Assuming that rationality can be taught at school to everyone, is there even a connection between more rational individuals and a more rational society?
The problem I see here is that rationality is already very weakly defined for individuals and I know of no definitions in the context of society. A society can't even think (or can it?), how can it be rational?
Many decision processes of society are not based on rationality at all and I see no reason why the tried ways of winning (i.e. corruption) should be replaced by others assuming as the only change slightly more rational agents. Elections produces an average of opinions, this average may not change at all given more rational voters.
You will have to cover a lot of inference steps just to show that society as a whole will become more rational. Rationality isn't the only attribute of a "good" society and there might be ugly trade-offs. Whether a more rational society will have any "huge benefits" is just the last question in a chain that will surely be too much for a single article or a few sentences.
The problem I see here is that rationality is already very weakly defined for individuals and I know of no definitions in the context of society. A society can't even think (or can it?), how can it be rational?
The first answer that comes to mind is "A society can be considered rational if the institutions that society creates collectively would be considered rationally and intelligently designed had they been designed by an individual."
This is clearly not usually the case, but some societies have it much worse than others. Yvain's writings on...
Does anyone know of a good article that illustrates how society is generally irrational, and how making society more rational would have huge benefits, because it'd be a very high level action?
I'm writing an essay about how to improve education, and one of my proposals is that a core part of the curriculum should be rationality. I believe that doing this would have huge benefits to society, and want to explain why I think this, but I'm having trouble. Any thoughts?
Edit: Part of Raising the Sanity Waterline talks about common ways in which people are irrational. However, they're all links to longer Less Wrong articles. Preferably, I'd like to illustrate it in a few sentences/paragraphs.