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AndySimpson comments on Rational Me or We? - Less Wrong
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It's pretty hard to be isolated in a world of six billion people. The more key question is the probability of coordinating with any randomly selected person on a rationalist topic of fixed difficulty, and the total size of the community available to support some number of institutions.
To put it bluntly, if you built the ideal rationalist institution that requires one million supporters, you'd be in trouble because the 99.98th percentile of rationality is not adequate to support it (and also such rationalists may have other demands on their time).
But if you can build institutions that grow starting from small groups even in a not-previously-friendly environment, or upgrade rationalists starting from the 98th percentile to what we would currently regard as much higher levels, then odds look better for such institutions.
We both want to live in a friendly world with lots of high-grade rationalists and excellent institutions with good tests and good incentives, but I don't think I already live there.
Even in the most civilized civilizations, barbarity takes place on a regular basis. There are some homicides in dark alleys in the safest countries on earth, and there are bankruptcies, poverty, and layoffs even in the richest countries.
In the same way, we live in a flawed society of reason, which has been growing and improving with starts and fits since the scientific revolution. We may be civilized in the arena of reason in the same way you could call Northern Europe in the 900s civilized in the arena of personal security: there are rules that nearly everyone knows and that most obey to some extent, but they are routinely disrespected, and the only thing that makes people really take heed is the theater of enforcement, whether that's legally-sanctioned violence against notorious bandits or a dressing-down of notorious sophists.
Right now, we are only barely scraping together a culture of rationality, it may have a shaky foundation and many dumber bricks, but it seems a bit much to say we don't have one.