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pjeby comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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It seems to me that the principal issue is that, even if you know all those things... that doesn't guarantee that you're actually applying them to your own beliefs or thought processes. There is no "view source" button for the brain, nor even a way to get a stack trace of how you arrived at a particular conclusion... and even if there were, most of us, most of the time, would not push the button or look at the trace, if we were happy with our existing/expected results.
In addition, most people are astonishingly bad at reasoning from the general to the specific... which means that if you don't mention religion explicitly in your hypothetical course, very few people will actually apply the skills in a religious context... especially if that part of their life is working out just fine, from their point of view.
It may be fictional evidence, but I think S.P. Somtow's idea that "The breaking of joy is the beginning of wisdom" has some applicability here... as even highly-motivated individuals have trouble learning to see their beliefs, as beliefs -- and therefore subject to the skills of rationality.
That is, if you think something is part of the territory, you're not going to apply something you think of as map-reading skills.
Hm, in fact, here's an interesting example. One of my students in the Mind Hackers' Guild just posted to our forum, complaining that by eliminating all his negative motivation regarding work, he now had no positive motivation either. But it was not apparent to him that the very fact he considered this a problem, was also an example of negative motivation.
That's because even though I teach people that ALL negative motivation is counterproductive for achieving long-term, directional goals (as opposed to very short-term or avoidance goals), people still assume that "negative motivation" means "motivations I don't like, or already know are irrational"... and so they make exceptions for all the things they think are "just the way it is". (Like in this man's case, an irrational fear linked to his need to "pay the bills".)
And this happens routinely with people, no matter how explicitly and repeatedly I state that, "no, you have to include those too". It seems like people still have to go through the process at least once or twice with someone pointing one of these out, before they "get it" that those other motivations also "count".
Heck, truth be told, I still sometimes take a while to find what hidden assumption in my thinking is leading to interference... even at times when I'd happily push the "view source" button or look at the stack trace... if only that were possible.
But since I routinely and trivially notice these map-territory confusions when my students do them, even without a view-source button -- heck, I can spot them from just a few words in the middle of their forum posts! -- I have to conclude that there is something innate at issue, besides me just not being a good enough teacher. After all, if I can spot these things in them, but not me, there must be some sort of bias at work.
I suspect you are right; the issue isn't that these people haven't "learned" relevant abstractions or tools. They just don't have enough incentives to apply those tools in these context. I'm not sure you "teach" incentives, so I'm not sure there is anything you can teach which will achieve the goal stated. So I'd ask the question: how can we give people incentives to apply their tools to cases like religion?
It's not incentive either. I have plenty of incentive, and so do my students. It's simply that we don't notice our beliefs as beliefs, if they're already in our heads. (As opposed to the situation when vetting input that's proposed as a new belief.)
Since we don't have any kind of built-in function for listing ALL the beliefs involved in a given decision, we are often unaware of the key beliefs that are keeping us stuck in a particular area. We sit there listing all the "beliefs" we can think of, while the single most critical belief in that area isn't registering as a "belief" at all; it just fades in as part of our background assumptions. To us, it's something like "water is wet" -- sure it's a belief, but how could it possibly be relevant to our problem?
Usually, an irrational fear associated with something like, "but how will I pay the bills?" masquerades as simple, factual logic. But the underlying emotional belief is usually something more like, "If I don't pay the bills, then I'm an irresponsible person and no-one will love me." The underlying belief is invisible because we don't look underneath the "logic" to find the emotion hiding underneath.
Unfortunately, all reasoning is motivated reasoning, which means that to find your irrational beliefs in a given area, you have to first dig up a nontrivial number of rationalizations... knowing that the rationalization you're looking for is probably something you specifically created to prevent you from thinking about the motivation involved in the first place! (After all, revealing to others that you think you're irresponsible isn't good genetic fitness... and if you know, that makes it more likely you'll unintentionally reveal it.)
A simple tool, by the way, for digging up the motivation behind seemingly "factual" statements and beliefs is to ask, "And what's bad about that?" or "And what's good about that?".... usually followed by, "And what does that say/mean about YOU?" You pretty quickly discover that nearly everything in the universe revolves around you. ;-)