From a slightly different angle-- there are a lot of established groups (families, schools, religions, countries) which don't want their members thinking about whether loyalty is worth the costs and whether obedience serves the purposes of the group. For example, one major reason to enlist in the military is to serve one's country. People are not exactly encouraged to think about whether joining the military (whether for them personally or in general) is an effective means of doing so.
Teaching rationality in a way which implies that people should make a serious effort to make rational decisions could be up against a hard fight.
Now that I think about it, CFAR and the like haven't run into that sort of resistance that I know of, and I'm assuming it's because CFAR is still too small to be noticed.
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.