Edit :Excellent suggestions in the comments. Two of them stood out for me:

  1. "Untaught" may be better.  It is less connoted (if at all), conveys about the right meaning, and can be understood by about anyone (thanks, shminux).
  2. Using a word to name a category can raise walls around it. In this case, we must be extra careful not to stigmatize the very people we'd like to join us (thanks, daenerys).

We often use "insane" to describe people whose behaviour or beliefs are below the sanity waterline. But as most must would agree here, you cannot call someone insane with a straight face just because he happens to believe in magic.

I'm currently watching Future by Design, a documentary featuring Jacque Fresco and the Venus Project. Jacque came up with this word, "unsane", to describe people who basically, aren't rational because they haven't been exposed to the right ideas yet.  Which would be different from "insane", which is more about irrevocably irrational people.

I like this word, because there isn't the tone of accusation we find in "insane". This neutrality makes it easier to say that we can do something about it. Insanity should be eradicated like vermin. Unsanty on the other hand can be fixed.

So, do you think this word, "Unsanity" might be worth using?

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Nonsane would be better, I think. Whereas unsane suggests a strongly opposite to sane, nonsane suggests a mere lack of sanity. It also looks like it might be related to nonsense, which is a common product of nonsanity.

I also like nonsane better, for those reasons and because I would predict that using unsane in conversations with persons considered to be so, is more likely to provoke Logical Rudeness and dismissal in the form of "it's pronounced 'insane', idiot", than nonsane is likely to.

Nonsane is a clearly-separate term. Unsane pattern-matches to Ralph Wiggum.

Nonsane would be better, I think. Whereas unsane suggests a strongly opposite to sane, nonsane suggests a mere lack of sanity.

I'm shocked that this ended up in an extreme upward spiral. "Strongly opposite" doesn't seem to be the suggestion at all. We have an actual word (insane) that means that and the fact that someone has clearly gone out of their way to use insane is an overwhelmingly strong indication that they are not trying to say "strongly opposite to sane!"

The difference between "non-X" and "unX" tends to be that 'unX' is closer to being consolidated into a single word than 'non-X' which is closer to a word with an external operator applied. Kind of like 'atheist' vs 'non-theist'. Real words that are actually words tend to be 'unX' and not 'nonX' (typing nonchristian into google just gives you a suggestion to try 'non christian' which in turn returns results consisting 'non-christian') so creating a fake word of the type 'nonX' is just totally unnatural.

The above is not to say that 'unsane' should be used as alternative to using 'sane' with a 'non' operator. Just that having my tribe adopt a 'nonsane' as a jargon word would be outright embarassing. It's nerdy while not even having the saving grace of doing nerdy right!

I downvoted everyone who suggested that we call people who have not yet been exposed to rationality: "ignoramuses", "stupid", "ignorant", or the like.

I would like to grow the LessWrong community, and calling everyone who isn't already one of us names, is not the way to do it. Also, I find it offensive, and would like to see less comments like these.

Point taken. I may even have to say "oops". I have forgotten that naming categories tend to raise walls around them. (Here, using a word such as "unsane" or "non-sane" would tend to stigmatize even If I don't want to).

"Ignorant" derives from the Latin ignorantia, from the verb ignorare, to not know. (The Dutch translation is "onwetend", literally, "un-knowing"). If I had not been informed of the negative connotations it carries in English, I would have thought it a perfectly polite word to use.

People like to be able to dismiss any criticism as "calling names", "ad hominem". It is therefore unlikely that you'll be able to find a term that captures the original meaning of (wilful) ignorance without the insulting connotations. If an alternative term were to find widespread use, people would just start taking offence at the new term - being offended allows them to ignore your criticism.

In French "ignorant" just means "not knowing", and though it has a connotation of being generally uneducated and possibly stupid telling someone they're ignorant in the context of a particular topic usually goes over well. The connotations in English are much more negative, and I got seriously bitten in the ass over that.

I think it sounds to blatantly like a euphemism.

"differently oriented" makes for a better euphemism.

But it's not different, that's the problem; it's mainstream!

"Acolyte of the sanity-normative hegemony"?

Irrational has about the right meaning and has less unfortunate connotations than insane. Though admittedly they might still be worse than what you're looking for.

"Unsane" was Korzybski's word a long time ago. One blogger in the general-semantics tradition writes: "The difference between unsane and insane is that unsane doesn't necessarily get you into trouble." G.s. uses "unsanity" to mean something like "having a map that doesn't describe the territory accurately."

That said, I think we should recognize that "sanity" is the name of a social, behavioral concept, too. We should be cautious using it, since it may drag in those connotations. A person who can't cope with the world due to psychological difficulties may be labeled "insane" by society even if their map of the world is not any more inaccurate than anyone else's. Once upon a time, being sexually attracted to people of the same sex was considered a matter of insanity; today, being an impulsive child who won't sit still in classrooms is considered a matter of insanity.

You want a word that means "these person's ideas are so wrong that they shouldn't even be discussed in polite company".

Look at this from the outside view, you want a word that's essentially a rationalist equivalent to "infidel" without the connotations "infidel" has of making its user seem scarily dogmatic.

So, do you think this word, "Unsanity" might be worth using?

Νο, that looks and sounds like "unsanitary".

If you don't want to use the word "insanity", I'd suggest you use the words "non-sanity" or "irrationality" instead.

EDIT: After a more careful reading of your post, I agree with the "ignorant" and "untaught" suggestions instead.

There are three relevant sanity levels to compare against: the minimum required to function, the level where most people are, and where we wish most people were. Call these clinical (C), normal (N) and extra-rational (X). If a person's sanity level is R, then

insane: R<C
irrational: R<N
rational: R>=N

It'd be nice to have a good word for N<=R<X, but unfortunately, my intuition says that

unsane: R<<C  

Which would make it an insult; so even if we redefine it as N<=R<W, people who hadn't heard that definition would be likely to react negatively.

It's a band. And a horror film.

Though this may not be the word for it, it's clear what you're getting at, and a word for it may be helpful.

If someone's ignorant in regards to the history of Mesoamerican history, or nuclear physics, or hydromechanics, that doesn't mean they're irrational/insane towards it.

Ignorance has nothing to do with how the word "insane" has been typically used in Less Wrong. It's been typically used to refer to people whose minds don't properly handle information about reality and/or make counterproductive decisions even though they have the information they require to not do so.

Indeed if someone's merely ignorant, and that's why they don't make the optimal decisions, that's a vastly smaller problem than when they have all the required information and still make insane decisions.

I thought he wanted something without a negative connotation.

Yeah, but if people actually start using the word "unsane", then I expect it to acquire a negative connotation quite rapidly.

Not knowing things is bad. I don't think there should be a non-negative word that excuses insanity by lack of knowledge.

So, do you think this word, "Unsanity" might be worth using?

I expect it is one that I will adopt. Most likely with the 'unsane' word consisting of a link to this post. I always appreciate posts that I can link to in order to minimise how verbose I have to make a comment when trying to cross inferential differences.

I tend to support the use of "insane" and "crazy" to mean "severely and systematically irrational", because there are some common points with actual mental illness that makes the analogy reasonable, and the connotations can be desirable. But if you're trying to create a neutral word so that you can put more connotations of badness, irrationality, and irreversibility into "insane", you're going to seriously distort your view of literal insanity. Literal-insane people have lots of experience at basic skepticism, so that's a strong protection against ending up colloquial-insane if you don't fail right at the start. And when you say insanity should be eradicated and use comparisons to vermin, you're saying that you want to take away my pretty hallucinations, and you're begging a reader who doesn't understand the horns effect very well to replace "insanity" with "insane people".

If you want a cutesy word for little problems that aren't so bad, maybe start using "insane" and pick something like "stupid" for the more severe version. Or at least pick something unrelated enough that "insane" will keep sounding like "having reasoning flaws that impair rationality" rather than "so fucked up, man, don't even try".

Lot of the time the appropriate word is 'stupid', to be honest. H. Sapiens, even the smartest ones, are pretty stupid; barely intelligent enough to have technological progress. Barely intelligent enough to come up with things that make sense, too.

I like normal-crazy. Crazy has nowhere near the negative connotations of insane and "we're all a little bit crazy (in our own special way)" is something of a meme. "This bit of crazy (you can call it a heuristic if you want) is miscalibrated" has gone down decently for me. The brackets are an alternative, not an aside to say.