Speaking about typical indviduals, ignorant is a good word, insane is not. As you say, it makes sense trying to explain things to an ignorant person, not to an insane person. Individuals can be explained things with some degree of success. I agree with you on this.
The difference becomes less clear when dealing with groups of people, societies. Explaining things to a group of people, that is more often (as an anthropomorphism) like dealing with an insane person. Literally, the kind of person that hears you and understands your words, but then also hears "voices in their head" telling them it's bad to think that way, that they should keep doing the stupid stuff they were doing regardless of the problems it brought them, etc. Except that these "voices" are the other people. -- But this probably just proves that societies are not individuals.
there's no problem with saying everyone else is wrong so long as you have either 1) results, or 2) good, persuasive, arguments
Yeah, having results would be good. The Friendly AI would be the best, but until then, we need some other kind of results.
So, an interesting task would be to make a list of results of the LW community that would impress outsiders. Put that into a flyer, and we have a nice PR tool.
The difference becomes less clear when dealing with groups of people, societies. Explaining things to a group of people, that is more often (as an anthropomorphism) like dealing with an insane person.
That's fair enough. I'd stay away from groups of people. Back in the day, they used to write without vowels, so that you could only really read something if you were either exceptionally literate or were being told what it said by a teacher. I say never communicate with more than a handful of people at once, but I suppose that's not possible a lot of the time.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.