If rationality is ready to outreach it should be doing it in an as bulletproof way as possible.

Why?

Now that we know that Newtonian physics was wrong, and Einstein was right, would you support my project to build a time machine, travel to the past, and assassinate Newton? I mean, it would prevent incorrect physics from being spread around. It would make Einstein's theory more acceptable later; no one would criticize him for being different from Newton.

Okay, I don't really know how to build a time machine. Maybe we could just go burn some elementary-school textbooks, because they often contain too simplified information. Sometimes with silly pictures!

Seems to me that I often see the sentiment that we should raise people from some imaginary level 1 directly to level 3, without going through level 2 first, because... well, because level 3 is better than level 2, obviously. And if those people perhaps can't make the jump, I guess they simply were not meant to be helped.

This is why I wrote about "the low-hanging fruit that most rationalists wouldn't even touch for... let's admit it... status reasons". We are (or imagine ourselves to be) at level 3, and all levels below us are equally deplorable. Helping someone else to get on level 3, that's a worthy endeavor. Helping people get from level 1 to level 2, that's just pathetic, because the whole level 2 is pathetic. Even if we could do that at a fraction of the cost.

Maybe that's true when building a superhuman artificial intelligence (better getting it hundred years later than getting it wrong), but it doesn't apply for most areas of human life. Usually, an improvement is an improvement, even when it's not perfect.

Making all people rationalists could be totally awesome. But making many stupid people slightly less stupid, that's also useful.