Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 October 2009 04:23PM

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Comment author: Yasser_Elassal 09 October 2009 07:35:47PM 23 points [-]

Stupidity is the lack of mental horsepower. A stupid person has a weak or inefficient "cognitive CPU".

Craziness is when the output of the "program" doesn't correlate reliably with reality due to bugs in the "source code". A crazy person has a flawed "cognitive algorithm".

It seems that in humans, source code can be revised to a certain degree, but processing power is difficult (though not impossible) to upgrade.

So calling someone crazy (for the time being) is certainly different from calling someone stupid.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 October 2009 08:14:23PM 2 points [-]

Also yup.