I suppose it all depends on whether you think persuasion or group membership signalling is what primarily influences people's beliefs. I was under the impression there was a wealth of studies suggesting that people basically do not respond positively to logical argument but are easily swayed by what they think everyone around them believes, but I completely failed to find any of them (or studies to the contrary, on that matter), so barring someone producing links where I failed, I suppose we can only recognise that we have different beliefs about reality that we do not have easily serialisable/communicable evidence for.

One issue I take with what you said, though, is the notion of a "rational goal". I don't see how this would be defined in my understanding of the terms; goals are axiomatic, (ir)rationality is a property of candidate actions in pursuit of a particular goal. I still get the impression that we probably use different definitions, and yours is much closer to something like "rational"="conducive to intellectual growth". (So in my world a better paperclip maximiser would be more rational, and in yours a better paperclip maximiser would be less rational...?)