object to that?). In its popular form (“the abundance agenda”), the democracy failure mode claim is simple and indeed important: when housing, energy, transit, and goods are scarce and expensive because of policies and laws chosen by lawmakers, the feed-through is that democratic politics becomes a combat arena, where the fight is over the division of a fixed-size pie. And this pie is fixed, despite changes in demand driven by demographics, research and innovation, concentrations of wealth and inequality, education, or whatever. Under abundance people are supposed to become happier and more content with democracy, secure in the knowledge that succeeding generations will do better than the current one (which is getting the raw deal). The restitutional hope is that if resources are made plentiful to all, then the culture of grievance and narrative of loss and hopelessness loses oxygen and dies off.

One early (contemporary version) of this thinking was Derek Thompson’s piece The Atlantic (2022), and it sparked adjacent strands—Ezra Klein’s ‘supply-side progressivism,’ Tyler Cowen’s “state-capacity libertarianism,” and a broader “progress studies” revival. Although these strands disagree about the size and locus of the state, they share one thesis: you must pair growth with competent, execution-ready government. Even libertarians now argue that free markets require high state capacity to build and maintain complex systems (transmission, ports, pharmas, chips) at speed. Critics worry about environmental risk or capture, but the centre of gravity has shifted toward “build more, faster, cleaner.” Klein and Thompson have even articulated this at length in their book Abundance. To be honest, it’s hard to argue with much of this kind of thinking: democracies have been failing to deliver housing, infrastructure, jobs, even dignity and security at the scale needed. But this is not enough by itself; people want and need things other than material security (I’ll do a members only book review of Abundance in the future).

shared-prosperity constitutionalism

A second family argues that without broadly distributed gains, abundance alone won’t stabilise democracy. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s Power and Progress is good example: the central claim is obviously correct – our new technologies do not automatically benefit the many. Their answer is a focus on ensuring our institutions steer technology toward ‘good jobs’ and civic bargaining power, or you will amplify inequality and status threat (which provide the raw materials for a possible authoritarian backlash; I think it’s more complicated than that, tbh).

This line of thought focuses on increasing worker power, productivity inside firms, and developing “pro-human” AI complementing the efforts of workers rather than replacing them – roughly, the focus is growth with design constraints keep the polity governable. Economics Nobel Laureate Acemoglu recently articulated these ideas at length in a feature piece in the Financial Times: his diagnosis is spot-on, if incomplete, but his solution falters – we need some sort of ‘“pro-worker AI” (but what is that? idk). The piece is generally lacking on the implementation details – perhaps they will follow in good time – but, reader, we’re increasingly out of time!

rule-of-law groupings

A third family are the centre-right and liberal actors who spend their time naming abuses, litigating, and hardening legal and procedural guardrails. There are a quite a few of these: in the US, think of The Bulwark’s anti-authoritarian conservatives who track norm breaches on the right; Lawfare’s institutionalists who document legal pathways and where courts must draw the line; and litigation shops that contest voter suppression and executive overreach. Their operating premise is that modern forms of autocratisation and incipient authoritarianism are generally incremental, slow, and happen via procedural manipulation, politicisation of law enforcement, suborning courts, and through disinformation and misinformation (‘flood the zone with shit’ as Steve Bannon put it). The rule-of-law groupings offer a tried and tested means of resistance to democratic backsliding: a slow slog, case-by-case, court-by-court, procedural-test-by-procedural-test. Their strengths are their vigilance and specificity: they focus precisely on what they can protect and advance under specific statutes.

Their value also lies in the fact that they de-monopolise pro-democracy identities, by policing their own coalition’s excesses, signalling that constitutionalism is a shared, not partisan, commitment. that makes later bargains on rules and restraint feasible. But this is also one of their weaknesses: this kind of ‘watchdog’ politics can be negative and ‘elite-coded’ because it is costly in time and money, depends on the ultra-committed, and it tends to avoid policies discussing material or other kinds of improvement in democracy more generally. These groupings also find themselves marginalised or boycotted, too (because they’ve left the tribe!).

There’s also larger point of failure here, though: the Bulwark types tend to rely a lot on expressing moral outrage again the transgression of democratic norms. However, norms are just that – they are norms (whether social, procedural, legal, political) , not something hard-wired into the law or firm-wired into our brains, and which everyone obeys – but we can stop obeying them! Norms move and change all the time under normal circumstances; smashing them might be shocking, but that might be it. And some people (maybe even many people) might agree that certain norms need smashing! Sometimes, the outrage is the point!

electoral, legal, and constitutional plumbing

A fourth family focuses on attempting to redesign legal and political rules and laws so minority takeovers are rendered much harder to execute and maintain. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt popularised the idea that democracies now die by legal means (court-packing, rule-bending) rather than via the mobilisation of tanks in the streets, so informal norms like forbearance, loser’s consent, and mutual toleration must be reinforced alongside formal changes that support the even-handed rule of law (this might be politically - moves toward more-proportional elections and multi-party competition to reduce all-or-nothing stakes, perhaps by ranked-choice or single-transferable voting, or legislative changes ensuring appointments are non-partisan ones based on merit).

These proposals are technocratic, and they’re meant to change incentives, not vibes. They are important: I will develop the point later that expressing ranked preferences is a cognitively preferable state of affairs: being forced into a binary choice, a this or that one outcome causes dissonance for those who are not true believers. A ranked choices outcome of some sort is preferable for a variety of cognitive and political reasons.

information environment

A fifth family grouping is concerned with our information consumption. One branch focuses on platform governance—the EU’s Digital Services Act regime, which compels “very large online platforms” to assess and mitigate systemic risks and to open their algorithms and data to regulators. Another is the local news revival: some empirical work ties the collapse of local reporting to a more general development of cynicism and polarisation (perhaps because common shared knowledge is splintered and no longer easily available). Some funders, NGOs and even individual journalists have built vehicles to restore civic information as infrastructure, and to provide deep reporting on what is happening on local councils or whatever. The theory here is straightforward: resilient democracies depend on reliable shared facts and watchdog capacity at the local level; information is thought of as a public good.

However, it needs to be said out loud is that the EU’s approach to wanting to be the world’s regulatory superpower has been a complete epistemic, economic, fiscal and cognitive dead-end, resulting in the EU having basically few-to-none, major-scale, info-tech giants. It’s been a bizarre way to tackle the challenges of the future. Scaling companies from within makes complete sense if the EU wants autonomy to manage its own infotech in its own interests.

Imagine the following circumstance: you’re an employee for a giant US tech, processing EU data. The US government using it’s national security laws sends you a secret order, which you must keep secret to transfer data on some person, persons or entity, and will prosecute you to the full extent of the law if you reveal this legal request. What will you do? Obey your government? Of course you will. Axiomatically. Without question, for to whom do you owe your identity and loyalty? Not the outgroup across the water. You don’t want to end up as Edward Snowden, living in Moscow. You will ignore EU regulations, because of course you will. And there is nothing the EU can do about it. Worse – the EU will never know about it. And even if they do, there’s little they can do about it, if we are honest about it.

Far better that the EU had focused on creating opportunities for large European info-tech instead. Not having done so is a profound cognitive failure with deep and meaningful real-world consequences: an incapacity to imagine that the world would be anything other than it is, that the US, for example, would release a NatSec Strategy basically saying ‘you’re on your own’, to Europe (forget the past eighty years), and by-the-by, say ‘stop regulating our infotech companies (or there will be trouble)’. That last link is to a story that US officials are thinking of deliberately targeting EU officials who implement EU law regarding infotech transparency. Such targeting efforts might, of course, be rescinded if there is a change in the US government – but they may not be.

Leaving the threat on the table might suit a muscular US Democratic party, for example, intent on deepening the US’s tech strength. An assumption that there will be forthcoming goodwill in a new administration is a foolish one: it is deeply suboptimal to think the US government will support foreign entities over its own. The only sustainable solution is an independent European infotech sector – one that is muscular, strong, and capable.

And of course this is possible. The modern tech sector, Web 2.0+, is an invention of the last twenty years. Things can change quickly. But this one is on Europe itself to get right, not the US.

civic participation and deliberation

A sixth family include those concerned with ‘get-people-registered-to-vote’ and then ‘get-out-the-vote’ efforts, which ofc are great and important endeavours, for the right to vote was hard-won and is easily lost. There is also a slowly-developing strand of important participative, legitimising, cognitive-logjam breaking form of institutionalised citizens’ assemblies and deliberative polling to defuse identity-loaded conflicts and build legitimacy for hard trade-offs. These have worked very well here in Ireland (generally!), but they can work, and have worked, in many other parts of the world as well. I will argue later that these forms of involved citizenship tap into deep wellsprings in our neurocognitive and affective make-up. There is quite a decent academic and policy literature on deliberative groups and deliberative assembly, which I’ll take a look at later on in this series.

To be clear: citizen’s assemblies aren’t silver bullets: they won’t kill the various werewolves who want to destroy democracy. They work well when tethered to real power and clear remits, and when they sit inside a learning-oriented administrative state. And they play several key cognitive functions: they allow information and points of view to be surfaced that otherwise would stay hidden; they allow norm assessment among members of the assembly. In the latter case, citizens may hold views they assume are non-normative, but they may discover that they aren’t, in fact. Finally, citizen’s assemblies allow for a persuasive element: individual policy attitudes may not in fact have deep cognitive representations, and may actually, under conditions of peaceful debate allow people to gracefully change their minds – because they encounter ideas from their fellow citizens which, on reflection, are ones they are in fact comfortable with, having considered them.

anticorruption and external pressure groups

A seventh family is concerned with the outward-facing flank of democratic defence. These include NGO’s such as Transparency International or indeed government-empowered or international institutions sanctions regimes designed to help liberal democracies raise the cost of kleptocracy and human-rights abuses, or to ensure the drying up of cross-border financing propping up authoritarians and corroding domestic institutions. The EU has delivered many such sanction packages since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example. When coordinated with criminal enforcement and financial-transparency reforms, these tools can both harden the democracy’s perimeter and signal solidarity to reformers abroad. But governments are often loath to bed down such laws: the UK, for example, has seen many massive foreign donations to small, noisy, political parties.

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micawberist politicians

The last family, and I suspect the biggest one, believe “something will turn up (to rescue us).” And so very often it does! We forget how in times of adversity and need we can change outcomes by bringing fresh thinking to bear on the problems we have. Europe 1945 was destroyed, starving, with its physical infrastructure devastated but Europe in 1955 was embarking on the ‘trente glorieuses’, or the three decades of dramatic economic growth and reconstruction which rebuilt physical and social infrastructure and strengthened our democracies. What turned up was the far-sighted Marshall Plan to pay for this reconstruction, the initiation, deepening, and broadening of what ultimately became the EU, and much more besides.

Political micawberism is essentially the ‘cognitive miser’s’ approach: waiting for something to happen, rather than thinking through the steps needed toward actively making something happen – waiting for events to turn, a favourable wind to arise, and taking it from there. This is not necessarily a bad approach: economies across the world are littered with failed and wasted attempts to pick winners, or national champions, or attempting to dominate the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. This doesn’t mean you can’t plan, however! You can, as Singapore, China, and others have shown, but in very different ways. And what turns up might be bad – a pandemic, a war, a housing bubble, or worse.

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How do these strands relate to each other? And where do they clash?

Continue reading on Steady

I had intended that next time, I would start developing the argument that liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems.

However, before doing that, I will instead have a short interlude, where I examine (somewhat critically…) the conventional response to the problems were facing - best summarised by the phrase ‘let’s do some incremental tinkering’. We need to do more and better than fudge around the edges of the problems besetting us - incremental tinkering isn’t going to cut it.

Chapter 1 section is live for all to read. The next section is on the way. Join now to catch up before the next installment drops.

And as a recap on last time, just click here (free to read): The Unfinished Contract —Our Democracies Must Learn or Die (Part One)

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Democracy’s travails aren’t just a local problem:- there’s a global need for new thinking. Join them:

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a book-length project written online, in public - a new and scary experience for me, and I hope an exhilarating experience for you - the reader.

This is a new and focused project called: Cognitive Republic: Building Societies That Experiment, Learn, and Evolve.

We will examine how we can reinvent democracies as learning, adaptive, systems. You can read the introduction here, and the first intended section titles in this footnote.¹

The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die (Part One)

Over the past decades democratic states have been battered by crises outpacing their ability to adapt. A crisis shortlist would minimally include: a once-in-a-century financial meltdown, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a once-in-a-summer climate catastrophe, and in the background the social pressure cooker effects of a slow-building but widespread crisis in housing provision.

And there’s so much more – you can add to this list yourself (both public corruption and wars should also feature).

Public trust in democratic government and democratic institutions is falling fast, but our politics seems trapped in the same old, stale, recurring, arguments and debates. Across the world, surveys record plummeting public trust in parliaments, governments, and other democratic institutions: the share of citizens saying they are unhappy with “the way democracy works” jumped from under 40% in 2005 to nearly 58% by 2019. Similarly, in a 2024 multi-nation survey, just 36% of people in twelve advanced economies expressed satisfaction with their democracy, down from almost half just a few years earlier. In 2023 just 39% of people across OECD countries expressed trust in their national government. Younger generations are especially disillusioned: by their mid-30s, 55% of global millennials say they are dissatisfied with democracy, compared to under half of Generation X at the same age (and a majority of baby boomers are satisfied).

Democracy rests on an explicit and implicit social contract between citizens and the state. The public expects democratic institutions to govern effectively, fairly, and transparently. Democratic governance relies on a reservoir of trust – we trust that election outcomes are legitimate, that authorities will act in the public’s interest, and that social divisions will be managed peacefully through our institutions. When this reservoir of trust dries up, the very core functioning of democracy itself is threatened, and citizens may withdraw from civic engagement or turn to anti-system alternatives.

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Across richer and poorer countries alike, the same symptoms recur: we have elections placing politicians in office, but not it seems into effective power; we have parties and leaders effective at mobilising anger but when in office cannot or are unable to govern effectively; and we have citizens who feel unseen by their representatives, and who withdraw into private life or even some form of polarised or hardened identity. Loss is the master variable: people feel dispossessed of control, time, and recognition, and angry at governments that do not deliver. The 20th-century promise of linear progress has broken down; governments legislating for a predictable, linear, slow Newtonian world look brittle and unstable.

And new species of authoritarian populists have quickly evolved in this new political environment, promising simple solutions for our complex problems, as well as offering retribution and punishment to be handed out to an ill-specified enemies (judges, immigrants, cosmopolitans, liberals, outsiders, professors, experts) - any and all of whom are blamed for what ails you.

Rising distrust has coincided with the growth of these authoritarian-populist movements openly challenging liberal-democratic norms. From the United States and the United Kingdom and India to Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines, populist leaders have gained support by presenting themselves as the voice of ‘the real people’ against corrupt or unresponsive elites (even if these leaders are elite billionaires themselves). They promise quick fixes and strong leadership, appealing to voters frustrated with the status quo.

And this vicious cycle continues: eroding trust in democracy fuels populist victories, and in power, such leaders often further undermine checks and balances – accelerating further democratic backsliding.

The populist surge might be better interpreted as more a symptom than a cause of democratic malaise: only after mainstream institutions have lost trust and credibility could these outsider candidates successfully denounce the system as rigged or call for sweeping illiberal changes. This is a cause for hope: people are seeking a new way to solve our problems.

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What to do?

It’s a dismal situation. How will our democracies renew the social contract, and restore trust in government, and tame the apparent allure of the authoritarian alternative? Reversing this cycle is among the central governance challenges of our time.

Many policymakers and scholars argue that democracies must renew their social contract for the twenty-first century. Traditional remedies (such as technocratic fixes or public-relations campaigns imploring citizens to trust institutions) just aren’t enough. Traditional fixes – a bit of advertising to a few key groups, a bit of imploring, a bit of hectoring, some dog-whistles, a new website, a few tik-toks, a free mindfulness course or two for the stressed and dispossessed, a tax break or tax cut, a vote every couple of years: these are not going to work, especially as we know we are facing dangerous, unpredictable and uncertain future challenges, where policies frozen by ideology shatter, unable to cope with new circumstances or changing realities – as we have seen with many recent policy failures right across the world.

It’s easy to despair: our infrastructure still lags, our public services fray, and the general macro-mood sours further. This is a policy, capability, and capacity gap.

However, it is also a profound and general cognitive failure within our democracies: our systems no longer perceive change clearly, remember honestly, reason under uncertainty, correct error without humiliation, or tell shared stories people can recognise as theirs.

Twenty-first-century volatility is not just economic or cultural; it is cognitive at its core. Information moves faster than institutions can currently process it; policies ossify before their ink dries, and democratic feedback loops are too slow and too late, and democracies are not designed to learn from their mistakes.

An inability to learn is the democratic system disease

Democracies are bad at (a) allocating and sustaining attention, (b) remembering what worked, (c) rehearsing and learning from failure, (d) correcting without humiliation, (e) telling the truth about trade-offs. These gaps are where our contemporary demagogues live.

We need a new way of thinking, new ideas, even a new language, to discuss what ails us, and how to fix it. We need something more than equal to the challenges we are facing; we need something that will have public confidence, and which repays public trust.

A more fundamental rethinking of democratically responsive design is needed.

I argue here the alternative is governing by experiment, turning democracy itself into a complex adaptive system: a system capable of adapting by learning faster than the challenges it faces arise. If democracy is to endure, it must be able to learn in public. That is the starting position of the Cognitive Republic. It offers what populism cannot—a way to govern loss, uncertainty, and disagreement without lying about them—and how that is made tangible, measurable, and hard to game.

We need a radically new democratic philosophy – one appropriate to the complex and uncertain times we find ourselves in, and which, upfront, admits that many of the difficulties and problems we face do not admit of obvious and easy solutions, but solve them we must. Redesigning our democracies as learning systems – capable of testing, adapting, evolving, learning, and delivering, can renew the faith and trust of the public, and surmount the complex challenges we will inevitably face.

This model rests on certain key ideas:

• experimentation over dogma – power is only granted on condition that it be curious. Ministries frame proposals as hypotheses, specify success metrics, and accept rollback if the evidence disappoints;

• variation plus selection equals adaptation – just as ecosystems thrive on biodiversity, democracies grow wiser when cities, cooperatives, and regional councils test different solutions in parallel. Comparative results reveal what works, for whom, and at what cost;

• ethical foresight and inclusivity – rapid testing does not excuse recklessness. Each pilot passes through an ethics screen, accessible to the communities it may affect, while ensuring vulnerable groups are protected even as the system learns.

Over time, the republic becomes a network of continuous experimentation: problems surface, prototypes launch, feedback flows, and laws evolve.

Bottom line: Populism metabolises loss and failure into blame and retribution, offering anger instead of solutions, whereas the Cognitive Republic metabolises loss into learning with dignity, replacing the broken promise of perpetual improvement with a credible promise of visible corrigibility (the quality or state of being capable of correction).

In the Cognitive Republic, government behaves less like a command-and-control centre and more like a Civic Experimentation Lab—a publicly accountable arena where every policy begins life as a prototype. Instead of debating abstractions until gridlock sets in, leaders launch small, time bound pilots. Citizen juries watch the trials, independent evaluators track outcomes, and open dashboards publish the data in real time. Failed ideas are not scandals; they are datapoints that feed the next iteration. Controlled pilots and rapid rollbacks let lawmaking out‑pace crises instead of chasing them. Embedding continuous learning cycles into government is the best real defence against a slide toward brittle authoritarian rule.

This approach builds upon findings in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. When our brains encounter surprising or unexpected inputs, they update their models of the world, learn, and adapt; when societies face unexpected crises, they too must learn, unlearn, and relearn.

I call this approach the ‘Cognitive Republic,’ where we all, together, build an experimenting, learning, evolving society. Cognitive Republic offers a radical reframing of democracy for the twenty‑first century as a thinking and learning system—an ecosystem of experiments, heuristics, and feedback loops, not just a system of checks and balances.

Now all of this is easy to say - of course democracies should learn and be responsive! But it is much harder to think through this challenge in detail, and even harder to implement. And it is important to avoid utopian longings and yearnings. Above, a new democratic philosophy must be practical and legible, or it is useless. These are the challenges I will address over the coming weeks and months.

Next time (paywalled): liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems

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1. Here are the initial sections - and there’s many more to come.

   Introduction: The ‘Cognitive Republic’ and the Global Collapse of Democratic Faith

   1 — The Unfinished Contract: Why Democracies Must Learn or Die

   2 — The Cognitive Republic: A Manifesto for a Learning Democracy

   3 — A General Theory from First Principles

   4 — The Compounding KPI: Learning Rate

   5 — A New Civic Humanism: Philosophy & Values

   6 — Identity Engines: How Brains Make “Us”

   7 — Institutions That Think: Enhancing the Civic Brain

   8 — The Hybrid Agora: Where Pixels Meet the Public Square

   9 — Preference Rich Democracy: Beyond Binary Choices

   10 — Markets That See

What you can expect

This is my new home for a new mission: a book-length project written online, in public - a new and scary experience for me, and I hope an exhilarating experience for you - the reader.

You know me from my substack - BrainPizza. The substack will continue, and I will continue to write there on brain and behaviour. And I want to thank you for your support over the years there - it has been a very enjoyable experience. But after c. 250 pieces, and c. 500k words, I want to take the time for a separate new identity here and for a new and focused project:

Cognitive Republic: Building Societies That Experiment, Learn, and Evolve.

Reinventing Democracies as Learning, Adaptive, Systems

Cognitive Republic started life as a book proposal: I have decided instead to release it here piece-by-piece to test the arguments and to engage in thinking in public.

You can become a member by hitting the button below. There are several tiers available. Subscribers will receive occasional free posts and snippets; members will get full chapters and more besides

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Why this? Why now?

The alarm bells are ringing loudly and clearly: democracies everywhere are in polycrisis – simultaneous crises of trust, legitimacy, and governance; crises caused by political stasis in the face of rapid technological, financial, and other changes; crises of belief and confidence caused by the rise of new online media, tools, and techniques shaking the foundations of what we know.

And there’s so much more: there are the  lingering effects of the major financial shocks of the past few decades – of debt, inflation, and banking collapses; the acute crises caused by new and lethal communicable diseases spreading rapidly through our globalised world; the many wars, insurgencies, and civil conflicts taking place; the crises caused by the populist authoritarians offering simple, beguiling, but catastrophically wrong, solutions to the problems besetting us. And everywhere there are mental health crises, with anxiety, social isolation, and burnout widespread and draining potential from even the richest societies.

To use an old-fashioned phrase, anomie, feelings of disconnection, of loss of meaning, of loss of agency, is everywhere, affecting everyone.

Our democracies seem ill-equipped to handle these multiple crises and challenges. We need new, out-of-the box, thinking to solve our problems in ways that have public buy-in and confidence.

In a world where traditional institutions are brittle, authoritarianism resurgent, and democratic trust eroding, the Cognitive Republic reinvents democracy as learning, adaptive, systems.

This project can only be a success if you join me here - so I invite you to do - there are differing tiers of membership available:

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Here are the initial sections - and there’s many more to come.

Introduction: The ‘Cognitive Republic’ and the Global Collapse of Democratic Faith

1 — The Unfinished Contract: Why Democracies Must Learn or Die

2 — The Cognitive Republic: A Manifesto for a Learning Democracy

3 — A General Theory from First Principles

4 — The Compounding KPI: Learning Rate

5 — A New Civic Humanism: Philosophy & Values

6 — Identity Engines: How Brains Make “Us”

7 — Institutions That Think: Enhancing the Civic Brain

8 — The Hybrid Agora: Where Pixels Meet the Public Square

9 — Preference Rich Democracy: Beyond Binary Choices

10 — Markets That See

What’s this all about?

Liberal democracy does not need more moral rhetoric or further arguments about liberals versus conservatives or big versus small government; these arguments are tedious, care-worn, and fruitless. They are getting us nowhere. We need to move on from this way of doing business.

To adopt the language of information technology: our democracies need a new operating system, one capable of regularly updating itself so that it always remains appropriate to the challenges we face.

I argue here we need a radically new democratic philosophy – one appropriate to the complex and uncertain times we find ourselves in, and which, upfront, admits that many of the difficulties and problems we face do not admit of obvious and easy solutions, but solve them we must.

Redesigning our democracies as learning systems – capable of testing, adapting, evolving, learning, and delivering, can renew the faith and trust of the public, and surmount the complex challenges we will inevitably face.

This approach builds upon findings in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. When our brains encounter surprising or unexpected inputs, they update their models of the world, learn, and adapt; when societies face unexpected crises, they too must learn, unlearn, and relearn.

I call this approach the ‘Cognitive Republic,’ where we all, together, build an experimenting, learning, evolving society. Cognitive Republic offers a radical reframing of democracy for the twenty‑first century as a thinking and learning system—an ecosystem of experiments, heuristics, and feedback loops, not just a system of checks and balances.

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Two news stories today hit a consistent theme of mine: the tech industry has a serious problem - profound, deep, worrisome.

BL, UF: they have precisely no idea how humans brains process information; they don’t care, and it keeps blowing up in their faces.

And then they chase the next shiney thing while not fixing the obvious things in their products.

Story one: ‘Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it’

This is so derangedly stupid that words almost fail me.

MQ (but read the whole thing):

Microsoft is launching a set of capabilities in Windows today that will start to weave AI features into regular Windows 11 PCs, instead of consumers having to buy a special Copilot Plus PC. The biggest change is that Microsoft thinks people will want to talk to their computers and have Copilot take actions on their behalf.

“You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that,” says Mehdi. “With your permission, we want people to be able to share with their AI on Windows what they’re doing and what they’re seeing. The PC should be able to act on your behalf.”

Here you are in your shared workspace, saying out loud to an idiot powerpoint:

Move that line just a small bit to the left on the slide. No the other one. Now group those objects into a single object.

No, not those ones. The other ones. Stop. Try it again. It'd be faster if I did it myself…

They see billions of talk minutes on Teams and think "Aha! People love talking to computers!"

No. This is confirmation bias writ large. The mistake is simple:

People love talking to each other - for very good reasons: it’s our cognitive interface with others.

And they will tolerate talking through computers to in order to talk to other people...

Story two: ‘AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea’

“All our classes were delayed because of technical problems with the textbooks,” Ko said. “I also didn’t know how to use them well. Working individually on my laptop, I found it hard to stay focused and keep on track. The textbooks didn’t provide lessons tailored to my level.”

Paperbooks are an ancient technology. I can go and take a five hundred year old printed book off the shelf and read it. A CD from the 1990s? Maybe. But really? Who remembers Encarta? Good luck getting those CDs to work now.

your brain is a prediction engine

You are not a computer; you are a prediction engine. Until Silicon Valley accepts this very basic point, the promise of world-changing AI will keep colliding with human cognition; the results are predictable: this stuff will not work they way they think it will, because your brain does not work the way they think it does.

Summon a familiar annoyance: not the drama of a catastrophic crash, but the slow drip of small betrayals. Word quietly reformats a paragraph you already fixed; PowerPoint’s Slide Master produces a new, unintended layout that appears to have invented itself.

A thousand cuts; time is lost because the basics do not work.

Here’s today’s issue: I make two differing formats of a PDF of a PPT - slides and handouts. I try to load them to Blackboard, which can only see one of them. I assume the fault is mine (reader: it’s not), and redo the files again.

Crickets.

I try again. UGH. I go to copilot, which offers a long list of things to do. NONE of them work.

I drag the file out of the folder to the desktop, try it again. And, inexplicably, it works. I put it back in the folder. And now it works… wtf?

I tell Copilot, which replies: “That is wild — and oddly satisfying! It sounds like the file got “unstuck” somehow when you moved it to the Desktop and back. Here's what likely happened:” (longlist of gibberish about metadata follows).

co-pilot

These are not isolated defects:- the most basic functions are at issue here - the ToCs break, the Slide Master never works, and a hundred other problems. These are signals the systems in question do not serve the user they claim to serve.

And in recent months, we get grand announcements about operating systems “rewritten around AI” arriving with choreographed confidence; national edtech platforms promise personalisation, then a retreat under public pressure. The details differ each time; but the cognitive failure - a refusal to care about how humans think and act - is shared widely.

And the basics - the avoidable frictions - are NEVER fixed. I suspect they are simply not sexy enough.

the empty-vessel mistake

The tech industry proceeds from a tacit picture of the mind:- call it the Empty Vessel, the brain is a passive, lossy processor that needs more data; learning is about ingestion; and downtime is inefficiency.

And the implication of this utterly wrong model is simple: add a conversational agent to every surface; pipe in summaries; eliminate so-called friction.

This is a profound category error. The brain is not a rate-limited narrow gauge pipe; it is a predictive system drven largely by its own intrinsic activity.

you are a prediction engine

The predictive processing framework offers a better account than the techbros. The brain constructs many hierarchical generative models of the world; it predicts incoming signals at multiple levels of abstraction; it updates itself by minimizing prediction error.

Sensory input is not simply read; it is compared to a top-down forecast. The difference term—the prediction error—is passed upward for model revision; in some formulations, this is framed as free-energy minimization. Precision weights modulate which errors matter; attention is, in part, the selective increase of precision on specific channels. This is how perception, action, and learning hang together. And there’s much more - we have rapid implicit and explicit learning systems - ones that are very robust, and that take a lot of damage to knock them off course (you learned your own name at say two or three months of age - and you can still recall it a perhaps a century later. No machine has every down this.)

Two points follow that product teams consistently overlook:

First, learning is sample-efficient because the underlying model is rich in crosstabs and prediction. A child needs few exemplars to induce the concept of “cat”; prior structure does the heavy lifting. A veteran accountant inspects one spreadsheet and locates the anomaly; years of hierarchical priors make the pattern pop.

Drowning such expertise in auto-suggestions does not help; it injects noise into a well-tuned model.

Second, reward signals are not decorative; they are computational. Dopaminergic systems track reward prediction error; positive surprise updates value estimates and sustains exploration; chronic negative surprises degrade motivation and trust. And the latter is why we have such low expectations of IT systems - they work so badly, instead of so well - nobody cares about the basics - but the basics is what we want to work.

If your software produces frequent small mismatches between expectation and outcome, do not be surprised when users disengage; you have taught their brains to expect disappointment.

downtime is cognitive work

The default mode network is active during mind-wandering and quiet rest; hippocampal–cortical loops replay recent experience during sleep; consolidation strengthens useful traces and prunes noise.

This is not waste; this is maintenance and creative recombination.

The farmer who never lets a field lie fallow gets one good harvest; then the soil fails. The brain needs rest. It needs control (agency!). It needs aerobic exercise! It needs lots of things!

Tools that carve up attention into ever finer fragments ignore a simple truth: recovery and integration are part of thinking.

friction is often the thought

Some effort is a feature - cognitive friction can be a good thing. The act of manually shaping a document—choosing headings, adjusting structure, testing cadence, these all externalise cognition; manually shaping and typing allows rapid error detection by eye and hand; and it supports a fast visuomotor loop with minimal overhead.

Replacing this with voice instructions to an agent sounds futuristic; in practice it forces a slow, serial, auditory–vocal loop that increases cognitive load for many tasks.

You become a micromanager of an erratic intern; you trade fluent doing badly for constant supervision. It’ll worsen your performance.

Progress inevitably halts; and you mentally say ‘wtf - again with this 💩’.

when design collides with cognition

Consider the push for always-on conversational interfaces.

The social context is obvious: people do not want to narrate their work to a laptop in shared spaces; attention is a commons in a shared space, and speech is invasive. You know this. How difficult is to concentrate on your text when someone is speaking on the phone beside you on the bus or train.

The neurocognitive context is also vital: for common tasks, eyes-hands-screen is parallel and low-latency processing, absorbing little bandwidth, and giving you that vital time to pause, consider, think, move things around; ears-mouth-agent is serial and high-latency. It’s fine for dictation - but anything more complicated? Nah. The latter raises switching costs and disrupts flow; the promised productivity evaporates. And even your dictated text needs lots of work. I regularly use dictation to get the flow of a text going (I’ve written the first lousy drafts of my books that way), but unless you speak in perfect considered prose, the writing actually happens in the rewriting and editing.

Or consider mass “AI textbooks” promising personalisation. True adaptation requires robust learner models; it requires accurate precision weighting of errors, sensitivity to prior knowledge, and stability in basic interactions. If the platform delivers interface glitches, mismatched lessons, and privacy uncertainty, it generates repeated negative prediction errors; students and teachers learn the correct lesson: do not trust this system.

And the books themselves must obey basic laws of human learning and memory, not fads or delusions:

• learning styles: a seductive but utterly useless idea - Fuggetaboutit, they don't exist

• using your memory to strengthen your memory: retrieval practice - perhaps the best, general, scientifically-validated, most-easily implemented method for strengthening your memory

• interleaving: the mix-it-up memory method that works: fluency is a bad teacher - what feels good misleads learners about what they've learned

the deterministic-algorithm delusion

There is a deeper conceit: with enough data, human cognition can be treated as a deterministic algorithm; and surprise, an error term to be eliminated. This is neat and wrong.

A system with zero prediction error is a system with zero learning; creativity collapses; boredom expands.

a brief for human-centred tools

We are not inefficient machines waiting for a patch; we are predictive organisms that thrive on well-tuned models, stable contexts, and occasional, well-timed novelty. Better tools will do the following:

• respect cognitive load: fewer prompts; clearer affordances; assistance on request rather than constant interruption; sensible defaults that do not fight the user.

• protect attention and recovery: modes for deep work; quiet surfaces; schedules that leave room for rest and consolidation.

• build trust in small increments: reliability in routine interactions; graceful failure when things go wrong; transparent state that matches user expectations.

• leave space for positive surprise: features that surface serendipity without flooding the channel; recommendations that can be ignored without penalty.

There is nothing radical here; only psychology that has been available for decades. Yet we continue to watch clever people reinvent bad ideas with perfect confidence; and the results are as predictable as they are avoidable.

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the warning in the papercuts

The next time your word processor “helps” by breaking a paragraph you just fixed, treat it as a signal. These are not trivial bugs; they are reminders the tools are under-designed, and will keep underperforming, unless the techbros do the necessary work of making the basics work every time.

We deserve systems that work with the brains we actually have; not with a fantasy of a user who never minds the interruption, never needs the pause, and never notices when trust is run down, one small error at a time.

(some reflections on democracies and selves, with a reading list at bottom: cross-post from my BrainPizza newsletter)

Modern democracies focus on institutions (cognitive communities, such as parliaments, courts, markets, the media), and reduce the individual citizen to an abstract unit: a preference to be measured or a vote to be counted.

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This simplification forgets an underexplored, overlooked, frontier of democratic life: the human self.

The self is not simply a recipient of governance. The self is a governing structure in miniature; a dynamic, recursive, self-regulating organism of attention, memory, identity, and moral reflection. If institutions can be designed, improved, and corrupted, so can selves. And just as democracy must adapt to survive, so too must the citizens who compose it.

What follows is a reframing of the individual—not as a consumer-voter, but as a self-governing cognitive agent, capable of participating in public life with depth, resilience, and foresight.

the self as a nested governance system

When we think of the individual, not as a consumer, or voter, but as a self-governing cognitive agent, we should think of individuals as capable of participating in public life with depth, resilience, and foresight.

The self is not singular entity: it is a mosaic of subsystems: automatic reflexes, internalised habits, abstract goals, social roles, an ongoing internal conversation, an identity and personality that changes over time, and long-term values - all happening in a complex social world.

And all of these elements interact and compete and change over time.

the myth of a fixed personality Shane O'Mara Read full story

These elements are monitored and integrated by metacognitive capacities such as attention, inhibitory control, and memory. Prefrontal cortical brain systems, for instance, are critical for managing competing priorities and simulating future consequences. The brain does not simply process information—it is governing conflicting tendencies within itself.

This internal system operates much like an institution: there are feedback loops, conflict resolution mechanisms, scripts, rules, and negotiations between short-term impulses and long-term commitments. In this light, personal identity is not fixed. It is maintained and developed through continual deliberation. The self is an adaptive governance structure—with its own internal politics.

As I wrote in Talking Heads (US Kindle Ed available here):

“…human cognition has unique communicative, imaginative, prospective and collective functions. And, simply put, these abstract abilities of ours allow us to construct shared cognitive realities. No troupe of chimpanzees or pride of lions or swarm of locusts will ever sit in a deliberative chamber (like a parliament or a board meeting) to represent others and hash out together a course for the future. Nor will they sit and collectively pass a motion of praise or sanction, and communicate that to another collective entity. Nor will they ever institutionalise such processes, agree to abide by them, bind themselves to them and then act as if they are real and substantial things out there in the world. They are products of thinking, cognitive constructs, but no less real for all that – because of this unique human capacity we all have for creating and acting upon shared cognitive realities.”

“The self is not a recipient of governance. It is a site of governance.”

self-regulation as civic practice

Executive function and emotional regulation are often thought of as individual, personal, traits, but they are also the psychological foundations of democratic citizenship. The capacity to pause before acting, to decentre from one’s own preferences, to deliberate across time, and to act on principle rather than impulse are not luxuries: they are essential civic skills.

Individuals with greater self-regulation tend to be less vulnerable to populist appeals, conspiracy theories, and polarisation. When the brain is under cognitive load or emotional strain, people may become more reactive and more susceptible to simplistic narratives. Strengthening the cognitive infrastructure of self-control is thus a direct investment in the resilience of our democratic institutions.

We are all (latent) cosmopolitan globalists Shane O'Mara Read full story

“Democracy depends on minds that can wait, weigh, and think in time.”

mindfulness and moral identity as democratic scaffolds

Mindfulness, defined as sustained attention to present experience, is sometimes dismissed as a wellness fad (indeed, I have had a go at it here). But in cognitive terms, it is a metacognitive skill enhancing attentional control, reducing impulsivity, and improving reflective decision-making.

Mindfulness creates a kind of mental breathing room: a space in which individuals can notice their automatic reactions and choose how to respond. This is not just self-care; it is democratic preparedness. A mindful citizen is less likely to be swept away by outrage spirals, digital distraction, or manufactured moral panic. This is civic competence in its purest form.

Moral identity matters too. How people understand who they are—especially in terms of values and responsibilities—shapes their actions in public life. Individuals who can narrate themselves as ethical agents, rather than passive consumers or tribal partisans, are more likely to act with courage, fairness, and restraint. Democracy needs more of these citizens.

“A mindful citizen is harder to manipulate.”

Moral identity—who we believe ourselves to be in ethical terms—anchors public reasoning and long-term accountability.

In a distracted age, citizens need not just opinions but inner constitutions.

identity engineering at the personal scale

If democratic institutions can adapt, so can our democratic selves. The architecture of the self is not fixed, for it can be intentionally shaped through narrative, attention, and reflective practice.

This involves articulating one’s core values, simulating difficult scenarios (‘What would I do if…?’), and constructing environments promoting agency (reducing digital distraction, engaging in long-form reflection, or nurturing habits of dialogue).

Cognitive neuroscience supports this view: memory and imagination are deeply involved in identity formation. The self is, in many ways, a predictive model—revised through experience and rehearsal. Identity is not something to be discovered. It is something to be built.

Just as institutions must evolve, so must selves. Identity is not merely inherited or assumed: it is constructed over time and through experience and reflection. Through autobiographical memory, narrative rehearsal, attentional design, and value reflection, individuals can shape who they become.

This requires tools: ways to narrate one’s values, simulate difficult scenarios, and rehearse decision-making under ethical pressure.

Talking Heads, Kindle USA

conceptual foundations

This approach draws on my readings from several traditions:

• Cognitive neuroscience: dual-process models, predictive processing, metacognition, and the construction of identity through memory

• Virtue ethics: the cultivation of character as a precondition for choice

• Liberal political theory: autonomy as reflective self-rule rather than preference satisfaction

• Contemplative traditions: the Buddhist and Stoic emphasis on attentional sovereignty, emotional regulation, and detachment from impulse

Together, these frameworks reinforce the idea that good citizenship is not just institutional—it is internal.

a public platform: constitution of the self - some questions

• How would you draft and revise your internal constitution?

• How can you explore simulated identity scenarios (‘What would I do if…?’)

• Should you track your self-regulation and attentional capacities over time (maybe using an app?)

• Do any of these relate to how you behave in your democracy?

  How bad will you feel when your side loses the election? Shane O'Mara Read full story

experimental extensions

Some speculative projects to expand the framework:

• Selfhood scores for deliberative groups: how does internal cognitive structure shape group reasoning quality?

• Micro-deliberation tools: can we create simulated ‘inner parliaments’ or ‘deliberative mini-publics’ for training complex decision-making?

• Narrative inoculation: will identity rehearsal techniques reduce susceptibility to disinformation and moral drift?

conclusion: democracy begins in the brain

Democracies current problems are in part institutional, but they are also cognitive, emotional, and moral. We are witnessing a crisis not just of trust in systems, but of attention, identity, and coherence in ourselves.

Elections allow national conversation resets Shane O'Mara Read full story

The tools of neuroscience and psychology offer a path forward: by strengthening the cognitive capacities underpinning personal agency, societies can fortify the very structures of collective decision-making. If citizens can learn to govern themselves (via attention, learning, reflection, and moral clarity), they can also build democracies that are more resilient, just, and alive to complexity.

Democracy does not begin and end in the voting booth or the public square:- it begins in our heads - every day, in every decision we take.

A resilient democracy begins with minds that can govern themselves.

Attention is political. Memory is moral. Identity is civic.

If you enjoyed this post, and want more essays on how neuroscience and psychology can help us build better democracies, subscribe below. You’ll get new ideas weekly from BrainPizza. And a major new series is coming very soon - focusing on how we can rethink our democracies for the better.

What if societies were (deliberately) built to learn? Shane O'Mara Read full story

12 readings

1. The Significance of the Default Mode Network (DMN) in Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Disorders: A Review

2. 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis

3. Executive Function: Does America Have a Judgment Problem?

4. The Brain as a Prediction Machine: The Key to the Self?: Part 2: Sense of self may arise from the brain’s predictions and simulations.

5. Executive Functions in Social Context: Implications for Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Supporting Developmental Trajectories

6. Countering Disinformation Effectively: An Evidence-Based Policy Guide

7. Updating the identity-based model of belief: From false belief to the spread of misinformation

8. Mindfulness As Metacognitive Practice

9. Network psychometric-based identification and structural analysis of a set of evolved human motives

10. Narrative identity

11. The Psychology of Life Stories

12. Why people follow rules

‘Learning styles’ is simple in theory, possibly even flattering to the learner, and utterly ridiculous in practice (when you think about it carefully).

(This is a cross-post from my BrainPizza Newsletter - I’m just trying out this platform as an alternative)

The theory: if we somehow match teaching to a learner’s preferred modality (typically labelled ‘visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinaesthetic’, sometimes shortened to VARK), learning will improve (somehow).

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This is a big claim. Imagine being confronted with a task to learn: a written script (verbal learning), or the piano (visuomotor learning), or navigating a complex work situation with competing demands (social learning), or learning a song (auditory); or the new complex ticket machine at your train station (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic); or learning to drive a car, a bike or a computer game (visual, auditory, reading, kinaesthetic).

Transform the task somehow to your preferred learning style, and voilà, you’ll learn more quickly, efficiently, and retain the material for longer, and presumably be able to use it more effectively.

On the contrary, if you ignore your preferred learning style, then you’ll learn more slowly and less effectively.

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Seductive idea, isn't it? (First question: how do you know your preferred learning style? Do you really know it? On reflection, do you have a preferred style for learning how to swing a racket, a golf club, or to learn a new complex coding procedure? Course you don’t.)

Learning styles theory is not just a claim about some preference you have (like a preference for salty over sweet foods); it is a serious claim about the mechanisms of learning and memory, as well as a set of predictions about the learning and memory systems of the brains of learners.

using your memory to strengthen your memory: retrieval practice Shane O'Mara Read full story

However, pursuing learning styles as a theory of learning and memory has been one of the deadest of dead ends: a pointless, nonsensical, take on learning and memory, a view of learning discussed solely within a group of aficionados who have been having silly and pointless conversations with themselves for decades, even though the idea has failed every empirical test, and makes no contact with actual studies of learning and memory, at any level, from synapses to brain systems to collective memory.

interleaving: the mix-it-up memory method that works Shane O'Mara Read full story

And it is a daft idea if you step back and consider the anatomy and evolved cognitive functions of the brain in any detail at all:

Where is my memory? Shane O'Mara Read full story

In experimental terms, learning styles proponents assert an aptitude–treatment interaction (ATI): a person × treatment effect in which people assigned to their preferred ‘style’ will learn more from instruction delivered in that style, and will learn less when paired to a mismatched style.

Sins of Memory Shane O'Mara Read full story

That decisive crossover pattern has not materialised - for it does not exist. Instead, we have an intuitively-appealing story floating free of neurocognitive theory, resting on little-to-no or weak measurement, and which resists being killed off when critical tests show it is wrong (because the committed want to believe in it!).

My book ‘Talking Heads’ (US Kindle Ed available here) has an extensive discussion of shared reality, memory, and collective remembering. No learning styles here.

The prevalence of belief in learning styles among educators remains strikingly and stupidly high, possibly explaining the persistence of the learning style neuromyth despite null findings.

The effective alternatives (retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving)are rooted in well-replicated cognitive mechanisms that generalise across learners.

Finally, contemporary neuroscience shows memory depends on distributed, interacting cortical–temporal–diencephalic circuits, and not isolated ‘visual’ or ‘auditory’ modules, undermining the biological plausibility of fixed sensory ‘styles.’

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the seduction of personalisation

Learning styles continue as a conjecture about learning because they take some very weak claims, which are then taken to a stronger set of mistaken conclusions.

It is true that disciplines traffic in different representational media, from maps and diagrams in geography, to equations and graphs in physics, to timelines and narratives in history. And multi-modal materials for instruction may help learners.

From these premises, a stronger claim is made: that the durable part of learning improves when instruction is matched to a person’s stable modality preference.

The rhetoric is that of personalisation, but the reality is a label applied to people rather than an analysis of the tasks they face.

A credible theory of learning makes contact with mechanisms and boundary conditions. It specifies what is changing in the learner (encoding, storage, retrieval); it says when a predicted effect should appear and when it should not.

Learning styles accounts offer none of this. ‘Preference’ is treated as a cause; ‘matching’ is treated as a cure, leaving us to imagine a ‘visual learner’ who ought to learn better from pictures and an ‘auditory learner’ learning geometry by talk rather than diagrams (as if they don’t have a visual system!).

This is not a theory; this is ‘not even wrong’.

a test the idea cannot pass

The only fair test are experiments that:

(i) classify learners with a stable, valid measure;

(ii) randomly assign them to matched or mismatched treatments;

and (iii) evaluate outcomes that matter (delayed retention and transfer), while estimating the crossover interaction directly.

(BTL: what modern cognitive science actually says; neuroscience says not to styles; harms and opportunity costs; why the myth persists; from labels to learning architecture; policy and practice: what to stop, what to start; the bottom line; annotated bibliography, with brief notes on methods and relevance)

No learning style effects emerge from such tests.

Where effects appear, they are typically treatment main effects that help everyone: well-designed diagrams improve spatial reasoning; focused listening improves phonological awareness; hands-on practice improves motor skill.

Where style inventories predict anything, it is usually preference or satisfaction, not durable learning.

Measurement compounds the problem with learning styles:

• Learning style inventories show poor test–retest reliability, high inter-correlations among ‘styles,’ (they should be orthogonal!), and close to zero predictive validity once prior knowledge, general ability, and motivation are taken into account.

• The learning style theory’s response is not been cumulative refinement, but taxonomic proliferation (VARK one year, Kolb or Felder–Silverman the next), all accompanied by post-hoc redefinitions of success (engagement, confidence) when learning gains are not there.

• In Lakatos’s terms, this is a degenerating research programme: anomalies do not lead to sharper, riskier predictions but to ever more elastic interpretations.

• And yet this nonsense continues to be perpetuated (search ‘learning styles’ for more of this stuff).

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what modern cognitive science actually says

Although learning styles theory hypes a non-existent phenomenon, there is an alternative - the modern science of learning.

Cognitive psychology has mapped the constraints and levers that matter: limited attention and working memory, the benefits of well-aligned words and images (dual coding) when they explain rather than decorate, the power of retrieval practice for strengthening memory traces, and the reliable gains from spacing and interleaving that improve discrimination and retention.

These are general mechanisms that apply to everyone, modulated by task demands and prior knowledge, not by a person’s declared sensory preference.

Crucially, when modality matters, it matters because of content, not person. Some material is intrinsically spatial or diagrammatic; some is temporal or phonological; some is symbolic and best learned through worked examples and practice problems. The pertinent question is, “Which representation reveals the structure of this idea?”, not, “Which box did the learner tick on a self-report inventory?”

neuroscience says no to styles

The neuroscience of memory likewise points away from modality labels and toward the architecture of representation and retrieval. Human memory is supported by an interdependent, tripartite circuit linking cortical temporal regions (e.g., perirhinal cortex and temporal neocortex) that compute item-level representations and support familiarity; the hippocampal formation that binds items to space and time into relational episodes via pattern separation and completion; and diencephalic anterior thalamic nuclei, with mammillary bodies and retrosplenial connections, coordinating hippocampal–cortical communication and temporal–context signals. Lesions anywhere along this circuit produce amnesia-like deficits that cut across sensory modality (learning styles do not predict this).

What distinguishes successful from unsuccessful learning is not whether information arrived via eye or ear, but whether the system was afforded the representations and retrieval conditions it needs: clear relational structure, spaced practice, and opportunities to reinstate context.

From this vantage, matching instruction to a modality preference is orthogonal to the underlying machinery. Instruction helps when it aligns form to function (when diagrams present spatial relations, or when examples make abstract schemas concrete, or when practice retrieves and recombines knowledge under varying cues).

harms and opportunity costs

It’s tempting to treat learning styles as harmless: if it motivates teachers to vary materials and students to engage, where is the damage?

Here’s the problem:

First, once students are labeled (‘I am an auditory learner’), the label can harden into identity and avoidance. A learner who most needs to become competent with graphs or equations now has a rationale for steering away from them.

Second, time and money are finite. Every hour allocated to administering inventories, re-labeling materials, and chasing matches is an hour not spent on practices with demonstrable effects:

• building retrieval into courses;

• spacing reviews over weeks;

• interleaving problem types;

• aligning worked examples to likely misconceptions;

• and giving informative, timely feedback.

These work, btw - there’s a vast body of data showing this.

why the myth persists

The persistence of learning styles has less to do with evidence and more with psychology and markets. Broad, flattering categories feel personal (the Barnum effect). ‘Personalisation’ carries a strange political and commercial appeal: parents like it; publishers can package it. And good practices (ulti-modal materials; optionality in how students demonstrate understanding) are routinely, and wrongly, attributed to style matching. In short, success is misdiagnosed and credit misassigned.

from labels to learning architecture

There is a better way to personalise learning: adapt not to a declared modality, but to what actually matters:- readiness, prior knowledge, misconceptions, and rates of progress - the most productive personalisation is the unglamorous work of aligning tasks to goals and supports to needs.

That means teaching the disciplinary literacies a field demands (reading graphs, writing explanations, manipulating symbols, constructing diagrams), choosing representations revealing a concept’s deep structure, and designing practices that forces retrieval under varied cues, conditions, and delays.

policy and practice: what to stop, what to start

Institutions should stop administering style inventories, and cease promising staff or parents matching will raise attainment.

Instead: invest in staff development on the cognitive principles with the strongest support:

• how to build retrieval into weekly rhythms;

• how to space and interleave effectively;

• how to align words and images to explain rather than decorate;

• how to diagnose and address common misconceptions;

• how to calibrate students’ metacognition so they can plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning with greater accuracy.

Evaluate success not by immediate liking or perceived ease, but by delayed retention and transfer to novel problems: outcomes signalling genuine learning.

the bottom line

Learning styles takes a small insight (presentation of to be learned matters, a tiny bit, for reasons unrelated to learning) and attaches it to an aptitude–treatment interaction the evidence does not support. Moreover, the neuroscience of memory offers no mechanism by which a stable sensory preference governs durable learning across tasks; and the programme has failed to generate sharper predictions in the face of null results.

Learning styles: fuggetaboutit, they don't exist.

annotated bibliography (with brief notes on methods and relevance)

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119. A definitive methodological review: they specify the experimental design required to validate ‘matching’ (an aptitude–treatment interaction with a disordinal crossover) and show nearly all extant studies either don’t test this criterion or fail it. Conclusion: no credible evidence that tailoring by putative “style” improves learning.

Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., & Ecclestone, K. (2004). Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review. Learning and Skills Research Centre (LSRC). Finds weak reliability/validity, conceptual incoherence, and warns against policy/practice built on such measures.

Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(1), 64–78. A pre-registered, PSPI-compliant test of the matching claim: participants classified as ‘auditory’ or ‘visual,’ randomly assigned to audiobook vs. e-text, then tested immediately and after delay. No aptitude–treatment interaction and no benefit from matching preference to modality.

Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2020). Providing instruction based on students’ learning-style preferences does not improve learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 164. An expanded replication/extension consolidating the 2015 null results and situating them within the broader literature; again, no instructional advantage from aligning to self-reported style.

Husmann, P. R., & O’Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Anatomical Sciences Education, 12(1), 6–19. In a large anatomy cohort (n≈426), students’ VARK categories did not relate to chosen study strategies or grades; some techniques helped all students, but gains were unrelated to any learning style ‘match.’ Reinforces that preferences ≠ optimized learning pathways.

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning-styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266–271. A concise review clarifying why learning-styles claims lack predictive power and why educators should instead focus on task demands, prior knowledge, and evidence-based strategies.

Newton, P. M. (2015). The learning styles myth is thriving in higher education. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1908. Text-mines education databases and shows that the majority of papers referencing ‘learning styles’ endorse or assume their utility, despite the lack of evidence, illustrating how the myth sustains itself.

Newton, P. M., & Salvi, A. (2020). How common is belief in the learning-styles neuromyth and does it matter? A pragmatic systematic review. Frontiers in Education, 5, 602451. Systematic review of educator belief: across 37 samples in 18 countries (N≈15,405), about 89% endorse matching—belief far outpaces evidence; brief corrective interventions can reduce belief substantially.

Aggleton, J. P., & O’Mara, S. M. (2022). The anterior thalamic nuclei: core components of a tripartite episodic memory system. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 23, 505–516. Proposes a tripartite episodic memory system—temporal (hippocampal) and medial diencephalic (anterior thalamic) streams that converge on shared cortical areas—integrating lesion, tract-tracing, and physiology. Provides the neuroscientific scaffold that learning relies on distributed circuits rather than single-modality ‘styles.’