I don't think it's true at all that there's no obvious mechanism that produces a more rational society from more rational people.
If I'm working on a project with a group of irrational people, the other members will tend to make mistakes of judgment which I'm simply too many steps of inference removed from them to realistically explain. So I give up, and the project suffers.
If I'm working on a project with a group of highly rational people, those problems can be avoided without even needing to be discussed, saving energy for higher level problems.
Groups are made up of individuals. If every individual in a group recognizes the problems which will attend a course of action, that group is much more likely to avoid those problems than a group where nobody recognizes them.
A group project is far away from society as a whole, where discussion and explanation between all members is impossible due to scale.
Your project could benefit from increased obedience as you could just lead rationally and the others would follow. Disagreements between rational people can take a longer time to resolve, etc.
I still agree to all your examples. More anecdotes will not be helpful, as I already agree that increased rationality will improve society (and group projects and institutions for that matter).
What I'm missing is a clear mechanism that actually produces a more rational society just from increasing the rationality of people. Please explain the mechanism.
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.