Aieee! The stupid! it burns!

I tend to think that different techniques are needed in the public debate depending on circumstances. Sometimes it is better choice to argue carefully and to show considerable interest in your opponent's arguments, but sometimes the better way is to confidently declare your position as the only sensible one. People like Dawkins are not popular by chance, their style of arguing has some appeal.

Unfortunately I am not so good at telling which strategy works better for a given audience and situation.

Depending on the details, many people may even reject "quick fixes that look like treatment" to death and disease.

See for instance the conservative response to the HPV vaccine Gardasil, which prevents the most common strains of the virus that causes genital warts -- and thereby drastically reduces the risk of cervical cancer. By providing a "quick fix" to protect sexually active women from a deadly disease, Gardasil reduces the "punishments" available for an action (or "lifestyle") disapproved by conservatives; therefore, they reject it.

Thanks! That post is totally made of awesome!

That said, my usual reply to the pro-death argument is some form of "If a rogue scientist accidentally released a nanovirus that kept everyone alive and healthy for a thousand years, would you support a policy of artificial death to maintain the status quo? If not, why not?"

I use the baseball-bat-to-the-head analogy, that if people were hit on the head with a baseball bat twice daily, after years they would come accept it, after decades they would come to believe it is good, and after generations they would develop clever and complicated arguments as to why it is good and why it should continue. But would any of those arguments convince you, now, to take up a regimen of baseball bat strikes to the head?

I think I stole that almost word-for-word from somewhere else on this site, though.

We've got people in the first world claiming that condoms are morally wrong, that they don't prevent HIV, that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and so on. Those claiming that they don't prevent HIV or that AIDS is not caused by it are marginalized because the populace is better educated, and probably also because it's not so big a problem here as to motivate simply hiding from it. The populace in the third world is less educated, and so has less reason to see this as a defiance of evidence, and the leaders both tend to be less well educated than those in the first world, and have more problems that are likely to be intractable, and so they're motivated to question the data. When you look at how recently first world politicians have been denying anthropogenic climate change, it doesn't look like we set a much higher standard, our failures simply aren't as visible.

I'm not sure exactly what you're claiming here.

If a government is run on bribes to the extent that people with low and middle level jobs have to collect bribes because that's the only way they can pay the bribes required by their superiors, it doesn't sound like a problem with the way their brains are wired.

First some fictional evidence.

For one it is really hard to create a homogeneous community. The libertarians try for a while, and maybe you can by a seastead some day. But you would still give up a lot. Then there is no real need to have a society consisting only of rationalists. There are many jobs that do not need a full blown rational person, so you always have some other people doing stuff. Probably a majority. You need some great minds in the right places, that is all.

Then there is the tendency that great minds often have trouble getting things done and this. Very bright people I met often achieve things because of their respective support network that takes care of more mundane things.

I experienced the occasional talk out while putting some project together, when action was required.

From the other angle I wonder how much reason can actually be implemented on a wider scale. I get the impression a lot of advancement was achieved by pumping the right cached ideas into the population. And then you meat decent programmers who are creationists, or into homeopathy.

Lets collect some ideas on how to achieve it.

The independence of Ethiopia was interrupted by the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and Italian occupation (1936–1941).[67] During this time of attack, Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations in 1935, delivering an address that made him a worldwide figure, and the 1935 Time magazine Man of the Year.[68] Following the entry of Italy into World War II, British Empire forces, together with patriot Ethiopian fighters, officially liberated Ethiopia in the course of the East African Campaign in 1941, while an Italian guerrilla campaign continued until 1943.

Ethiopia is arguably another example of a non-colonized state, since it was only invaded and occupied for a few years. If we define that as colonization the same can be said of most of Eastern Europe, which would bolster your position even more.

I'd like to point out that America (i.e. the USA, and most other nations on the continent) are "successful colonies": the colonizers have killed the natives (USA) or driven them out or made them into economically second-class citizens (Israel), and the financial success belongs to the colonists.

Whereas in African colonies, the natives have taken economic and political control, and the economic failures are theirs.

Colonisation is the link between third world countries, not the common thread of their poverty, which varies massively within this group as we both pointed out, and I'm quite open to the idea that the post-colonial performance of these countries is down to cultural and institutional factors. But third world status is defined by their economic position at the start of the Cold War, at which point the majority of these countries were only just gaining independence. It's ridiculous to assert their positions here were due to the culture of groups that were at best an advisory body to colonial administrators, rather than differences in colonial regimes. And culture being influenced heavily by economics, it is difficult to draw a line between these starting positions and the cultural structures that developed, or for that matter to see what purpose it serves except to "pander to left wing white guilt" (what does this even mean, is anticolonialism a primarily white phenomenon where you come from?)

That said, your using America and Vietnam as counterpoints to my argument suggests that we may be talking at cross-purposes somewhat.