This article talks about sanity, but doesn't really state what it is. What it describes is essentially just alternative perspectives born out of those rejecting, or rejected by, society. This state has indeed produced profound ideas, but it has also produced even more nonsense ideas. The article makes the classical mistake of the binary: There's the mainstream, and the higher "hypersane". Unfortunately things aren't so black and white. Even black and white plus grey is only one dimension. What this article serves to inspire is pseudoscientific nonsense simply because it is alternative, by pitting all alternatives against mainstream society, without acknowledging that amongst the alternatives, there are some better than others. Unfortunately there's no good heuristic to differentiate between them, when they are already alternative and don't have all that many people researching them.
>This state has indeed produced profound ideas, but it has also produced even more nonsense ideas
Can you say with 100% confidence what is profound and what is nonsense in this Universe?
>The article makes the classical mistake of the binary: There's the mainstream, and the higher "hypersane".
The two are extreme points so that we can see the difference, of course, there are all kinds of intermediate states as Diogen was not walking with a lamp during daylight when he was 5.
> Can you say with 100% confidence what is profound and what is nonsense in this Universe?
Given that profundity only makes any sense at all in the context of humans, with a fair degree of confidence (100% is never possible), I believe a reasonable measure is possible. The funny thing about profundity is: It means the advancement of thinking in people. To further add to this, it means advancing society, by extension of advancing its people (Unless you can find exceptions for which humanity does not benefit from cooperation). Advancement of people can be measured, if people agree on criteria. You might even create a measure based on how many different, sometimes competing criteria it advances. One proviso to this is that it is not easy to do so immediately, we usually need to look at the results over time, as it is an empirical measure on society.
Never forget, it's easy to retreat to "Well nothing is absolute, so why bother". The fact that we can create measures that have broad agreement mean we can come up with practical compromises that would essentially guarantee that ideas can never be equal. Yes that does mean that broad agreement will favour society, see the previous paragraph. Also, due to the time issue, broad agreement does change, and it should. So again, not 100% but reverting to that requirement is also not useful. The other dimension in which broad agreement is slippery is, what is the population of people you're asking. This is the edge of where ideas are forged. So even though a wider population may not get broad agreement of something, time will tell.
If there's one final point which I will make which drives home that it is important to have some measure, it is embedded in this saying "We stand atop the shoulders of giants". Without measure, what giants? What ideas can we actually build upon and hope to get something that isn't random chance.
>The two are extreme points so that we can see the difference, of course, there are all kinds of intermediate states as Diogen was not walking with a lamp during daylight when he was 5.
I get that, as I said, the profound has come from this mode of thinking. However, the issue is the framing of the article, it posits that becoming hypersane essentially necessitates being divorced from society in it's entirety. That part is not so well supported. But what this framing does do, is make it seem like anyone who doesn't agree with society has an edge in their thinking (and being, given we seem to be focusing on individual capacity) and should therefore continue with what they are doing. My sense is that this is somewhat orthogonal to success in creating the cutting edge. Clearly accepting everything in society without question can't, but this notion that you must go through madness seems outlandish. The framing seems very good however, to pandering to the various counter-culture desires, and the article does state the author has an upcoming book on the subject.
> However, the issue is the framing of the article, it posits that becoming hypersane essentially necessitates being divorced from society in it's entirety.
Yes, and it makes it clear it's necessarily so by definition. See, there is this gaussian distribution in nature. Most people are a bit insane, not much, but just enough. Of course the hypersane would be divorced from a society that believes in fairy tales, propagates myths, and is ready to kill or die for it.
