My argument is to exist socially is not always alligned with what is nessecary for natural health/survival/happiness, and yet at the same time is nessecary.

We exist in a society where the majority of jobs demand us to remain seated and immobile for the better part of the day. That is incredibly unhealthy. It is also bad for intellectual productivity. It is illogical, and yet for a lot of people it is required.

My example wasn't meant to be a strawman, but simply an illustration of my point that human thoughts and behaviors are predictable.

I did not say your example was a strawman, my point was that it was reductionist. Determining the general color of the sky or whether or not things will fall is predicting human thoughts and behaviors many degrees simpler than what I am talking about. That is like if I were to say that multiplication is easy, so math must be easy.

I am fairly certain I personally can predict what an average American believes regarding these topics

Well you are wrong about that. No competent sociologist or anthropologist would make a claim to be able to do what you are suggesting.

I don't know, are they? I personally think that questions such as "how can we improve crop yields by a factor of 10" can be at least as important as the ones you listed.

You can make fun of my diction all you want, but I think it is pretty obvious love; morality, life, and happiness are of the utmost concern (grave concern) to people.

don't know, are they? I personally think that questions such as "how can we improve crop yields by a factor of 10" can be at least as important as the ones you listed.

I what subsume the concern of food stock under the larger concern of life, but I think it is interesting that you bring up crop yield. This is a perfect example of the ideology of progress I have been discussing in other response. There is no question to whether it is dangerous or rational to try to continuously improve crop yield, it is just blindly seen as right (i.e as progress).

However, if we look at both the good and the bad of the green revolution of the 70s-80s, the practices currently being implemented to increase crop yield are board line ecocide. They are incredibly dangerous, yet we continue to attempt to refine them further and further ignoring the risks in light of further potential to transform material reality to our will.

IMO, borderline unethical. In any case, I don't see how you can get from "you should persuade people to be rational by any means necessary" to your original thesis, which I understood to be "rationality is unattainable".

The ethical issues at question are interesting because they are centered around the old debate over collectivist vs. individualist morality. Since the cold war America has been heavily indoctrinated in an ideology of free will (individual autonomy) being a key aspect of morality. I question this idea. As many authors on this site point out, a large portion of human action, thought, and emotion is subconsciously created. Schools, corporations, governments, even parents consciously or unconsciously take advantage of this fact to condition people into ideal types. Is this ethical? If you believe that individual autonomy is essential to morality than no it is not. However, while I am not a total advocate of Foucault and his ideas, I do agree that autonomous causation is a lot less significant than then individualist individually wants to believe.
Rather than judging the morality of an action by the autonomy it proivdes for the agents involved I tend to be more of a pragmatist. If we socially engineer people to develop the habits and cognitions they would if they were more individually rational, then I see this as justified. The problem with this idea is who watches the watchmen. By what standard do you judge the elite that would have to produce mass habit and cognition? Is it even possible to control that and maintain a rational course through it?

This I do not know, which is why I am hesitant to act on this idea. But I do think that there a mass of indoctrinated people that does not think about what it is they belief is a social reality.

Facts of the first kind are the overwhelmingly more numerous than facts of the second kind. Facts of the second kind are more important to human life. I agree with you that this community underestimates the proportion of facts of the second kind, which are not universalizable the way facts of the first kind are. But you weaken the case for post-modern analysis by asserting that anything close to a majority of facts are socially determined.

I was never trying to argue that the majority of facts are socially determined. I was arguing that the majority of facts important to human happiness and survival are socially determined. I agree that facts of the first kind are more numerous, but as you say facts of the second kind are more important. Is it logical to measure value by size?