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jimrandomh comments on When to scream "Error!" - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (38)
That's not stupidity, that's unhealthiness. Which can and often does cause stupidity, but it's not the same thing, and it can't be fixed in the same ways.
I agree with you, so I'm going to tentatively remove it. TheOtherDave, this one was from your comment -- if you think that it describes genuine stupidity rather than unhealthiness, could you explain why?
Admittedly, I don't have a lot of personal experience with healthy stupidity.
I'm a fairly bright guy, by human standards, and most of my experience with genuine stupidity stems from a period of my life where I was recovering from stroke-induced brain damage, which is at least arguably a form of unhealthiness.
That said, I think everyone is familiar with the effects of fatigue on cognition. It's harder to hold onto a train of thought, it's harder to account for emotional bias, it's harder to keep things in memory. When I get tired, I get stupid. It's a kind of mental fog.
When I was recovering, I felt like that all the time.
Partly, of course, that's because I was genuinely tired a lot of the time, in large part because my blood pressure was being artificially lowered and I was greying out a lot.
But even when I wasn't tired -- during those brief blessed windows after waking up and before I started physical therapy, for example -- there was still that characteristic mental fog, all the time.
That's what I was thinking about, when I wrote it.
That said, I have no idea whether healthy stupidity feels at all like that.
Okay. Considering that you were genuinely tired during the time period about which this observation was made (and that your tiredness probably facilitated stupidity, rather than the other way around), this does seem like an indicator of tiredness rather than stupidity, so I'm going to leave it out for now. Thanks for the explanation.
Actually, on further consideration, I'd be inclined to leave it in, with a note to the effect that stupidity with biological causes is often curable. I don't know what fraction of stupidity is caused by health problems, but it definitely doesn't take anything nearly so dramatic as a stroke to cause mind fog, and I suspect it would rank highly on any cause-of-stupidity diagnostic checklist. In particular, subtle dietary deficiencies do it too.
Done. I note that I just reversed a decision twice, and might have made the correct decision quicker had I tried harder for goal-related insight before replying.
Adding "feeling like you're blind and must be led around by more observant people"