Hm. The West Wing had some truly wonderful examples of people being rational, smart, and efficient... and they had to be in order to solve the innumerable conflicts that came to them. Contrast with The Thick Of It, where the incompetent characters are the very image of Robin Hanson's model of humanity while the competent ones (or rather competent one) are moved more by loyalty to an institution (which doesn't reciprocate) than to the actual service of the public.
Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were intermediate examples. Sir Humphrey is very intelligent. He's also very arrogant because of his intelligence and culture, and completely heartless besides, utterly free of the burden of a consciousness. This can make him ruthlessly efficient at times, and at times a complete idiot, in fairly realistic and understandable ways. Bernard is very cultured, but is amazingly naive and tends to focus on small details to the point of pedancy. Jim Hacker, the titular Minister, is a man of average intelligence and average morality who struggles to survive as a politician (and who at least tries to do the right thing, or his limited understanding of it). The results speak for themselves.
In both TWW and YM/YPM, I find myself laughing with the characters more often than at them. If there's laughter "at", it's at the struggles they're facing and how sympathetic their difficulties with them are.
This is my first attempt at starting a casual conversation on LW where people don't have to worry about winning or losing points, and can just relax and have social fun together.
So, Big Bang Theory. That series got me wondering. It seems to be about "geeks", and not the basement-dwelling variety either; they're highly successful and accomplished professionals, each in their own field. One of them has been an astronaut, even. And yet, everything they ever accomplish amounts to absolutely nothing in terms of social recognition or even in terms of personal happiness. And the thing is, it doesn't even get better for their "normal" counterparts, who are just as miserable and petty.
Consider, then; how would being rationalists would affect the characters on this show? The writing of the show relies a lot on laughing at people rather than with them; would rationalist characters subvert that? And how would that rationalist outlook express itself given their personalities? (After all, notice how amazingly different from each other Yudkowsky, Hanson, and Alicorn are, just to name a few; they emphasize rather different things, and take different approaches to both truth-testing and problem-solving).
Note: this discussion does not need to be about rationalism. It can be a casual, normal discussion about the series. Relax and enjoy yourselves.
But the reason I brought up that series is that its characters are excellent examples of high intelligence hampered by immense irrationality. The apex of this is represented by Dr. Sheldon Cooper, who is, essentially, a complete fundamentalist over every single thing in his life; he applies this attitude to everything, right down to people's favorite flavor of pudding: Raj is "axiomatically wrong" to prefer tapioca, because the best pudding is chocolate. Period. This attitude makes him a far, far worse scientist than he thinks, as he refuses to even consider any criticism of his methods or results.