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byrnema comments on Making your explicit reasoning trustworthy - Less Wrong
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Reading your post felt very weird to me, as if you were deliberately avoiding the obvious conclusion from your own examples! Do you really believe that people follow kosher or die in religious wars due to using abnormally explicit reasoning? The common thing about your examples is putting ideals over personal gain, not reasoning over instinct. Too much acting on explicitly stated values, not explicitly stated beliefs. In truth, using rationality for personal gain isn't nearly as dangerous as idealism/altruism and doesn't seem to require the precautions you go on to describe. If any of the crazy things I do failed to help me, I'd just stop doing them.
Which prompts a question to everyone: what crazy things do you do that help you? (Rather than help save the light cone or something.)
I had a similar impression and response. Humanity seems to get in trouble when they try to make their values too explicitly consistent. The examples that come immediately to mind are when individuals or groups decide to become too strict, black and white or exacting about upholding a value that they have. They forget about or deny a larger context for that value.
I think that to avoid this, a person needs to learn to be comfortable with some inconsistency in their values. Even as they learn not to be comfortable with inconsistencies in their beliefs about reality. Our values don't represent truths about reality in the same way our beliefs about external reality do, and this seems to be a deeper source of the epistemological conflicts we have.