I do like your definition of “crazy” that uses “an idea [I / the crazy person] would not endorse later.” I think it dissolves a lot of the eeriness around the word that makes it kind of overly heavy-hitting when used, but also, I think that if you dissolve it in this way, it pretty much incentivizes dropping the word entirely (which I think is a good thing, but maybe not everyone would).
If we define it to mean ideas (not the person) that the person holding them would eventually drop or update to something else, that’s more like what the definition of “wrong” is, and which would apply to literally everyone at different points in their lives and to varying degrees at any time. But then maybe this is too wide, and doesn’t capture the meaning of the word implied in the OP’s question, namely, “why do more people than usual go crazy within EA / Rationality?” Perhaps what is meant by the word in this context is when some people seem to hold wrong ideas that are persistent or cannot be updated later at all. For the record, I am skeptical that this form of “crazy” is really all that prevalent when defined this way.
If we define it as “wrong ideas” (things which won’t be endorsed later) then it does offer a rather simple answer to the OP’s question: EA / Rationality is rather ambitious about testing out new beliefs at the forefront of society, so they will by definition hold beliefs that aren’t held by the majority of people, and which by design, are ambitious and varied enough to be expected to be proven wrong many times over time.
If being ambitious about having new or unusual ideas carries with it accepted risks of being wrong more often than usual, then perhaps a certain level of craziness has to be tolerated as well.
I do like your definition of “crazy” that uses “an idea [I / the crazy person] would not endorse later.” I think it dissolves a lot of the eeriness around the word that makes it kind of overly heavy-hitting when used, but also, I think that if you dissolve it in this way, it pretty much incentivizes dropping the word entirely (which I think is a good thing, but maybe not everyone would).
If we define it to mean ideas (not the person) that the person holding them would eventually drop or update to something else, that’s more like what the definition of “wrong” is, and which would apply to literally everyone at different points in their lives and to varying degrees at any time. But then maybe this is too wide, and doesn’t capture the meaning of the word implied in the OP’s question, namely, “why do more people than usual go crazy within EA / Rationality?” Perhaps what is meant by the word in this context is when some people seem to hold wrong ideas that are persistent or cannot be updated later at all. For the record, I am skeptical that this form of “crazy” is really all that prevalent when defined this way.
If we define it as “wrong ideas” (things which won’t be endorsed later) then it does offer a rather simple answer to the OP’s question: EA / Rationality is rather ambitious about testing out new beliefs at the forefront of society, so they will by definition hold beliefs that aren’t held by the majority of people, and which by design, are ambitious and varied enough to be expected to be proven wrong many times over time.
If being ambitious about having new or unusual ideas carries with it accepted risks of being wrong more often than usual, then perhaps a certain level of craziness has to be tolerated as well.