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The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

aeon.co

1–10 of 250 posts

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#2
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.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#4
Certainly, there's too much magical thinking, but what the heck is "hypersane?" Is it an absence of conspiracy theories, foolish beliefs, and word-salad? Maybe giving too much attention to the histrionic, the unreasonable and the crazies is part of the problem.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#6
post #5

Interesting subject, terrible article. This wouldn't even pass on one of those sites that sells essays for students. There are people who do well under stress. Army elite units have selection programs to find such people.

It felt like a word salad.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#7
I agree that this is not a very well-written article in that the terms are not well-defined.

I think the self-transforming mind is a more useful concept: https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-th....

If you can understand your own motivations and see through ideology, you aren't bound by the limited possibilities of the "normal man." Of course, everyone thinks they are further along in development than they actually are. Perhaps the author actually is hypersane... or he is just confused.

Re: The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

#10
Now that I've thought about it, I'd like to posit that the Author is not in fact talking about "Hypersanity" as a state of mind, but in fact, just people particularly dedicated to spreading their ideas.

As I was reading the article, I was particularly struck by how it failed to acknowledge the threads of ideas which "normal men" may have, but never advertise particularly far. If we were to cast out the net of all the ideas that normal people have, and then also put it through some kind of heuristic to pick the best ideas, we'd end up with something far better than a "hypersane" person.

Adding to my previous comment, the issue here is the heuristic for picking the best ideas doesn't exist for either normal or alternative thinking, so amongst both sets, we end up with masses of garbage.

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