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 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."
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.
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.
I am not sure this type of "craziness" itself is always a bug.
Irrational beliefs and behaviors often have perfectly rational explanations that make sense from a mental health point of view: humans are more emotional then logical creatures. Internally coping with (often unconscious) emotional problems can be a higher priority personal task than correlating with reality in every possible respect.
-2jastreich
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.
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."