The powers of instrumental rationality in the context of rapid technological progress and the inability/unwillingness of irrational people to listen to rational arguments strongly suggest the following scenario:
After realizing that turning a significant portion of the general population into rationalists would take much more time and resources than simply taking over the world, rationalists will create a global corporation with the goal of saving the humankind from the clutches of zero- and negative-sum status games.
Shortly afterwards, the Rational Megacorp will indeed take over the world and the people will get good government for the first time in the history of the human race (and will live happily ever after).
This sounds remarkably like my dream. But I figured that we'd take over some of the world, institute mandatory rationality training in that part, use our Nation of Rationalists to take over the rest of the world, and then go out and start colonizing space.
One of the standard methods of science-fiction world-building is to take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future, and see what comes out. One trend I've observed is that over the last century or so, people have kept coming up with clever new ways to find answers to important questions - that is, developing new methods of rationality.
So, given what we do currently know about the overall shape of such methods, from Godel's Incompleteness Theory to Kolmogorov Complexity to the various ways to get around Prisoner's Dilemmas... Then, at least in a general science-fictional world-building sense, what might we be able to guess or say about what rationalists will be like in, oh, 50-100 years?