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ABranco comments on I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid - Less Wrong
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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.
Excellent distinction, Yasser.
I would add one more case:
Wrongness is when the output of the "program" doesn't correlate reliably with reality. But this could happen not only because the algorithm is flawed (wrong because crazy), but also because of insufficient or incorrect input. I think this is an important distinction, because the person can be smart (non-stupid) and rational (non-irrational = non-crazy) but still wrong nevertheless — and those around would call him "crazy" or "stupid" undeservedly.
Example: CEOs taking calculated risks but being fired because the company, guided by him, flipped the coin and got head instead of the desired tail. Stakeholders expected him to be omniscient.
Those CEOs who get it right will be perceived as omniscient gurus. Hindsight bias will make them write books on how to be successful; survivorship bias will lure people into buying them.
Not being crazy makes your output less wrong. But doesn't guarantee it to be right, either.
If I didn't get it wrong in my analysis above (puns intended), would it be fair to say that this community, having the mission to fix the biases in our algorithms, should be even more appropriately called Less Crazy instead?