Genetic engineering aside, given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win. You could as reasonably expect a thousand unbiased dice, all tossed at once, all to come down 'five,' say. There are simply far too many ways, and easy ways, in which human thought can go wrong. Or, put it the other way round: anthropocentrism cannot lose.

That's the same argument against rationalist winning that has been seen many times on LW. However, it is based on hopelessness and fear, rather than on knowledge of even a single failure of an organised attempt at large-scale rational winning. So, while Stove recognises the obviously wrong thoughts of philosophers, he himself goes wrong in thinking the above by making a wrong probability estimate.

So just to be clear, we are saying that the probability of a significant number of people turning to rational thinking is greater than the probability of winning a lottery, right?