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.
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”.
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.