I think you are focussing too narowly. While it is highly unlikely if not impossible for a person to have been raised in an atmosphere where they were constantly told that 9/11 was an inside job, it is extremely possible that many of them were raised in an atmosphere where they were constantly told that the government is a no good piece of shit organization full of lying bastards who want to expand their own power at the expense of our freedoms as well as economic and physical health* and is staffed purely with megalomaniacal evil masterminds who cackle from the shadows giving orders to their hunch-backed henchmen**, and when 9/11 happened they just found the most perfect 'evidence' for this viewpoint.

Likewise, I am extremely hesitant to trust the Misters Fang or Cameron when they say they 'used to be' an atheist and an evolutionist. While it is certainly possible that they were atheists, I find it likely that they were atheists only because they were too lazy to uninterested to be anything else. As Hambydammit states orphan, Atheist in itself does not automatically guarantee anything other than the lack of an active belief in one or more gods.

Furthermore, given their rather lacking knowledge in damn near anything, its entirely possible that they did believe in god but did not actively go to church, and thought that made them an atheist.

However, I'm not going to argue with your overal premise, that humans are by and large simply not rational by nature, merely (slightly) disagreeing with these smaller points. I think I remember one of the biologists here mentioning that humanity is evolved to accept word of mouth testimonies as reliable evidence because it is generally safer than doubting and going to find out yourself. (If someone says there is a lion over that-a-way you don't go to corroborate that data for confirmation, you run the other way.)  

*Not that this statement is exactly false mind you.
**Not that this statement is also exactly false mind you.

 

Yup. Rationality must be learned, either through experience or through education. We are born only with the seeds of rationality, which is our basic intuitional ability.

The problem is that intuition is not perfect. It is inherently flawed in systematic ways, which is why we have named so many fallacies. Each fallacy is an insight into a particular flaw in human intuition.

Rationality is a set of skills and techniques that have been developed over centuries, if not millenia, which are designed to correct these flaws. Logic is a perfect example. It is a system designed to lead you from sound premises to a valid conclusion. Science is yet another example, designed to overcome personal intuitional flaws by using a system of peers and a set of practices which minimize false conclusions better than any other system we know.

All of these things must be learned somehow. Our basic intuition is useful, no doubt. Our brains are powerful prediction engines, even without any education. However, we are not born with perfect intuition, nor are we born with built-in corrective systems. These systems must be learned through experience, or, more commonly, taught to one another.

Imagine a primitive tribe. They have no modern culture, but even they have a rich culture of their own. It consists of stories, skills, songs, legends, etc. Many of these are instructive in nature. They, too, are systems designed to impart knowledge, and also to correct common misunderstandings. However, they lack a sophisticated system of rationality, and so you end up with typical superstitions, biases, etc.

Even today, in modern society, most people do not put in enough time to learn the various tools of rationality to a significant extent. They just learn enough to get by. It takes either a professional requirement, or a genuine interest, to motivate someone to learn, and keep learning, rational skills.

So, yes, that's why there's so much irrational belief, and so many different varieties. Ideas spread around, based on our flawed intuitions, and become popular not because they *are* true, but because they 'feel' true (intuition). 9/11 conspiracies are like this, so are alien abduction/visitation stories, religions, anti-vaccination superstition, new age woo woo, etc.

Our job, as I see it, is to directly confront the problem, first by identifying it, and then by developing intuitive corrective arguments in support of rational thinking. While intuition is the problem, it is also, necessarily, foundational to the solution. We have to make rational thinking interesting, fun, cool, what have you. Something that appeals to people's intuitions. Another way of doing it is to make irrational thinking un-fun, ridiculed, etc. Both are appeals to people's intuitions.

It doesn't really make sense to say that 'irrationality' per se had an evolutionary advantage. That's like saying genetic diseases have an evolutionary advantage. What's more accurate to say is that evolution works not with 'good', but with 'good enough'.

It is intuition itself that provides the advantage, and, like anything else that evolved, it is not simply 'good', it is just 'good enough'. Irrationality can be seen as flaws in our intuition. Our brains are intelligent, they can predict the future. But not perfectly. They make 'pretty good guesses', not perfect guesses. That's why I define intuition as our brain's natural ability to make pretty good guesses.

Irrationality becomes obvious after that definition. It is simply the by-product of not having perfect minds. While we can make pretty good guesses, some of our guesses turn out to be not-so-good, or even 'pretty bad guesses'. Overall, intuition, like any evolved ability, is on the whole more beneficial than it is harmful. So the pretty good guesses outweigh the pretty bad guesses. But we are still stuck with our evolutionary legacy of patchwork intelligence.

Back to the analogy with genetic diseases. They themselves are not 'beneficial', but the genes and biological systems they are associated with are overall more beneficial than the harm caused by the genetic diseases themselves. Otherwise, they would have been weeded out by natural selection.

Same with intuition. If it was overall harmful, it would have been weeded out. But it is overall beneficial, just in that 'good enough' way that evolution works with.

Rationality is something we build *on top* of intuition, as a corrective and amplification mechanism. You might think of it like a sci-fi power suit. An ordinary human is strong enough to do ordinary things and basically survive through life. But a human with a power suit (a la Ironman) is able to amplify his natural strengths, while also correcting his natural weaknesses. But inside, it's still a guy in a suit. Rationality is still directed by our basic intuition.

And that is what I wanted to say. Only me not speak real good.

By the way, I see more clearly now that you were talking about irrationality as in comparison with mutation. In this I can somewhat agree, however I would say that it is more imagination and conceptualization which are the appropriate terms here. When I was using 'irrationality' in my previous post, I was using it in the sense of believing something as true because it 'feels' true, when in fact it is not true. You don't need to believe something to merely imagine it or conceive of it. So, wouldn't it make more sense to say that intuition, imagination, and the capacity for conceptualization are the things that were advantageous? And that they have flaws, which is where irrationality comes in?

Epic fail by the way. This is like rolling a critical fail 10 times in a row.

And when was the last time any of us, ever believed ANYTHING that Venom has said?

Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan are Arabic states in any sense of the word. The people aren't Arab. They don't speak Arabic, and they are not of Arab ethnicity.

 

Actually, Iraq was ruled by the Pan-Arabic Ba'ath party until the U.S take-over along with it's persecution of the Kurdish minority.

 

 

And both countries speak Arabic.

 

 

 

 

 

Which would be the result of our underlaying irrationality.

 

 

The point is that all things irrational, merely play on our irrationality, and that some are more likely to fall in that others.

 

 

 

Sorry, I should have only said Afghanistan. I don't know why I said Iraq (Iran is the nation where the ethnic majority is Persian, not Iraq). In Afghanistan the majority language is Persian and the Afghans are mostly Pashtun or Tajik by ethnicity

 

 

I'll forget you said Iraq, if you forget I said Afghanistan speaks Arabic.

 

 

 

 

Excellent, so my master plan is working.

 

 

 

I think the point of this is that we seem to come up with this shit ourselves. Then the whole irrational nature thing takes it and runs with it.