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hyporational comments on How to illustrate that society is mostly irrational, and how rationality would be beneficial - Less Wrong
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Society is made up of individuals. If you can demonstrate that individuals are irrational, then you have a better chance at claiming that the society is too. Yudkowsky wrote about the sanity waterline rather late when he had already covered a lot of other topics and I think this was intentional.
You can't just start from the assumption that society would be more rational if rationality was taught at school. You'd also need evidence that rationality can be taught to a lot of average people. I don't think such evidence exists. Whatever taken out from the curriculum might be replaced by something completely ineffective.
Of course, if changing the curriculum would make some of the smarter individuals more rational, and leave the average student with nothing, the result might still be a net positive. This argument wouldn't convince anyone professing egalitarianism however.
Individual benefits are far easier to sell than societal benefits. They're easier to imagine, examples are available, they're near rather than far, self interest is inherently motivating, and your reader won't be mindkilled by politics. If you can get the reader to accept the individual benefits, then you might be able to extrapolate a bit from there.
The title of this post is misleading, since you're not illustrating anything but asking for advice.
It could actually make things worse. It could put the whole society into a huge valley of bad rationality.
On the other hand, maybe that's exactly where the society is now.
Can't specific rationality techniques be effectively taught to a large amount of average people, though? I vaguely recall that there might be some examples of that in studies where the researchers taught participants a trick or two before submitting them a test of some sort, but my ability to recall specific examples is almost geometrically inverse to gwern's, so that certainly takes out of my point.
I know of no evidence that this is possible -- where "effectively" means "after several years still actively using these techniques in their lives".
I could swear there was research on delaying gratification that matched this criteria. It's not clear in the Wikipedia article whether the hot-cold strategy was prescriptive or descriptive, but I thought I remembered there being a prescriptive study that correlated with positive outcomes later in life
You're right, sorry about that. I just changed it.
I took a semester long Critical Thinking course in college as part of a Philosophy major prerequisite (which I later dropped.) I was already familiar with the material, which was pretty sparse and underdeveloped compared to the Sequences, but I think every other student left that class having learned a lot about avoiding some major pitfalls of reasoning which affected their lives on a regular basis, and every student including myself agreed that something like it ought to have been a mandatory class in high school.
Individual benefits might be easier to sell than societal benefits, but honestly, I think that the societal benefits of general rationality education would utterly dwarf the benefits of intensive rationality training in a small sector of the populace. Biases hampering our ability to productively debate policy, to evaluate initiatives empirically, to design programs to attain their actual intended purposes, etc. all harm the social structures around which all people, from the most rational to the least, are forced to build their lives.