I don’t think that’s the case. It seems to me that a very significant part of what people learn from the surrounding culture is not communicated explicitly.
Yeah, I went and oversimplified there. Though I wonder if it still says something about the complexity of the patterns that the majority of the members of the culture can be expected to internalize them quite fully. It seems like there should be some low common denominator elements going on there compared to what goes on with peoples’ internal mental states.
I agree it can make sense when it comes to particular areas of knowledge, especially those that are technical or hard-scientific. But one would be hard pressed to find many examples when an all-encompassing comparison would make sense.
I thought about the Medieval Europe versus present-day Europe comparison, but Medieval Europe was probably reasonably sane when it came to agriculture or warfare. One big difference I can think of is how the two would react to a significant change in their circumstances. Present-day culture still isn’t quite good at responding to change in the most beneficial way, but Medieval culture could get away with not even considering that things might change in a big way and people would need to reassess how they go about dealing with things.
As far as I can tell, the sanity waterline idea emerged from the frustration of people consistently reacting to certain types of new information in a stereotypical and easily refutable way, and in a higher sanity waterline culture, people would have better cached thoughts to match with useful new ideas or would feel obliged to recognize when something should be given more thought before opining about it.
Yeah, I went and oversimplified there. Though I wonder if it still says something about the complexity of the patterns that the majority of the members of the culture can be expected to internalize them quite fully. It seems like there should be some low common denominator elements going on there compared to what goes on with peoples’ internal mental states.
I thought about the Medieval Europe versus present-day Europe comparison, but Medieval Europe was probably reasonably sane when it came to agriculture or warfare. One big difference I can think of is how the two would react to a significant change in their circumstances. Present-day culture still isn’t quite good at responding to change in the most beneficial way, but Medieval culture could get away with not even considering that things might change in a big way and people would need to reassess how they go about dealing with things.
As far as I can tell, the sanity waterline idea emerged from the frustration of people consistently reacting to certain types of new information in a stereotypical and easily refutable way, and in a higher sanity waterline culture, people would have better cached thoughts to match with useful new ideas or would feel obliged to recognize when something should be given more thought before opining about it.