In my experience, people who don’t compartmentalize tend to be cranks.
[. . .]
Most people who try to make all their beliefs fit with all their other beliefs, end up forcing some of the puzzle pieces into wrong-shaped holes. Their favorite part of their mental map of the world is locally consistent, but the farther-out parts are now WAY off, thus the crank-ism.
And that’s just the physical world. When we get to human values, some of them REALLY ARE in conflict with others[. . .]
People who grow up with a religion learn how to cope with its more inconvenient parts by partitioning them off, rationalizing them away, or forgetting about them. Religious communities actually protect their members from religion in one sense—they develop an unspoken consensus on which parts of their religion members can legitimately ignore. New converts sometimes try to actually do what their religion tells them to do.
[. . .]
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[. . . .] They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.
If the culture is constrained to hold constant the religion or cultural norms, then the resulting selection will cause the culture to develop blind spots, and also develop an unspoken (because unspeakable) but viciously enforced meta-norm of not seeing the blind spots. But if the culture is constrained to hold opposite meta-norms constant, such as a norm of seeing the blind spots or a norm of actually doing what one’s religion or cultural norms tell one do do, then the resulting selection will act against the dangerous memes instead.
The post “Reason as memetic immune disorder” was related. I’ll quote teasers so that you’ll read it:
And my comment there: