And not just because of the nice words about something I wrote. The comparison to an OS is right on.

I think the concept of "hardwired" cognitive differences is actually a useful one; it's not necessarily a declaration of hopelessness, either. If it's true that people group themselves into roughly two camps according to mental architecture, it's always been true. And we can look to the past at times when we managed to get along well enough to run a country to know that there must be some way to make the two OSes work together.

OS is a good analogy because the real things don't exist in perfect isolation from one another. All the OSes talk fluently over the Internet and local networks, and standard file formats permit exchange of data. It must once have been true that the meatware OSes once had common communication protocols and document formats that let them talk together. Part of the problem now is analogous to spam: The public discourse has been buried under terabytes of spurious bullshit; memetic chaff shot out of cannons by both sides.

Another way that real OSes cooperate is through standard software interfaces that let carefully-written software work on multiple OSes; or translation layers when an API isn't enough. The way that JavaScript, for example, works the same way no matter what kind of computer it's running on. The analogy to a meatware OS that I'm groping toward has to do with how we share common ideas and principles and rules. How, for example, each mental architecture interprets the Constitution, when a copy is uploaded and takes up residence inside one kind of brain or the other. If the translation/interface were perfect, we'd all be in perfect accord about things like the meaning of the Second Amendment [humor]. But being able to agree on a consensual shared reality even some of the time would be a hell of a relief.

Maybe the old label for these meatware compatibility technologies was "live and let live". It seems like, in the modern world, everybody's trying to convert everybody else; like Apple trying to get people to dump their PCs, or vice-versa. Ain't gonna happen, especially if so many of us are truly hard-wired. What must have worked in the past was simply not trying to be vindicated through conversion, but to just settle for doing a competent job running the country through compromise and cooperation and agreeing to disagree.

And, historically, through a lot of shared denial. I don't think we can just return to a bygone era in which women and minorities and gays and the poor knew their place and just STFU about it. We have to figure an accommodation that works for quite a few more constituencies than it had to in the past, and those growing pains are proving excruciating.