I believe you can aid people in dismissing
irrational discrimination. If it is based on a logical error than it can be corrected.
Something that is true has a way of needling away at people's brains until it gets in.
Discrimination is a very deep brain function. It is the ability to discern patterns.
Sometimes this system results in false positives, such as when you jump at shadows at night or get spooked because you imagine somebody to be in a room when they're not.
But most of the time it works. That is why it evolved. It had enormous survival value despite some of the drawbacks.
Thinking otherwise is magical thinking. Turning discrimination into an original sin is in of itself a path towards discrimination.
In truth nobody has 'the benchmark' for reality. Nobody is consistently right all the time.
Take CFAR - the Center For Applied Rationality.
They found a very interesting result when they studied people's opinions. They found that when people were polled on a large variety of different questions, that when their confidence level was 100%, that they were only right 66% of the time. I repeat, that was for their highest confidence level.
CFAR has a program where they study rationality and have come up with a list of ways to improve our own rationality by using clever heuristics.
http://rationality.org/checklist/
Here is an excerpt:
"Reacting to evidence / surprises / arguments you haven’t heard before; flagging beliefs for examination.
When I see something odd – something that doesn’t fit with what I’d ordinarily expect, given my other beliefs – I successfully notice, promote it to conscious attention and think “I notice that I am confused” or some equivalent thereof. (Example: You think that your flight is scheduled to depart on Thursday. On Tuesday, you get an email from Travelocity advising you to prepare for your flight “tomorrow”, which seems wrong. Do you successfully raise this anomaly to the level of conscious attention? (Based on the experience of an actual LWer who failed to notice confusion at this point and missed their plane flight.))
When somebody says something that isn’t quite clear enough for me to visualize, I notice this and ask for examples. (Recent example from Eliezer: A mathematics student said they were studying “stacks”. I asked for an example of a stack. They said that the integers could form a stack. I asked for an example of something that was not a stack.) (Recent example from Anna: Cat said that her boyfriend was very competitive. I asked her for an example of “very competitive.” She said that when he’s driving and the person next to him revs their engine, he must be the one to leave the intersection first—and when he’s the passenger he gets mad at the driver when they don’t react similarly.)
I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)
I notice my mind flinching away from a thought; and when I notice, I flag that area as requiring more deliberate exploration. (Recent example from Anna: I have a failure mode where, when I feel socially uncomfortable, I try to make others feel mistaken so that I will feel less vulnerable. Pulling this thought into words required repeated conscious effort, as my mind kept wanting to just drop the subject.)
I consciously attempt to welcome bad news, or at least not push it away. (Recent example from Eliezer: At a brainstorming session for future Singularity Summits, one issue raised was that we hadn’t really been asking for money at previous ones. My brain was offering resistance, so I applied the “bad news is good news” pattern to rephrase this as, “This point doesn’t change the fixed amount of money we raised in past years, so it is good news because it implies that we can fix the strategy and do better next year.”) "
This and not a rote education, is what we need. There is an infinite number of lies, you can't fight them all one at a time. CFAR is a great organization, I'd go to their meet-ups in a shot if I could afford to. These are the true crusaders for looking at the world scientifically.