That's sort of what the Yudkowsky generation of the rationality movement was trying to do, and for more or less that same reason. But bridging from a STEM intellectual toolset to the necessary kind of introspection would have required people with knowledge of some combination of cognitive science, (differential) game theory, signal processing, and stochastic control engineering. There weren't enough people interested in those topics for there to be a self-sustaining community of practice. There were people enough who were interested in decision theory and universal algorithmic probability, which in theory should have motivated many of them to acquire an engineering understanding of those other things, which are the details of how efficient implementation would work "close to the metal", so as to be able to find the corresponding patterns in what their brains were doing. But I guess they didn't know about the necessary connection, or at least they didn't know about that deeply enough to find it motivating.

(The general field of study at the point of connection there is called "computational cognitive science". But I only know of one person in the movement who actually recognized that there would be a point in going into into that part of academia, and then mostly only for other reasons. And, instead of becoming a mentat, they just eventually ended up in a social circle which had what I surmise to be a substantially-malefic spiritual contact, did a lot of LSD with the intent of demolishing their ego, had a psychotic episode (including a part where they believed they were a demon), picked up that social circle's typical creepily-disjointed(-as-though-unconsciously-extrinsically-puppeteered) judgementalness, and started using bizarre self-referential framings of other people's motives and shoulda-knowns to post accusations against that social circle's local competitors for moral authority. (Weirdly, they somehow unconsciously stated the accusations using phrasings precisely misleadingly worded and vibed so as to enable third parties who didn't care about whether the details added up to use them as ammunition for takedowns and hit pieces, but still consciously believed that they were against ostracism dynamics and weren't actively trying to play into ostracism dynamics at all.) And of the three other people I know who knew some of the close-to-the-metal details and were vaguely interested in inner development, one fell in with the Zizians (with their related strain of judgementalness) and then left over the katana incident and went to ground, and while the other two seem to have done okay, they weren't really into the intersection. Come to think of it, two of the people who I was in a vaguely related study group with went crazy a few years after we stopped meeting, in two other ways related to judgementalness.)

Or maybe it's my fault that nobody ended up learning the closer-to-raw-psychology mathematical and engineering principles of rationality? Maybe I did very wrongly by not being more involved myself, to promote that connection using what I knew? But I had a lot of other problems going on that might have made that a bad idea.

(A lot of those problems were caused by the situation where rationalists mistrust the judgement of people who can't back up their positions with evidence that would have been less likely to be available in some alternative scenario, and where the universe in Its inscrutable judgement had meanwhile left me in the position of the guy in Carl Sagan's thought experiment who had the invisible flour-permeable dragon in his garage that refused to inflict burns or leave footprints in a third-party-observable way, unless it could tell in advance that it would do so only in such a way as to force plausible alternative explanations to exist. I needed to avoid visibly doing anything that might raise questions about why I believed in a supposed phenomenon, if that phenomenon hid itself from the eyes of other rationalists by purposefully and consistently weaving circumstances around itself to cloak its manifestations behind a very plausible appearance of human delusion. That was radically crippling for me, far beyond what someone who hadn't thought about it might imagine. It was like being an illegal immigrant who couldn't afford for any disputes to rise to the attention of the police, and so correspondingly couldn't do anything that might potentially lead to disputes at all, even indirectly. Never in fifteen years was there anyone functional and knowledgeable whom I could seriously talk to safely about the intersection between the supernatural and the norms and judgement-principles of rationality, who could afford the time.)

The rationality movement tried to buy us Mentats and time to prepare for [discouraged topic] so that nothing like a Butlerian jihad would be necessary. But what it got us instead was a bunch of attention and runaway investment in [discouraged topic], and an ironic situation like that joke with the Torment Nexus:

> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
>
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

The more developed people in or near the scene now, looking back, say things like "the collective attentional processes of humanity seem to be unable to effectively represent the concept of 'don't'," or "[Yudkowsky's] whole thing is about not raising eldritch super power gods, and I think he learned a lesson about how hyperstitioning elides negations".

I guess I wouldn't be going on at such length about this, but I don't even really currently have anywhere to tell anyone my regrets about having not somehow managed to square enough of the circles in question.