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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: MrMind 09 February 2015 09:12AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 12 February 2015 06:19:46PM *  1 point [-]

I do not propose my comment as a definition, I propose it as a finger pointing in the general direction of where you want to look.

Note that the original question ("What is a population measure of sanity?") critically depends on the definition of "sanity" which is not at all obvious to start with.

Comment author: gjm 12 February 2015 06:31:00PM 1 point [-]

I do not propose my comment as a definition

I know; that's why I said "I worry that this will end up being a circular definition [...]" rather than "I worry that this is".

the original question [...] critically depends on the definition of "sanity"

I took the original question to be partly asking for a definition of "sanity".

Comment author: Lumifer 12 February 2015 06:47:57PM 1 point [-]

I took the original question to be partly asking for a definition of "sanity".

Specifically, the sanity of a social group which is a bit different from the sanity of an individual.

One obvious approach is to measure it by the matching of the map and the territory, but that will make "sanity" very highly correlated with scientific and technological progress which probably not what we want.