[user234683]

> "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed."

Relevant to this is the analogy by Phil Goetz of reason as a memetic immune disorder [1]:

> The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.

> A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-...

[xtiansimon]

Thank you `user234683` for the link to 'Reason as memetic immune disorder'. I think more needs to be said about 'dangerous' memes.