I’m not sure. People in 1900 or 1950 had less knowledge than we do now, but they might have had a mainstream culture that took the knowledge they had more seriously than ours does. I’d have to be more of a historian to be able to tell how much this was actually the case.
How well does having Jaynes, Kahneman & Tversky, and The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences measure up to creationism as a political platform, blank-slate leftism and postmodernism in academia, or climate denial and anti-vaccinationists getting massive media attention?
EDIT: My mental model of Robin Hanson also notes that all else being equal, you might expect people with less surplus resources to have a higher sanity waterline, since they have a smaller margin for engaging in delusional signaling before they start running out of vital resources like food.
You could always do a veil of ignorance style thought experiment and ask how crazy you would expect things to be for you if you were a person chosen at random at a given time and place to try to sum over some of the contexts.
Should differences in agency be accounted for somehow? If there’s a single god-emperor somehow able to order absolutely everyone around in minute detail, should you consider only the sanity of the god-emperor, or also of everyone else, when all they can do is obey the god-emperor? The lives of the populace are going to suck, but will be actively crazy only if the god-emperor orders them to do stuff that results in craziness. One idea of the past is that there was more overt control by some sort of small social elite caste and the general populace had less individual decision-making ability then.
I’m not sure. People in 1900 or 1950 had less knowledge than we do now, but they might have had a mainstream culture that took the knowledge they had more seriously than ours does. I’d have to be more of a historian to be able to tell how much this was actually the case.
How well does having Jaynes, Kahneman & Tversky, and The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences measure up to creationism as a political platform, blank-slate leftism and postmodernism in academia, or climate denial and anti-vaccinationists getting massive media attention?
EDIT: My mental model of Robin Hanson also notes that all else being equal, you might expect people with less surplus resources to have a higher sanity waterline, since they have a smaller margin for engaging in delusional signaling before they start running out of vital resources like food.
I also think it’s inaccurate to say there’s A sanity waterline as opposed to different waterlines in different contexts.
You could always do a veil of ignorance style thought experiment and ask how crazy you would expect things to be for you if you were a person chosen at random at a given time and place to try to sum over some of the contexts.
Should differences in agency be accounted for somehow? If there’s a single god-emperor somehow able to order absolutely everyone around in minute detail, should you consider only the sanity of the god-emperor, or also of everyone else, when all they can do is obey the god-emperor? The lives of the populace are going to suck, but will be actively crazy only if the god-emperor orders them to do stuff that results in craziness. One idea of the past is that there was more overt control by some sort of small social elite caste and the general populace had less individual decision-making ability then.