Thinking too hard about anything will drive you insane but I think the real issue here is that rationalists simply over-estimate both the power of rational thought and their ability to do it. If you think of people who tend to make that kind of mistake you can see how you get a lot of crazy groups.
I guess I'm a radical skeptic, secular humanist, utilitarianish sort of guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think throwing around the words "bayesian prior" and "posterior distribution" makes actually figuring out how something works or predicting the outcome of an intervention easy or certain. I've had a lot of life at this point and gotten to some level of mastery at a few things and my main conclusion is that most of the time its just hard to know stuff and that the single most common cognitive mistake people make is too much certainty.
I guess I'm a radical skeptic, secular humanist, utilitarianish sort of guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think throwing around the words "bayesian prior" and "posterior distribution" makes actually figuring out how something works or predicting the outcome of an intervention easy or certain. I've had a lot of life at this point and gotten to some level of mastery at a few things and my main conclusion is that most of the time its just hard to know stuff and that the single most common cognitive mistake people make is too much certainty.