From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Thu May 20 1999 - 16:04:17 MDT
> In large part, I think most of us agree on certain aspects
> of what a 'sane' person would be, as particularly outlined
> in Max More's Extropian Principles - Pancritical
> Rationalism, Practical Optimism, the use of Korzybski's
> E-Prime, as well as the assistance of advancing
> technological augmentations...
I'll have to disagree on several points here. First, I
think is possible to be completely sane and irrational.
A person who knowingly chooses a noncritical epistemology
and metphysics--a devout Christian, for example--is not
rational, but otherwise functions adequately according to
eir own sub-optimal choices, can interact usefully with
others, and is otherwise not "insane", in the sense that
ey is competent to make eir own choices, even if they are
bad ones. I've always seen E-prime as a gimmick vaguely
related to clarity of thought and expression, but it is
so easy to come up with murky E-Prime and precise English
that I'm not convinced it's a good thing in general.
Finally, I'm not yet entirely convinced that optimism is
optimal. I do see some of Max's points as valuable, but
most of them are just rational. I can't think of a single
decision I have made in my life on the basis of optimism
that wasn't just a rational choice for other reasons, and
even if there were a connection, I wouldn't call a
pessimist "insane", even if ey was unpleasant to be around.
Indeed, I might seek eir advice before embarking upon some
risky venture to see if ey had better ideas about what
might go wrong.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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