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.
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. ...
Razib summarized my entire cognitive biases talk at the Singularity Summit 2009 as saying: "Most people are stupid."
Hey! That's a bit unfair. I never said during my talk that most people are stupid. In fact, I was very careful not to say, at any point, that people are stupid, because that's explicitly not what I believe.
I don't think that people who believe in single-world quantum mechanics are stupid. John von Neumann believed in a collapse postulate.
I don't think that philosophers who believe in the "possibility" of zombies are stupid. David Chalmers believes in zombies.
I don't even think that theists are stupid. Robert Aumann believes in Orthodox Judaism.
And in the closing sentence of my talk on cognitive biases and existential risk, I did not say that humanity was devoting more resources to football than existential risk prevention because we were stupid.
There's an old joke that runs as follows:
A motorist is driving past a mental hospital when he gets a flat tire.
He goes out to change the tire, and sees that one of the patients is watching him through the fence.
Nervous, trying to work quickly, he jacks up the car, takes off the wheel, puts the lugnuts into the hubcap -
And steps on the hubcap, sending the lugnuts clattering into a storm drain.
The mental patient is still watching him through the fence.
The motorist desperately looks into the storm drain, but the lugnuts are gone.
The patient is still watching.
The motorist paces back and forth, trying to think of what to do -
And the patient says,
"Take one lugnut off each of the other tires, and you'll have three lugnuts on each."
"That's brilliant!" says the motorist. "What's someone like you doing in an asylum?"
"I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid."