A.I. toasters?

"people dont toast toast. Toasters toast toast." Unless you're talking about those sentient "toasters" from Battlestar Galactica, no toaster toasts anything unless a person decides they want to make toast. "So what makes them do it then, if not an idea?" Human behavior is goal-oriented. People have outcomes they wish to effect in order to meet their wants and needs. Jumping off a building is an idea, but it is not a goal. We can have ideas about how to attain our goals, but direct experience shapes how we put those ideas into effect. That is to say, those ideas must be effective in real-world circumstances for such methods to be reinforced and maintained by the realization of desired outcomes. That's not to say that people don't make mistakes, but a learning process subject to natural consequences will tend to produce behavior grounded in reality (i.e. "rational" behavior). "I am attempting to argue that irrationality is dangerous. That beliefs about the world matter." I don't think you've shown that and I think perhaps you have even implicitly shown that you actually agree with my position by offering the example of someone who harbors irrational ideas but hypocritically does not follow through with them. Your true concern does not seem to be that people will typically act on their irrational beliefs but simply that they have them in their heads at all. You are overly concerned with hypocrisy even though the hypocrisy of not acting on one's irrational ideas is by far the lesser of two evils. As such, I find the idea of stamping out every shred of hypocrisy to be highly irrational, but I'm sure that most people in your position are vastly limited by the real life personal social consequences of fully implementing that in their real lives whereas pursuing that goal in online spaces with the wall of anonymity means you don't have to bear those same social consequences.