Excellent post. I'm also reminded of this post that I just recently read: Change Incentives, Not Minds.

Now, you’d think that a public choice EconTalk would take the position that there are systemic flaws in our current form of government and so we need to find ways to improve our systems to remove the flaws.

Instead, Boudreaux’s position, as far as I could tell, was “Well, there are systemic flaws in democracy…so let’s educate people about them”. It’s a complete non sequitur, which I found very frustrating, because someone who understands public choice ought to be able to see the glaring flaw in this strategy. It’s like saying: “In a democracy, voters are rationally ignorant…so let’s educate voters about rational ignorance to fix it.”, or “In a democracy, concentrated interests with lower transaction costs tend to win in the political marketplace, so let’s teach people this to fix it.” I heard no mention of changing the rules so as to change these incentives. Incentives are like the laws of physics – they work whether or not you believe about them, and whether or not you know about them.

We can probably convince some intelligent people to become rationalists simply by talking to them, but many of them are of the type who'd have preferred to become rationalists anyway, even if they hadn't known the word. If we want to raise the sanity waterline, we need to work on better incentives for rational thought.

Anybody have ideas on what might be realistically achievable rationality incentives?