What do you mean by “the quality of the society”? I worry that this will end up being a circular definition or something very like one.
(Some plausible definitions clearly don’t work. Imagine two societies with the exact same people, but in countries with very different natural resources. One may be much richer than the other as a result, leading to e.g. better healthcare, better education, less poverty, etc. So if those are part of what “the quality of the society” means then you’re basically declaring richer populations as more sane even if they’re composed of the same people.)
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.
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.
What do you mean by “the quality of the society”? I worry that this will end up being a circular definition or something very like one.
(Some plausible definitions clearly don’t work. Imagine two societies with the exact same people, but in countries with very different natural resources. One may be much richer than the other as a result, leading to e.g. better healthcare, better education, less poverty, etc. So if those are part of what “the quality of the society” means then you’re basically declaring richer populations as more sane even if they’re composed of the same people.)
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.
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.