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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Implied? No, not even with the most uncharitable interpretation did tombert even imply that being poor makes you "crazy" or that being crazy makes you a criminal. A hindered ability to think rationally might only make one more impulsive or less able to consider long term consequences.

You are literally accusing the writer of implying things which rely upon a context of your own making, not theirs.

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This is interesting - I read that statement exactly like the person who made the post that you just responded to, and thought it to be the clearly obvious interpretation.

I would consider someone that has their rationality stripped (or "greatly hindered") to be irrational. I think "irrational" is a bit more passive than "crazy", but I would personally read those as mostly synonymous.

I wonder why we interpret the same sentence so differently - we may be reading between the lines in very different ways - like the "blue&black / gold&white" dress.

Again, I apologize if it's not more clear, but you do understand that if I implied that they were crazy, that would also imply that I called myself crazy, right?

That's what the following paragraph is about, trying to explain that this could happen to anyone.

Yes? I did understand that - you were saying that being broke can lead one to do and think things that they'd normally consider crazy or irrational.

Are you thinking that I understood your statement to mean that being broke would permanently turn you into a loony? Maybe I generally consider "crazy" to be a temporary state or state of mind that anyone can get into or out of, and you generally consider "crazy" to be a permanent fixture of personality, dividing society into hard lines of people that are either "crazy" or "not-crazy"?

To say one's ability to think rationally is severely hindered, suggests impairment in (for example) considering short term versus long term priorities, or being overly impulsive, or being overly controlled by emotions.

Whereas "crazy" suggests an absence of sanity.

Rational vs irrational. Sanity vs insanity. These are not interchangeable ideas.

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