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.
Your project could benefit from increased obedience as you could just lead rationally and the others would follow.
This is a good point even for the society. To get a rational society, it is not necessary that literally everyone becomes rational. Just that the rational people make the most important decisions, and the others follow them.
Although there are dangers with this solution in a long term; specifically that some day the irrational people may decide to stop following the rational ones. In democracy it means someone else uses some simple tricks to ...
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.