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jastreich comments on I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid - Less Wrong
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To use your analogy. Any person who doesn't provide the expected output is often deemed crazy... It doesn't mean that there is a bug in the person, perhaps sometimes it's a bug in reality.
I've talked to a number of people who most would call crazy (none of them went to the mad house -- at least that I know of). When you begin to look at things from their perspective you sometimes find that they see patterns others are missing; but lack the social graces and unique way or inability to relate those patterns to others is lost.
On the other hand, I think that we are all "crazy" and "stupid" in our own ways. I think there are really extreme cases of both.
In the context of my analogy, it's nonsense to say that reality can have bugs.
I suppose you meant that sometimes the majority of people can share the same bug, which causes them to "deem" that someone who lacks the bug (and outputs accordingly) is crazy.
But there's still an actual territory that each program either does or does not map properly, regardless of society's current most popular map. So it's meaningful to define "craziness" in terms of the actual territory, even if it's occassionaly difficult to determine whether 1 person is crazy or "everyone else" is.
I suppose what I was referring to is a spec bug; the bug is in expecting the wrong (accepted by society) output. Not an actual "the universe hiccuped and needs to be rebooted." The reason for the spec bug might not be a shared bug, but programs operating on different inputs. For instance, Tesla... Anyone who knew Tesla described him as an odd man, and a little crazy. At the same time, he purposefully filled his input buffer with the latest research on electricity and purposefully processed that data differently than his peers in the field. He didn't spend much time accumulating input on proper social behavior, or on how others would judge him on the streets. It is seen as a crazy thing to do, to pick up wounded pidgins on the street, take them home and nurse them back to health. Because the spec of the time (norms of society) say it was odd to do.
An old friend of mine who I haven't seen in years is an artist. He's a creative minded person who thinks that rationality would tie his hands too much. That said, when I was younger it surprised me the types of puzzles he was able to solve because he'd try the thing that seemed irrational.