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When I was a little kid we would take car trips to visit my grandparents, and my father would borrow books on tape from the library. He borrowed Asimov's "I, Robot", which if you haven't read it is basically "House, M.D." except that instead of people you have robots and instead of Dr. House you have a pair of underpaid robot repairmen. It didn't introduce any concepts of rationality directly, but in the book the heroes won by figuring things out, rather than by being strong or passionate or morally correct. It made figuring things out cool, and it turns out that if you want to figure things out, you use rationality.

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38 Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

25th Feb 2009

1 min read

414

38

To break up the awkward silence at the start of a recent Overcoming Bias meetup, I asked everyone present to tell their rationalist origin story - a key event or fact that played a role in their first beginning to aspire to rationality. This worked surprisingly well (and I would recommend it for future meetups).

I think I've already told enough of my own origin story on Overcoming Bias: how I was digging in my parents' yard as a kid and found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem, and how I wore it to bed that night and dreamed of a woman in white, holding an ancient leather-bound book called Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (eds. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, 1982)... but there's no need to go into that again.

So, seriously... how did you originally go down that road?

Added: For some odd reason, many of the commenters here seem to have had a single experience in common - namely, at some point, encountering Overcoming Bias... But I'm especially interested in what it takes to get the transition started - crossing the first divide. This would be very valuable knowledge if it can be generalized. If that did happen at OB, please try to specify what was the crucial "Aha!" insight (down to the specific post if possible).

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[-]swestrup16y680

As far back as I can remember I have wanted to be a scientist and to walk the path of rationality. What comes to me as a watershed moment was when I was 15 or 16 an my very Christian Grandfather came to visit. He told me that since I had a very scientific mind, he was giving me a scientific gift. It was a thin book with a title something like "Scientific Proof of the Bible".

Afterwards I remember sitting for what felt like hours in my room, staring at the closed book. "What if I was wrong?" I kept asking myself with dread. What if there really was scientific proof of the existence of God and what I had always taken to be the nonsense of the Bible? What if going to church and praying really WERE things I should be doing? If so, how could I justify not going. What was the guiding principal of my life, anyway?

In the end, I decided, my guiding principal was "Truth at any cost." If I was wrong, I wanted to KNOW I was wrong, and I would deal accordingly. So, I picked up the book and started reading, and within a few minutes I was laughing in relief as there wasn't a cogent argument or scientific proof, or even the slightest bit of rationality in the entire thing.

But my Grandfather had given me a great gift, although not the one he thought. From then on, I was willing to lose arguments since my desire was to know the actual truth, and not to merely have the comfort of thinking I was right. That, as they say, has made all the difference.

[-]Normal_Anomaly14y130

This is a nice one for irony. "Oft evil will shall evil mar indeed."

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16y100

I've just got to say awwww to this one.

[-]Scott Alexander16y530

Since it would be impossible to disentangle and explain all the different factors, and all the studies say people are terrible at determining what events influence them anyway, I'll just tell the event in my transition to rationalism that makes for the best story:

When I was around five, my kindergarten teacher decided to initiate my friends and I into the Great Miracle Of Life by bringing an incubator full of chicken eggs into the classroom. I watched them hatch, loved the little chicks, and (after some time and other events including a bad experience at a meat-filled Asian restaurant) decided to become a vegetarian and eat neither meat nor eggs.

When I was about eleven, I got quite into politics, and like most people in my area ended up as a typical liberal. And so I was of course pro-choice: why should we respect the rights of fetuses when they're just a collection of cells and not even really alive?

It took me a while to realize that I was simultaneously refusing to eat eggs because potential-chickens were valuable living beings who deserved respect, and condoning abortion because potential-humans weren't.

If I'd been a little older and a little cleverer, I'd have made up some typi... (read more)

0Raw_Power14y

Some days one wonders if saving the angst such an effort implies might be worth it. Then again, some of us just can't help ourselves: thinking things through is more of a compulsion than a choice.

[-]Raw_Power14y470

This was going to be a Discussion article where I panicked about becoming a Yudowksy fanboy, but I thought it might fit better here. Maybe.

I am extremely embarrassed by what I am going to write, but is has been weighting on my mind, and I was wondering if other Lesswrongers were feeling similarly.
See, the more sequences I read, the more amazed I am by the man's work. I mean, back at the beginning, I used to grudgingly respect the guy. Then, the deeper I delved into it, the more sucked-in I was. It was like finding a goldmine. We had the same "basic wavelength", for lack of a better term. There wasn't the dissonance I usually felt when reading other philosophers or writers. He viewed the world from a perspective very similar to mine, and derived his ethics and morality in much the same way I would. Except... we clearly aren't equals. The sheer volume of his work is staggering. The depth of his insights, and, more importantly, how diverse they are, all the fields he covers... He talks about nearly everything that I have ever thought to be relevant or interesting. And he keeps pouring them out. One article a day, isn't it? And then he has his fanfiction. And his day job on

... (read more)

8David Althaus14y

Brilliant! It's seldom that I can relate to every single line of a comment.

3salij11y

How strange.. I thought the same as well. It is curious to find my brethren, when I have so long felt alone in this.

2Adam Zerner9y

I can relate to a lot of what you said. Same basic wavelengths, [speechless], utterly impressed, etc. I love the phrase you used about there being an absence of the usual dissonance you feel when you read other philosophers. For me, Eliezer is the only person in the world for whom I feel (almost) no dissonance whatsoever when I read his thoughts.

[-]Kevin16y450

My family is Jewish and we all went to a Reform synagogue. This sect of Judaism is very liberal in the scheme of things, making it very clear that the bible is not literally true and accepting of just about anything, even agnosticism (if not atheism).

At the age of 16, Reform Judaism has a confirmation ceremony where one makes a statement of faith to the assembled congregation. I realized that I couldn't go up in front of a crowd and in good faith profess a belief in God. I had understood all of it to be just stories for a long time, at least since the age of 13, but I hadn't quite realized that meant I was an atheist. I just never really thought about it, but when I finally did it seemed obvious in retrospect. I ended up reading a poem to the congregation and it was very well received as it was the shortest speech given that day.

The next year, I decided I wasn't going to go to synagogue for the High Holidays (where my liberal synagogue had 3 hour long worship services). My parents weren't quite sure how to react, but they told my grandparents and my grandparents responded by deciding they weren't going either. This particular decision set off a chain reaction where it was determined that no one in my family from my grandparents on down were believers and we had all just been going along for each other's benefits. On the holidays now, my 92 year old grandfather always mentions how nice it is that the holidays give us reason to get the entire family together.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16y160

Every now and then I hear a story about (or meet in person) someone who not only left but managed to deconvert their whole family.

I wish, so dearly, that I could devote the time to at least seriously trying that...

[-]Kevin16y160

I mostly just got lucky based on the circumstances. My little brother has fallen in with the 12 step program, though. It's working for him but it's nature is so anti-rationalist that it pains me somewhat. He started believing in God again; I threw some basic paradoxes at him and he just responded by saying he never really thought about it. I think he'll grow out of it eventually.

I went to Israel last year and was surprised and delighted to see that the country was positively European in its religious attitudes. Almost half of the people are non-believers, but I would be seriously afraid to try and deconvert any Orthodox practitioners, even or especially if they were family. They can get rather angry.

[-][anonymous]13y380

For me, it all happened quite quickly. My family was never very religious (my grandparents are ardent anti-theists, my mother is an atheist, and my father is a nominal catholic who hasn't been to church in at least twenty years).

Still, when I was a young child, I was well-equipped with the standard delusions: Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and a vague idea of God (never really considered in any detail, at that point). Then, one day, when I was thinking about it, I realized that Santa Claus was, in a difficult to pin down way, fundamentally different from nearly everything else in my mental hierarchy of being. Santa didn't play by the rules. Santa used magic. Thinking about it, I decided that magic was more like books than it was like real life, and I had to throw the deity out with the bathwater. I stopped believing in Santa Claus and Jesus over the course of about five minutes of really clear thinking.

I've refined my methods since then, and discovering Less Wrong has been absolutely fantastic, but that was the start.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky13y220

It's nice to know that sometimes, somewhere, things work out the way they should.

[-]Swimmy16y380

I was raised in a religious household and took it very seriously. At the same time, I always enjoyed skepticism and debunking, because I was always entertained by such things. But when it came to philosophy I was completely full of it. I got away with it by living in an area where I only encountered other Christians, not many atheists. When I did actually encounter some atheists, I would do some hand-waving about how there was something Deep and Intellectual about Christian apologetics that they were missing.

I dated someone who was extremely, well, hippie. Completely non-judgemental about even the most absurd hypotheses. I really hated that kind of attitude--where was her intellectual curiosity? So I got more into specific skeptic arguments. I fell in love with James Randi and watched almost every video of him that existed on Youtube at the time. But I waited to apply any of the lessons to the Big Question. Christianity was a huge part of my life; my entire family is still very seriously Christian, and a huge chunk of my social network used to be.

I started reading Overcoming Bias because, hey, Mason econ student, why wouldn't I read another great blog? There are several lessons on ... (read more)

[-]Aleric16y300

I grew up in the Northeast United States. I didn't care for school most of my life and was exposed to a mainline Protestant church. Due to socialization from the media and educational systems, I was pretty much a de facto liberal until the age of 22. When I say I was a "liberal" I mean it in the American Leftest variety and not the classical Liberalism of the enlightenment.

I joined the military at 22 in the attempt to bring some excitement to my life. After the Bush administration raised my pay by 15% I figured I must be a "Conservative?" In March of 2003 I led an Infantry team during the invasion of Iraq.

After I returned from the war--still believing I was a Conservative--I started reading pop-Conservative books. I took up many of the positions of the Right and believed "the liberals were the problem."

After being honorably discharged I moved home with an intense desire to learn and change the world. I started school and majored in political science. I also picked up an opiate addiction in an attempt to numb the physical and psychological effects of the war. It was during this time of substance abuse that I first started challenging everything I ... (read more)

9Raw_Power14y

That's... definitely an unusual story over here. Would you care to write a top-level post about the details of this? Or are you especially uncomfortable with talking about your PTSD and the causes and consequences thereof, as well as the experience of opiates consumption? Sorry for being so insensitive, but you really have piqued my curiosity here.

6jsalvatier14y

I second that notion. It's just too bad we discovered this thread a year and a half after it was posted.

7Raw_Power14y

I cast Raise Thread.

5jaimeastorga200014y

I am afraid the spell you actually need is Resurrection; this Aleric fellow has not posted in the same span of time. In fact, his only post was this story.

-1Vaniver14y

You went for SRD correctness over a pun? You are getting both a downvote and a frowny face. :( Don't make me break out the really frowny one.

2jaimeastorga200014y

Not a pun; I was continuing the joke of spellcasting in a way which pointed out that the problem was not only with getting new activity in the thread, but also getting new activity from the poster. Also, just in case you are wondering, I did not downvote you.

4Vaniver14y

Even if you had, there would have been no hard feelings. That comes with the territory of enjoying puns.

1Adam Zerner9y

Interesting. How so?

[-]Strange715y250

When I was in second grade, about seven years old, it was my turn to do a show-and-tell project, so I decided to bring a game I'd learned from a book that purported to be about geometry or math or something but seemed to mostly involve silly arguments between a talking turtle and a greek athlete. I assumed my fellow students would enjoy it, since the rules were relatively few and simple (compared to, say, spelling homework) and the victory conditions utterly unambiguous (compared to the bitter disputes of scoring in various playground activities). It seemed to relate to what we were learning, so the teacher might even approve further study.

I could hardly have been more wrong.

The rest of the class just stared blankly, and even the teacher didn't seem to get it. "But," she said, "You've got 'mu' right there at the start. Why don't you just cross out the rest?" I protested that such a move would be against the rules, but was unable to convey the underlying significance before show-and-tell time was determined to be over.

The book was Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstader. I figured that if the teacher couldn't begin make sense of it, none of the other kids were... (read more)

[-]Annoyance16y230

I became an atheist fairly early, but it took me longer to realize there was no Santa Claus. The idea didn't make sense, but the presents appeared under the tree, and my parents denied being responsible, so clearly they'd gotten there somehow. I concluded that I just didn't understand some important part of how the world worked.

One year, we'd just moved into a new house. For the first time, we had a real fireplace, made of brick. I excitedly spoke of how this would make visiting much easier on Santa, but wondered how he could make it down a chimney at all, and began making plans to string a net of dental floss across the opening in an attempt to see how Santa dealt with the obstacle.

I had been leaning on the brickwork, looking up the flue, as I said these things, and as I turned around I intercepted a look my parents were giving each other. Translated into English, it might have said something like "Isn't this precious?"

In that moment, I intuited that there was no Santa Claus, and that my parents had been lying to me because they thought my belief was cute.

I had already learned that not everyone was my friend. I already knew that some people who weren't my friends a... (read more)

[-]RobinHanson16y230

How rational was your transition to rationality? A sudden transition seems more suspicious, as that looks a lot like the sudden transitions humans tend to make between social groups. After all, there is usually little social benefit to sitting between social groups; social rewards come more to those firmly within one group or another. A gradual transition, on the other hand, seems more plausibly to match the more steady rate at which relevant info arrives on such topics. How much more relevant info could you really have obtained via one story or essay? Whatever your conscious thoughts, if you had a sudden transition I'm guessing that was your subconsious mind thinking something like "Yes, this looks like a good social group to join."

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16y180

I feel that perhaps you are being too cynical. There's such a thing as an insight snapping into place and recoding a lot of old information.

And there's such a thing as force building up for a long time against resistance, and then the resistance breaking; this is not sane, per se, but it's how I would describe my own sharp transition in 2003. I certainly don't think you could describe that as joining a social group.

Actually, I'd think there would be a lot of sources for sharp mental transitions. Just having to choose locally a preference between A and B will generate sharp transitions whenever A < B swaps to B > A and that means other things have to follow.

[-]badger16y120

I agree with Eliezer here, but Robin also has a point. I think we should distinguish between the transition away from one position and the transition towards another. Because falsification is relatively easier than confirmation, once the right evidence falls into place, a rationalist should expect to quickly abandon prior beliefs. The problem arises if something else quickly fills the void without being thoroughly tested. I saw a couple high school friends fall into the trap of thinking the opposite of stupidity is intelligence after leaving religion behind.

Beware a slow transition away from old beliefs as much as a sharp transition to new ones.

3RobinHanson16y

Yes, joining social groups isn't the only possible cause of sudden belief changes, but since the relevant info should have been coming out pretty gradually, it is still hard to see how a sudden large belief change could be that rational. I suppose one could more suddenly see an implication of evidence one had long held, but then the suddenness should be attributed to have realized that some point of view was possible at all. A sudden move to a point of view one had already recognized as possible would harder to describe as rational. [I also mean this comment to reply to other comments besides Eliezer's but this system offers no easy way to express that.]

5Eliezer Yudkowsky16y

If the belief change we're talking about is becoming more rational, then the implication is that you've been irrational up until that point and failing to integrate evidence. Saying "I've been such an idiot!" is a further factor discriminating in this direction.

2Kevin16y

That's what happened in my transition.

8Raw_Power14y

I don't know, man. For me, joining the "rationalist" tribe only means trouble, socially speaking. It is not a tight or rewarding community, it lacks solidarity and structure, and we can't seem to agree on suff. However, I would be fooling myself by denying that being inmersed in a European environment that actively enouraged me to not only ignore the edicts of my native religion but to also positively disbelieve in it may have had a role in making a position as a Muslim untenable. However, my change as a rationalist... in the Lesswrong meaning of the term... you could say I had always been a rationalist, ever since I was a small child. The turning point religiously was "Religion's Claims Of Non-Disprovability", which, like many articles here, managed to tie many loose ends that were worrying me for years and made all the puzzle snap together. What Lesswrong did was help me organize my thoughts and show me the natural conclusions of the thought threads that I was intellectually horrified of following on my own. It helped me become more myself, so to speak. So, no, mostly it wasn't a "good social group to join" rationale, though it certainly was a deal-sweetener.

7Johnicholas16y

I've heard a story about a cat: The cat sat sunning itself by the window for several hours. Then it got up and walked off. My roommate said "That's how we can tell a cat has complex inner life - apparently uncaused but decisive action." Surely decisive action has more possible causes than social groups?

3Nornagest14y

Seems the moral here is that humans already have a common internal mechanism for overturning belief systems that has nothing to do with rationality: outlining it completely would take me more research and probably enough space for a top-level post (it hasn't been addressed directly as far as I can tell), but it's related to the cult attractor and you can see suggestions of how it works in conditions like Stockholm syndrome. Being a lot more common over the set of all humans than having accurate intuitive access to a truly rational procedure for deciding between elements of belief systems, it makes sense to consider it a more likely cause for your own decisions in the absence of evidence for such a decision procedure.

2RobinHanson16y

It is sudden large belief changes that are suspicious, not decisive acts.

5Raw_Power14y

How about when one does not hold one belief to be prominently truer than another, but holds on to one consistent set of beliefs that their view of the universe and their morality are based upon, and which they cannot change gradually, because that would lead to inconsistency, and then one goes and accumulates enough evidence against the individual beliefs of one set and in favour of those of another set to decide to change sets entirely. Religion-coded and other similar worldviews are not buffets, you either take the whole menu or nothing at all. You can't divide it in bits the same way you would treat, for example, Marxism. It's all or nothing.

2Desrtopa14y

I can't speak with authority on his mental state at the time, but I was a participant in the online conversation during which his transition occurred, and I would say that it seemed like a click moment. He had already been grappling with religious issues and attempting to reconcile them in a rational way, and had started to make a headway on the sequences, and in the course of that conversation, he seemed to realize that there were simple and obvious reasons why the approach he had been taking didn't make sense, that the mistakes were correctable, and that by making a generalized effort to recognize and avoid those sort of mistakes, he could make his reasoning more correct. He already had the relevant information, but the connection was a relatively sudden event. Edit: wrote this after seeing Raw Power's comment in the recent comments bar without noticing the date of the comment he was responding to. I interpreted it as a question to Raw Power.

0Davorak14y

Sudden transition are suspicious and cation should be applied when switching world views. It does seem like you are jumping to conclusions in your guess: "Whatever your conscious thoughts, if you had a sudden transition I'm guessing that was your subconsious mind thinking something like "Yes, this looks like a good social group to join." This is a very narrow guess which you have not backed up with evidence. I also can not find supporting evidence in my own observations and/or reading. While it is a possibility it still seems likely to be an over simplification. Knowing that a previous belief system has been falsified(by some of it's foundation being disproven or thrown into doubt) it is perfectly fine to tentatively apply a new system of beliefs to experimental verify there correctness.

[-]MBlume16y200

I am a scientist. The truth has always held aesthetic value for me. Nonetheless, I was for many years a religionist as well. This was pretty much purely through the force of wishful thinking -- the idea of annihilation after death scared the crap out of me, and so I avoided it. A few particularly excellent posts on that other blog we all read (along with some other helpful nudges) finally broke me of my childhood religion. In February 2008, out of a concern purely for the aesthetic value of truth, I renounced the Dark Side, and all its works.

And so, the Dark Side retaliated by taking from me that which I held most dear.

Would it be ... too petty of me to say that I have sworn vengeance? That I hold a grudge against religion in general for one harm done to me?

I think it's not. If I held a grudge against theme parks in full generality because she ran off with a guy she met working at one, that would be petty. There's no reason to expect theme parks in particular to cause significantly more harm to others along those lines than other working environments. Religion is different.

The Dark Side encourages isolation. A false belief which you feel you must protect means you also have to prot... (read more)

[-]MBlume14y230

cringes just a bit

In the scope of things, this all seems a bit silly to worry over now =/

2NihilCredo14y

This is very good to hear.

6Raw_Power14y

That was one of the main things that held me (and, I guess, may others) back. That, and the promise of Hell (at least for Christians and Muslims). No, really, Cessation Of Existence still scares the crap out of mem though I have accepted is as very very probable (barring the Singularity happening very soon). What about you guys?

8NihilCredo14y

In the mid- or late-morning, when I'm full of energy and eager to tackle the challenges and entertainments of the day, death looks like a terrible loss, a fun-stopper to be escaped at any cost. Late at night, when my brain is exhausted and wavering, the bed is so warm and the silence blissful, never waking up again sounds like a fantastic deal. I hope to die at night.

1Vaniver14y

To the best of my knowledge, it is well with my soul. I enjoy living and seek to continue doing so- but when it comes to lifespan, I start at the present and count up rather than starting at infinity and counting down.

0[anonymous]14y

For me, the prospect of ceasing to exist has a calming effect. Not pleasant, as such. I certainly don't want to die. But the thought that someday, I will not exist at all puts all the day-to-day stresses and worries and regrets into perspective. There's an old 'symmetry argument' to the effect that life is a thin sliver of light bounded on the one side by an eternity of non-existence before you were born, and on the other by an eternity of non-existence after you die. The suggestion is that one is no worse than the other.

-1Kingreaper14y

The cessation of existence holds very little fear for me. Existence really isn't all that great, so it ending wouldn't be all that bad. The one thing I fear about it is that it should happen before I manage to make my net impact on the world positive. I don't want to be one of the >50% of the population that the world would have been better off without. I fear failure, rather than death.

3shokwave14y

Hmm. If you are currently below net neutral impact, then continued existence is at least as important as improving your impact on the world. If you are currently above net neutral impact, you should probably end your existence as soon as feasible to ensure you don't accidentally cause or contribute to some event that brings your net impact way down to negatives.

1Kingreaper14y

I don't aim solely to have a net positive impact. I aim to have as large a net positive impact as possible. My fear is not the only contributing factor to my utility function. So, if I prove capable of pulling out of the significant pit of negative impact I have produced during childhood and adolescence, I will hopefully not commit suicide until senility, when there is good reason to expect my impact to go negative again.* *(I also have a couple of mental blocks that make me committing suicide unlikely. I haven't attempted it since producing them, although their purpose was unrelated.)

0TheOtherDave14y

Isn't this just the Sunk Cost fallacy applied in reverse?

2wedrifid14y

Not this time. According to the specified value system the approach is rational. (The sunk cost fallacy is fallacious due to the way it interacts with sane human values not 'fear net negative' craziness.)

3TheOtherDave14y

Ah, right. I should have attended more carefully to context.

2NancyLebovitz14y

Why do you think >50% of people are net losses?

-1Kingreaper14y

Well, to start off, the reason I picked 50% is the belief that most people, had they not been born, would have been replaced by someone else. Slightly <50% of the world could expect, on average, to be replaced by someone better. (specifically, 0.5*[the proportion that would be replaced]) The reason I chose >50% is that I believe that the population at present is larger than the optimum population. I'm not sure by how much, but I suspect the optimum for our current technology level would be less than 1/3rd of our current population. Would you like me to explain why I believe the population is above optimum?

2Costanza14y

I would. Is it just the number, or is it the composition, or maybe the geographical distribution?

1MoreOn14y

I understand your fear. In fact, I have the same fear. I don't agree that the world would be better off without 50% of it. If anything, it's underpopulated. There's a reason why only way of doing worse than doing nothing is to be causing mass murders.

5Kingreaper14y

I would be interested in hearing your reasoning for this position. As such I precommit to upvoting an explanatory post, no matter how much I disagree with its content.

1wedrifid14y

And I commit to at least leaving it neutral even if I disagree with its content. And I will disagree. :)

1MoreOn14y

I posted it into discussion, because it's a long explanation. Probably unnecessarily long. Do tell. I don't even claim to try to be rational (I'm not), so I'm not the one to judge, but at least try to keep an open mind? Of course, I'd appreciate your feedback even if you do disagree. True. Also, depends on how massive.

2wedrifid14y

The problem with mass murders is not the effect on population.

2Pavitra14y

I'm guessing you think the problem with mass murder is the effect on society of knowing that crazy people might kill you for doing things they don't like, so that murder tends to be not simply a removal of human life, but a political act, a lynching. Do you consider murdering a thousand people you don't like to be better or worse than letting ten thousand randomly-selected people die because you can't be arsed to do anything about it?

9ata14y

Is that the only alternative to "The problem with mass murder is its effect on human population size" that you can think of? I always thought that the problem with mass murder was about the same as the problem with normal murder except multipled by a thousand or eleven million or however many victims there are.

0Pavitra14y

Is that the only alternative that you can think of? No, of course not. I just thought it was the most likely to be the one e had in mind.

0Kingreaper14y

For a strict utilitarian, the main problem with non-torture murder can be seen as the fear it produces in the population. Strict utilitarianism is quite common here, so guessing that wedrifid is one isn't that much of a reach.

0ata14y

I don't think "strict utilitarianism" refers to a specific, well-defined moral system, but my point still stands if you're referring to the general class of moral systems and methods of moral reasoning that are popular here; involuntary death is bad, whether torturous or not, so killing ten million people is at least as bad as the sum of the individual badness of killing each of them. The "at least" part is to take into account any further negative effects of mass murder, such as the one that you mentioned, but compared to millions of people dying involuntarily, I really doubt that's the dominating factor.

2Raw_Power14y

Well, I for one didn't look at if from a deontological point of view. Unlike other victims of coercion, murdered people tend not to make much of a fuss about having been forced to die. However, their death tends to produce sorrow and anger on those emotionally and economically reliant on them (including their creditors, superiors, subordinates, clients) and causes the loss of a hub of social network and a repository of knowledge and skill accumulated over a lifetime. In other words, murder, for a stable, sedentary, densely structured society, is extremely wasteful and troublesome. And it leads to a shitton of paperwork. That's for just one death. However, from a Golden Rule/Reciprocal Altruism POV, committing murder is an extremely bad idea because, besides the aforementioned problems with each individual murder, the fact that people can get killed, for whatever reason, may make one fear for one's safety among fellow humans ,raising stress levels to presumably unbearable heights and cause a limitless waste in resources in personal security, . Think of Israel-Palestine, where people constantly live in fear of being killed by some crazy suicide bomber or some trigger-happy teenage soldier. Despite what the actual risk of that happening might be compared to the risk of dying in a traffic accident, much more money ends up being spent on this sort of thing than on road safety. Car accidents, as the Joker would put it, are "all part of the plan". I love how effectively that character uses The Dark Side and The Fallacy Of Grey. Does anyone know any examples of similarly eloquent villains? (Besides Nietzsche that is). Hence why we are taught to heavily frown upon it. A Mongol from Genghis Khan's Golden Horde might see things differently, is all I'm saying. There are also countries like Colombia where murder is extremely common, and often absolutely senseless. Society functions, people get used to the fear. Humans can get used to a lot. Deliberately murdering a mass of p

4wedrifid14y

I should not answer that question. But will(1). ;) The murdering of 1,000 people is far better. Especially if done one at a time in novel and humiliating ways. That will serve to lower the status of the group with negative value and so alter the behaviour of the rest of the population. Of course this requires 'liking' to be closely related to the consequentialist value of people whose identities fit that archetype. That said I still wouldn't murder people. Partly due to an irrational sense of morality and partly due to an ethical injunction. (1) This message will self destruct upon the first disingenuous quotation by a future social aggressor. Unless this pre-emptive expression of contempt for said moraliser is sufficient for me to be satisfied with leaving the results.

0Desrtopa14y

I don't think that would make sense unless you could somehow accomplish it, not only without people knowing you were responsible for the murders, but that the deaths were murders at all. Otherwise rather than lowering the status of the group, you would probably make the public view them as noble victims.

2wedrifid14y

Here we disagree on a matter of fact and expectation. Historically in cases where specific groups were the target of lynchings the resulting lowering of group status has been rapid. Even members of said groups lower their perceptions of their own status such that they avoid sending high status signals (acting as equal to the persecutors) and so making themselves the next target. The same phenomenon can be observed in workplaces and other tribes within our culture, with respect to acts of humiliation, not death. The others in the tribe may view them as noble victims but victims are pitied, not respected. People, particularly ambitious people, will avoid doing things that affiliate them with the victim class. Status goes into free-fall. I did mention 'one at a time' and 'in humiliating ways' so as to minimise any potential martyrdom bonuses. Something terrible happening once is an exception, a tragedy. Something happening a thousand times is a norm, the status quoe. In a certain instinctive sense it becomes legitimate. The presence of humilitation and even the fact that it is a murder, not a valiant death in battle is also important. If the victims are raped, castrated and stoned then they just don't look as cool as if they charge into battle screaming "you may take my life but you will never take my freedom!" People at times have even placed a lot of stock in whether they are killed by the sword or by hanging - and for good status relevant reason.

0Desrtopa14y

Can you provide any examples? I can't think of any cases where groups were targeted for lynchings where it's clear that their status fell as a result rather than their low status causing the lynchings. You do have two tendencies working at odds here; the just world fallacy could cause their status to decrease, but being victimized for one's affiliation can also be a positive status symbol, hence why Christians will often frame themselves as being persecuted for beliefs in cases where it's clearly not accurate. If you have someone clearly going around victimizing the group to an extreme extent with the purpose of humiliating them, I expect the martyrdom effect would win out.

-3wedrifid14y

Given that the obvious examples are well known I suspect you would simply contradict them via a different chronological representation. I will note this, however: the motivation to lynch people exists for a reason. People do it because it works. I believe with considerable confidence that the reverse is true. Humiliating and victimizing a group will lower the status of that group. Being a victim is not cool.

3Desrtopa14y

I can think of plenty of cases of members of low status groups being lynched, but I can't think of any examples that would appear to indicate that lynching resulted in a decrease of status, so I'm honestly not sure what you're talking about. As for whether it works, it certainly works at killing or harming the victims, and if it didn't do that, people wouldn't bother doing it, but that doesn't mean that it works at reducing status.

0shokwave14y

Fictional evidence, but the victims in the SAW movies weren't seen as noble.

0Desrtopa14y

I haven't seen them, but point taken. Am I right in assuming though, that they were deliberately built up as unsympathetic prior to being gruesomely killed? If you want to lower the group's status, it's that build up, where their characters are given a systematically negative portrayal, that you want to aim for, not the gruesome comeuppance.

0shokwave14y

Yes. The method of murder bore some (often ironic) link to flaws in the victim's psyche or character.

0shokwave14y

It ought to be better. None of the factors of either option (murder, don't like, allow to die, randomly-selected, death due to apathy) are worth more than one human life. Thus, it is a simple question of scale. All the possible consequences - such as 'now people will be afraid if I don't like them', 'well, I can't be held socially or legally responsible for their deaths' - just do not outweigh 9,000 human lives. That said, if I ever encountered this situation in real life, I would be immediately convinced that I had made a mistake in my reasoning, and would spend as much time as I possibly could looking for the alternative where nobody dies.

1Costanza14y

On the other hand, there's the consolation that if and when you do cease to exist, you will no longer be bothered by fear of failure or anything else. You will have no regrets, no regrets at all.

3MoreOn14y

I prefer to exist with regret and be bothered by the fear of failure than non-exist. And besides, the universe isn't me-centric. If I invented the cure to all human diseases, solved poverty and prevented the world from blowing up by nukes, I wouldn't "die happy knowing what a positive impact I've had." In the scope of things, there would be that person who's me who did all that, and then ceased to exist.

0DanielLC14y

Why does the net impact = zero part matter? Certainly the only thing that matters is how much total good there is, not how much was done by you. Even if it is, wouldn't +1 QALY be just as much better than 0 as 0 is from -1 QALY?

0MartinB14y

You can do something about that. At least for your own bubble.

-9more_wrong11y

2Tesseract14y

Not to dispute your main point here (that emotionally-protected false beliefs discourage contact with reality), but do you really think that many religious practices were developed consciously and explicitly for the purpose of preventing contact with outside ideas? It seems to me that something like kosher law was more likely the combination of traditional practice and the desire to forge a sense of social identity than a structure explicitly designed to stop interactions. Group differences hinder interaction between groups, but that doesn't mean that the purpose of group differences is to do so. I don't disagree with you on the point that religion often explicitly discourages contact with nonbelievers, either, but that seems to me to be more easily explained by honest belief than Dark Side practices. If you believe something is true (and important to know the truth of) but that someone can be easily persuaded otherwise by sophistic arguments, then it's reasonable to try to prevent them from hearing them. If someone believes in global warming but doesn't have a firm grasp on the science, then you shouldn't let them wander into a skeptics' convention if you value valid beliefs.

2more_wrong11y

It seems very likely to me that tribal groups in prehistory observed that "eating some things leads to illness and sometimes death; eating other things seems to lead to health or happiness or greater utility" and some very clever group of people starting compiling a system of eating rules that seemed to work. It became traditional to hand over rules for eating, and other activities, to their children. Rules like "If a garment has a visible spot of mildew, either cut out the mildewed spot with a specified margin around it or discard it entirely, for god's sake don't store it with your other garments" or "don't eat insects that you don't specifically recognize as safe and nutritious" or 'don't eat with unclean hands, for a certain technical definition of 'unclean', for example, don't touch a rotting corpse then stuff your face or deliver a baby with those hands" etc. etc. Then much much later, some of the descendants of some of those tribes thought to write a bunch of this stuff down before it could be forgotten. They ascribed the origin of the rules to a character representing "The best collective wisdom we have available to us" and used about ten different names for that character, who was seen as a collection of information much like any person is, but the oldest and wisest known collection of information around. Then when different branches of humanity ran into each other and found out that other branches had different rule sets, different authority figures, and different names for the same thing as well as differing meanings for the same names in many cases, hilarity ensued. Then a group of very very serious atheists came and said "We have the real truth, and our collective wisdom is much much better than that of the ancient people who actually fought through fire and blood, death and disease and a shitstorm of suffering to hand us a lot of their distilled wisdom on a platter, so we could then take the cream of what they offered, throw away the rest, and make

0SpaceFrank13y

(I'm neither a theology scholar nor an anthropologist, so I may lack some important background on this.) I agree that the idea of early church leaders isolating members in order to explicitly limit the introduction of new ideas sounds far-fetched. It strikes me as the kind of thing that would only be said after the fact, by a historian looking for meaning in the details. But attributing those member-isolating rules to something like "preserving group identity" seems like the same thing. I find myself wondering if something like the anthropic principle is at work here, i.e. the only religious groups to survive that long are the ones who historically isolated their members from outside ideas. There's probably a more general term for what I'm getting at.

0[anonymous]13y

Survivorship bias?

4SpaceFrank13y

Now that I think about it, "natural selection" seems more appropriate.

[-]PhilGoetz16y200

Christianity drove me to rationalism. I went to a Catholic college where we had to take 2 semesters of theology and 3 semesters of philosophy.

We studied Aquinas for weeks. Knowing that Aquinas was generally regarded as the smartest person in the Middle Ages, I was stunned by the stupidity of his arguments. Aquinas could not have been stupid. Therefore, social pressure was capable of warping the minds of the smartest people on the planet for a thousand years. Therefore, it could be warping my mind right now.

Another thing we did was to study a parallel edition of the gospels. That means that it has one column each for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Laying them out side-by-side, I saw many places where Matthew, Mark, and Luke had identical sentences. They couldn't have come up with the same grammar and word choice independently. At least 2 of them had copied from someone else. I had studied the Bible all my life, and was surrounded by hundreds of people who also studied the Bible regularly. Some of them had read it every day for decades. And none of them had ever noticed this; or if they did, they didn't mention it. (It is universally known to Biblical scholars; but most ... (read more)

[-]orthonormal16y190

It was akrasia, Dostoyevsky, and the sacrament of confession that turned me into a rationalist. Seriously.

I became very religious as a teenager (for social reasons, as I'd later realize), and drifted more and more traditional and conservative (since I could see that liberal Christianity is generally logically incoherent). This drew me into theology (thus philosophy), so that I'd been exposed in college to all the arguments I needed to reject Christianity; I just refused to apply them, generally taking them one at a time and playing One Argument Against an Army.

What changed in grad school had to do with the internalization of the virtue of honesty. Because I had to confess my sins frequently, I became more and more aware of my rationalizations and self-deception (in areas of discipline and akrasia, not of course rationality). I took to heart what Dostoyevsky wrote in "The Brothers Karamazov":

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.

Before long, though, the practice of l... (read more)

[-]Emile16y190

I don't remember any sudden move towards rationality - I was raised in a godless household in a mostly godless country (France). I've always been pretty interested in science-fiction and in religion (though not as something I might believe in).

What pushed me a bit more towards rationalism:

Maths classes that required a lot of demonstrations (and having to be able to do them again on the blackboard with an examinator)
A physics teacher who insisted that we always include an uncertainty factor throughout our calculations, and not give excess decimals (I've noticed that I tend to think in terms of probability distributions more than others around me)
Questioning a lot of my political opinions, and noticing when my brain was "up to no good", for example when EvaluateAsLeftWingOrRightWing(idea) was being called before EvaluateTruth(idea).
Getting annoyed with atheists who consider religion to be the only domain where one can be irrational
Working as a programmer, which doesn't leave much place for wishful thinking
Reading Overcoming Bias daily

[-]Johnicholas16y180

Regarding working as a programmer, I entirely agree.

I don't know of any other discipline, even math, where one is more repeatedly confronted with one's mistakes.

3Vladimir_Nesov16y

Yet you are not forced to think about your own thinking.

7anonym16y

If you want to learn from your experience most effectively and efficiently, and to stop making the same kinds of mistakes, with subtle variations, again and again, it is necessary to engage in reflection about the erroneous thoughts that caused the bug/problem and the thoughts and mental processes that were absent but could have prevented the problem. It depends how much one cares about improving, and how quickly, but for anybody who seeks mastery, I don't see how you can avoid thinking about thinking.

6David_Gerard14y

I wish some of the programmers I've worked with realised this.

[-]ErikM13y180

The distant: I am diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (an autism spectrum disorder). I was unpopular at school, I understood poorly how to fit in, but I understood well how to get smarter. I took high school completion mathematics exams in primary school, university exams in high school, and while I never bit a teacher like in HPMoR, I did punch a student one time and demand that the teachers back me up.

As I remember it, said student was talking about a "tirus" which was supposedly like a next-generation virus which would eat up your computer unless you washed your motherboard properly with soap and water. Being a nerd with some technical aptitude, I told him that he was a bullshitting liar and he was to show me what he was on about or stop it immediately. He continued, so I told him to shut up or I'd hit him. He still continued, so I punched him in the stomach, which winded him and made him shut up. The student was surprised that I had carried through my threat, the teachers were surprised that I was unapologetic, and I was surprised that the teachers (this was at a religious school) were putting a distinctly man-made and exception-deformed rule about limits to hitting over... (read more)

[-]Vladimir_Nesov16y180

I never believed in God, even though my parents are casually religious. The idea was simply prohibited by absurdity heuristics. At the same time, I was surrounded by believers in supernatural, alternative medicine, and had a couple of memories of apparently supernatural events. The specific God was absurd, but the invisible dragon of supernatural explanation was clearly true. I knew things normal people didn't, I knew that my alternative medicine worked while all those silly doctors didn't believe in it, I knew that supernatural exists. This gave a clear feeling of superiority.

I started to part with supernatural at University, on Traditional Rationalist grounds. I studied physics, and there was nowhere for supernatural to hide. Mystical retreated in a dark corner of the garage, not allowed to touch real things, not allowed to show in specific tricks, but still lingering as uncertainty. I called myself agnostic back then, taking pride in having an open mind, not excluding the supernatural or even a more abstract God, while not believing in them.

The systematic breakthrough started less than two years ago, when I began thinking about AI. Before then it didn't occur to me that my own b... (read more)

2Raw_Power14y

But... didn't you say your alternate medicine and stuff actually worked? You don't need to throw the baby with the hot water (or whatever): techniques that work but have bogus explanations that still help in their practice (and I see that a lot in martial arts) simply need better, leaner explanations, but ignoring an empirical phenomenon entirely on the ground that its explanation sucks is not a very good idea. A few days ago I had my first Zen session. The sensation was unique, the results immediate, the explanation (harmony with the universe) bullshit/useless for deriving consequences, but useful for getting the position right. There's obviously more to it that "sitting before a wall in a contrived position", but what exactly?

3Vladimir_Nesov14y

I said that I knew that it worked, not that it worked. I'm not moved by your argument that aimed to exploit that particular hypothetical point of confusion.

[-]seez11y160

Hi everyone. Just to note from the beginning of this comment, I'm a bit different from the typical LW demographic, so maybe this will help shed light on another way of coming to rationalism.

I was born into a mildly Jewish agnostic household, but when I was about 4, I became strongly drawn to Christianity. I didn't know much about it, but I somehow heard about heaven and hell, and that was definitely what drew me in. I was terrified of the idea that people didn't get what they deserved, that bad things happened to good people, that when people died they were really gone forever. When I asked my mother about concern she explained that life isn't fair. But I knew that couldn't be true. Because if it was, if there was no supernatural protection against evil and death, then of course everyone would be frantically working to make it better all the time. I knew there were kind, intelligent people in the world, and they weren't doing this, so they must have a good reason, like that they didn't need to for reasons I didn't know about. I was very confused, and the idea that most people believed in heaven and hell, and it was "okay" that life wasn't fair and we were all go... (read more)

[-]albert13y160

I was brought up to be a "traditional rationalist". My parents were atheists/traditional rationalists and never tried to indoctrinate me with any mysticism, spirituality, 'mystery' explanations or fairy tales (i.e. Santa Claus). Being a very small child I think my intuition was that some form of god was true with a probability of 25%. That number went creeping down until basically 1% (for "intelligent design") and much less than that for an interventionist god. Also, even as a child, I always had the intuition (and still do) that reality has always existed (or time is an illusion and past and future are just different parts of some atemporal symmetry that exists). I've recently started reading a lot of popular physics books on that matter but it's taking a lot of repetition and effort to be able to grasp concepts which are well above my IQ level. In far mode, I've always valued rationality and tried to be as responsive to evidence and reality as possible. In near-mode, however, only fairly recently (last 7-10 years, now being 27) have I considered myself rational. My memories of childhood of social relationships, responding to life challenges, making (practical)... (read more)

6satt13y

I wouldn't take that result too seriously. If everyone posting on LW had an IQ of 140+ it'd suggest LW posters exclusively came from the top 0.4% of the IQ distribution or so. I think selection bias and/or overestimates of people's IQ is more likely.

5wedrifid13y

The entry requirement for MENSA is 148 on the Catell IQ test. Mensa only requires the 98th percentile. The selection effect could be on which IQ test result they wish to report. I certainly report the thing that sounds better whenever in such a situation. If people are mislead by me reporting an IQ that is through the roof that is their fault for taking such an ambiguous and meaningless number like "IQ" seriously in the first place.

3Dmytry13y

Everyone having 140+ is not very plausible, its unlikely everyone took iq test, even (i didn't, and i exclude the online ones)

0crxp13y

It's perhaps unlikely from a statistical point of view, though it is indeed entirely possible. Regardless, there is no reason why someone should refrain from engaging in an intellectual activity if they feel inclined to participate; there are certainly limitations that make IQ tests inaccurate predictors of intelligence for many individuals. I've personally known someone who scored ≈70 points higher when a better clinician administered the test and neuroatypicality was considered.

5Paul Crowley13y

Welcome - your story is interesting and I hope you stick around! I've sung this song before, but from what you say your worries are, one thing that would give you a real lasting boost in your general effectiveness would be learning to program. Have a look at CodeYear - online lessons that start slow, lots of my friends have been having success with them, and you can ask me for help if you get stuck - paul at ciphergoth dot org. Not only is it a directly useful and highly employable skill; it teaches useful habits of thought in several distinct ways.

[-]NancyLebovitz13y170

Another thing I'd recommend if possible is giving as little attention as you can (even down to none at all) to the question of whether you're intelligent enough. Such concerns can be remarkably draining.

1daenerys13y

I agree with NancyLebovitz about not focusing on your IQ. You story and actions show that you are more than intelligent enough to get along doing whatever! Your curiosity, and willingness to do things (like move to a different country) in pursuit of your goals are way more important than having to read things a couple times to understand them. Friendly advice- Try breaking long chunks of texts into much smaller paragraphs. It makes reading your story (and it's a very interesting story that deserves to be read!) much easier. If you don't feel like figuring out where natural paragraph breaks are, then just go through and put one every couple sentences! It sounds like you're in DC. They have a pretty active LW group, afaict. If you haven't yet, you might want to join their google group here.

[-]topynate16y140

When I was 5 or 6, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I ended up with a small collection of fossils and whatnot, as well as an awareness of both evolution and how old the Earth is. As the infallibility of the Torah was obvious, I assumed that its interpretation, which I wasn't yet old enough to learn, explained how everything could be reconciled. In any case, I had much more serious things to worry about. For instance, the boys and girls I knew showed no inclination to date or marry - therefore the human race would shortly end, unless the Moshiach came. Having tagged 'God exists, Judaism is right' as being obviously true, I simply didn't think about questioning it for a long while. As time went on, I did realise, slowly, that just because I'd decided something was correct, like inexorable human extinction, didn't make it so, and that I was not infinitely smart.

When I was 13, I had my Bar Mitzvah and was surprised that I didn't start observing the strictures of Orthodox Judaism, such as not manipulating electricity on Saturday. Now that I was responsible before God for my actions, I should have been much more compunctious, but I couldn't believe that I would be punished for such thin... (read more)

[-]William_Quixote12y130

Edited

[-]OrdinaryOwl13y130

I followed the standard Questioning Religion(TM) route. When I was twelve, our family had a bit of a crisis: my dad's job looked insecure, my mother was having difficulty with her side of the family, and I was home schooled and acutely aware of the fact that this was why I had no social contact with my peers. At all. The solution, as my fundamentalist curriculum (complete with pictures of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden with dinosaurs(!) in the science texts (!!!) ) put it, was to pray for God to magically fix it. Which of course he could do, he's omnipotent! He's God! And he loves all the little children, right?

Several weeks of ardent praying later, my twelve year old self began to smell something fishy. Coincidentally, in the mandatory Bible class (these were DVD correspondence courses), the teacher told the class, "God answers prayers with 'Yes, no, or maybe.' "

"Well, what on earth is the point of praying, then?" said my twelve year old self. I stopped praying. Coincidentally, my life drastically improved after that, so I felt that prayer hadn't altered the outcome one iota. I came to the gut conclusion that Christianity couldn't be right. Manda... (read more)

[-]UnholySmoke14y130

Apologies for coming to this party a bit late. Particularly as I find my own answer really, really frustrating. While I wouldn't say it was an origin per se, getting into reading Overcoming Bias daily a few years back was what crystallised it for me. I'd find myself constantly somewhere between "well, yeah, of course" and "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" Guess the human brain doesn't tend to do Damascene revelations. We need overwhelming evidence, over a long period of time, to even begin chipping away at our craziest beliefs, and even then it's a step-by-step process.

The analogy I sometimes go over is something most people find fairly obvious like egalitarianism. You don't find many people who would attest to being pro-inequality. But all the same, you find very few people who have genuinely thought through what it means to be in favour of equality and really try to fit that into everyday life. The first step to becoming a rationalist is to admit how irrational everyone is without monumental efforts to the contrary.

BTW, I am totally on the road to de-Catholicising my mother. This is on the order of converting Dubya to Islam, so if I can manage that I'm awarding myself an honorary brown belt.

0Raw_Power14y

I was going to make a quip about how converting Dubya to reactionary Islam isn't that hard: they have a lot in common, but that's a really offtopic slippery slope. It has never occured to me to try and deislamize my parents. Or anyone else. I became a rationalist because of my innate character traits (especially curiosity and a healthy disrespect of authority), like almost everyone here, apparently. I have learned that some people just aren't suited for this mindset.

0jsalvatier14y

I would be surprised if egalitarianism is a very good analogy. Politics is rarely a good example of anything.

-3FeatherlessBiped13y

WRT to de-Catholicising your mother: it has been rightly said that Catholicism is the most rational and consistent of all the religions. So, it would be a pity if you dissuaded her from Catholicism and inadvertently landed her in a less rational religion!

9wedrifid13y

What are you talking about? That's nonsense.

9PhilosophyTutor13y

Catholicism has an interesting intellectual culture in that they do make a real effort to tie together the grab-bag of kooky beliefs that make up Catholicism with an apparently logical structure. From inside the Catholic culture they are even apparently successful, although from outside the Catholic culture it's immediately obvious that their "logical" arguments attempting to derive apostolic succession, papal infallibility, Mary being without sin, confession to an ordained member of the Catholic church being necessary to avoid eternal torture in a very specifically-imagined Hell and so on from Biblical texts are very weak. It's almost but not quite analytic philosophy, in the same sort of way that a cargo cult almost but not quite emulates an airfield. I don't agree with the grandparent. The versions of Buddhism that didn't allow supernatural accretions to build up around the philosophy of the (real or fictional) founder of Buddhism seem more rational and consistent to me than the self-contradcitory business of an all-loving, all-powerful God ritually sacrificing his son who is also himself so he could forgive humans for following the impulses he gave them and spare them from the eternal torture he would otherwise subject them to. However I can see how someone could say something like the grandparent and not be totally wrong. It's certainly the religion that has tried hardest to rationalise it's idiotic doctrines as far as I know.

1FeatherlessBiped13y

Thanks for the portion of your reply that was respectful! What you may not appreciate is that some RC beliefs, while incredible to outsiders, nevertheless are logically inseparable from other beliefs that are shared with other Christians; once abandoned, other cracks form, and it all falls down, including parts which are widely accepted as true. RC is, as you say, the religion which "tried hardest to rationalise" all its beliefs, depending on the absolute minimum of non-rational arguments (i.e., from sacred scripture or human authority). It does this with a vocabulary which, I admit, is extremely challenging to the uninitiated. (Aristotelian/Thomistic logic and hylemorphism.) Nonetheless, within that philosophical system, it is quite consistent. It's like picking up a book on string theory -- you ain't gonna "get it" on the first pass (nor the second pass, in all likelihood.) (Sorta off-topic) I was not aware that people doubted the existence of the founder of Buddhism. If he did not exist, could a reasonable religion be attributed to him? :-)

4PhilosophyTutor13y

Internal consistency is a virtue to be sure, although differences in degree of internal consistency between Christian sub-sects all of whose beliefs are based on multiple irrational and/or self-contradictory premises do not mean a great deal to me personally. As a philosopher I think that it's good intellectual exercise to get to grips with bad arguments like those the Catholic church use. However there's no truth in those arguments to "get", and there are other forms of intellectual exercise which might well be more beneficial for the general LW readership. A religion could be the most rational and consistent of religions if its sole departure from reality was a fictional founder. Christianity, for example, has a fictional founder (the Biblical Jesus never existed according to the available evidence nor anyone substantially like him) but has lots of other departures from reality as well.

5TimS13y

What do you mean by this? Is there serious doubt that the Romans crucified someone named Jesus for religious sedition? ---------------------------------------- Since I was raised Jewish, I've got no emotional reason to think that Jesus was a divine figure or that the Gospels accurately describe the historical occurrences. Just curious about the consensus of historians.

4Prismattic13y

Also Jewish, and under the impression that "subversive itinerant preacher" was probably a fairly common thing in that historical period, as was "people crucified by the Roman empire".

2David_Gerard13y

More detailed answer.

3ArisKatsaris13y

Citation needed, or clarification what you mean by "anyone substantially like him". Because I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a real person named Jesus who was really crucified at the roots of the proto-Christian movement -- I'd probably assign less that 5% chance that Jesus was completely fictional. (though of course many other elements, like the birth at Bethlehem are almost certainly fictitious)

-14FeatherlessBiped13y

0FeatherlessBiped13y

FYI, this seemed decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_myth_theory The preponderance of the evidence would seem to be that he really did exist.

3PhilosophyTutor13y

Bible scholars have a consensus that this is the case, although whether they are doing any actual scholarship with regard to the issue is questionable. Atheists by and large do not become Bible scholars, and the mind-killing effects of religion mean that theists tend to do notably poor scholarship in this particular area. However when a rationalist tries to drill down to the actual evidence you find that nothing is there, apart from Bible scholars reading the Bible and saying "this Paul guy seems legit, I don't think he'd have made that up".

7Desrtopa13y

Perhaps the most compelling argument I've heard for the existence of a real historical figure by whom the gospels were inspired was actually put forward by Eliezer (in a discussion on the tvtropes forum, where he visits occasionally.) That is that Jesus appears much more like a cult figure who failed to live up to the expectations of his followers, and so they modified their expectations and rationalized, rather than an ideal messianic figure that people would simply have made up.

5wedrifid13y

Although the reverse is often the case. That's the problem with actually taking your beliefs literally!

4juliawise13y

No, but many Bible scholars become atheists after they realize how nonsensical their study material is. It seems likely to me that there was some person who served as the nucleus for a Jesus myth, just as it seems likely there was a real Briton general who served as the nucleus for a King Arthur myth. But we have no way of knowing anything about either, and I don't see that it matters much either way.

1FeatherlessBiped13y

Do you have a reference to support your first claim?

0juliawise13y

I've heard of several. I don't know stats on what proportion of Bible scholars de-convert. Bart D. Ehrman - author of a book saying lots of the New Testament was forged Francesca Stavrakopoulou (unclear when she became atheist) Robert Price - went from Baptist minister to Cthulu mythologist. Not kidding. Jacques Berlinerblau, who does say he knows few openly atheist biblical scholars.

0FeatherlessBiped13y

The second sentence of this response is a non-defense of your thesis, and the rest of it does not help your case, much. I am open to evidence of your claim that "many" have become atheists. For the sake of argument, I would admit that >10% conversion rate would count as "many", as would, say, some absolute number such as 1,000 in the last 100 years. Perhaps you can find some authority who has researched this question?

1juliawise13y

Sorry, I intended my above comment to mean: "There are some, I found these four, but apparently (according to Jacques Berlinerblau), there aren't many."

1TimS13y

What do you say about contemporary historians like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger? They all seems to think that an originally uninteresting preacher named Jesus was executed (via crucifixion) by Pilate, and that this preacher was the inspiration of the religion now known as Christianity. ETA: You asserted in your other comment that "Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way." I'd never gotten the impression that seditious preachers were noteworthy to the Romans or that crucifixion was a noteworthy method of execution.

7David_Gerard13y

The bit in Josephus was a complete forgery, likely inserted by Eusebius (well-documented as a chronic and unapologetic liar for the Church). Neither Pliny nor Tacitus wrote anything about Jesus - they wrote about Christians, the existence of whom is not in question. Further, it's well documented that Tacitus was tampered with. The notability is that Jesus was claimed to be known to all, with scribes following him about. Look, these objections really are standard, long-standing and pretty well documented. Reading up in the area is absolutely fascinating. Wikipedia is a half-decent start.

3PhilosophyTutor13y

Josephus's claimed writings mentioning Jesus can be divided into two groups: those universally agreed to be fraudulent interpolations by pious forgers like Eusebius, and those which look very much like such fraudulent interpolations but which people still disagree about. Tacitus and Pliny both wrote long after Jesus' supposed life and death and are just reporting what people of their times claimed to believe.

0FeatherlessBiped13y

The Jesusmyththeory wiki article describes a number of significant rigorous, academic (and non-friendly) challenges to the accuracy of the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels. Every honest person acknowledges uncertainty, exaggeration, and literary license. The question (for me) is: disregarding the deluded and dishonest, how would the honest brokers vote? I don't claim to have the answer.

0wedrifid13y

Did Paul exist? What about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?

2PhilosophyTutor13y

Paul did, and claimed to have met Jesus. So either he's a liar (hardly a surprising quality in a cult leader as we know from modern cult leaders) or someone resembling Jesus existed. I think the former substantially more likely given that the Jesus he claims to have met is absent from all contemporaneous documentation. I'm afraid I'm I'd have to look up the literature about the historicity of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and whether there is hard evidence to show that their purported authors were real people with those names who really wrote those texts. I don't know offhand. It's not a topic that's ever been of interest to me. However I do know that all of the Gospels were written long after Jesus' supposed life and death. Hence they don't count as contemporaneous accounts even if you don't automatically discount them as historical evidence because they are religious manifestos and not historical records. They aren't eyewitness reports, they're collections of myths put together by people who weren't alive at the time the supposed events took place.

[-]TimS13y100

In no way did Paul claim to have met living Jesus. Resurrected Jesus, yes - via miracle. Living, pre-crucifixion Jesus, no.

0PhilosophyTutor13y

Thanks for the correction, and upvoted for keeping me honest. Was it that he claimed to have met people who had met Jesus, or something similar? I recall something of the sort but I'm not fully trusting the memory.

0orthonormal13y

Yes- he mentioned his interaction with the other disciples, and said that they'd had the privilege of meeting Jesus in the flesh. It's in Romans or Hebrews, I forget which.

-1David_Gerard13y

Er, no he didn't. He specifically did not claim this. "Matthew", "Mark" and "John" were tags added later to those Gospels. "Luke" is traditionally attributed to Luke the Evangelist, a companion of Paul's, who wasn't an eyewitness to Jesus. The gospels are dismal failures as history - even apart from the miracles described therein.

0FeatherlessBiped13y

What I am talking about is my claim that the RC religion integrates religious and non-religious knowledge to an extent I have not seen in any other religion. Is this the claim you say is nonsense?

5Prismattic13y

By whom? Catholics?

[-]Wei Dai15y130

I was born in China, and moved to the US at the age of 10. My parents were both educated in Communist China and therefore atheists. I do not recall any anti-religious education in school, but do have a fairly vivid memory of watching a state-produced television program on the evils of 迷信 (superstition), which somehow left a deep impression.

After moving to the US, I remember watching Star Trek (reruns) as a teenager and admiring the Spock character. But I don't think I ever had a strong interest in learning how to be more rational, and instead just had an intellectual curiosity in topics that happen to be related to rationality, like economics, game theory, cooperation, the nature of probabilities and anthropic reasoning, the future, the Singularity, moral philosophy, etc., which led me to OvercomingBias and then LessWrong. Even now I think I'm driven more by a desire to satisfy my curiosities than to accomplish any larger goals.

I think my experience may be a counterexample to Something to Protect and Try Harder, but I don't really see how to generalize it.

[-]tsprad16y130

Some of my earliest childhood memories, age 4 maybe, are of Sunday School, enjoying the stories and the socializing, but being secretly astonished that the sweet little old ladies that ran the Sunday School made such a show of believing in their stories, of pretending they could actually communicate telepathically with a character in a story.

On reflection, I'm not so much surprised that I didn't accept the BS, but surprised that I knew instinctively not to question them about it and rock their boat.

But then, more recently I've started worrying that one of these days the mothership is going to come back and pick me up and debrief me. "What have you learned from over fifty years of living on this planet, among these people, as one of them?" And I'll have to admit I don't understand this species at all.

5Raw_Power14y

Well, I am utterly shocked that at such a young age you didn't even consider the possibility that God was real and that you could pray to him. Seriously, what gives? Where did this sense of distinction between fiction and reality come from? How did you distinguish the Bible from, say, History?

9saturn14y

By age 4 I think I had figured out that stories about magical or super-powerful beings always turned out to be made up. I did believe it when adults told me that people had souls though, until I got a book that showed the location of organs in the human body and I noticed it wasn't in there.

1Raw_Power14y

Argh, how I envy you guys. Me, I used to believe All Myths Are True at first, and then I selectively and methodically disbelieved those that I (very gradually) discovered to be inconsistent. I guess I've always had the tendency to completely immerse myself in stories. Even now, I still take stories and fiction way more seriously than I should...

1CrimeThinker8y

I had basically the same origin, just born/raised rationalist I guess and mostly agnostically christian enough to have done sunday schools and nightly prayers. Things like magic and such never really made sense, as much as I liked to imagine them, and used to hallucinate a different world frequently in which I had such abilities. Obviously I was just crazy but rational enough to at least accept that others didn't see the things I did and thus it just made more sense that they weren't real, that imagination and reasoning were clearly two different things (not mutually exclusive, you can combine them as this place seems fond of trying to do in some way or another). If anything I've felt too restricted by leaning to far toward rationality for most of my life and feel as if I'm only just beginning to understand that Maybe All Myths Are Actually True Somewhere. Regardless, that's more philosophy than science and until we find such a somewhere or such a true myth (which we frequently do in smaller scale concepts) doesn't seem too worth worrying about, but that's my natural rationalist bias that I'm struggling to "overcome."

5Nornagest14y

Well, what are your boundaries on "consider"? I remember entertaining the possibility of God's existence at a pretty early age -- somewhere between two and four, but infantile amnesia's eaten the specifics -- but always as a hypothetical, a playing-pretend game. It took me quite a while to realize that my peers weren't consciously participating in a pleasant fantasy; as late as age eight or so I remember making decisions that could only have been predicated on the opposite assumption. For context, I was raised in a pretty obviously Christian cultural milieu -- picture books of Bible stories, a sense that it was normal to go to church on Sundays even if you and your parents didn't -- but most of my very early authority figures didn't make a conspicuous show of belief. "Secular" might be the word, but only implicitly so.

3Desrtopa14y

I also never took the idea of a real interventionist god seriously, and while I've only lived one childhood and so can't compare the effect of this influence to its absence, it might have had to do with the fact that I learned about dead religions at a very early age. By the time my fundamentalist grandmother started proselytizing to me at the age of three, I already had significant exposure to Greek mythology, and I mentally filed "Grandma's beliefs about God" into the same class as "Ancient Greeks' beliefs about gods." It didn't even occur to me until I was about eleven that these were beliefs I was expected to take seriously and have an emotional investment in. I did experiment with the idea of a non denominational god as a kid, but I never felt the need to make excuses for the hypotheses if they turned up null results. I concluded that if there was a god, it wasn't giving me any reason to worship or believe in it, so I might as well assume it didn't exist.

[-]KatjaGrace16y120

Must everyone begin as not trying to be rational? I probably did too then, but I don't remember it. Trying to be correct by making your thought processes accurate seems like a pretty obvious thing to do (I assume that's what's meant by rational). I've rarely been so shocked as when I realized (at about 12 I think) that it's normal and not embarrassing in society to have opinions for 'arbitrary' reasons. I'm still kind of puzzled about what else you would think you were doing, even if you are delusional about your success. What did you folk transition here from?

[-]Marcello16y120

I think I began as a rationalist when I read this story. (This was before I had run across anything Eliezer wrote.) I had rationalist tendencies before that, but I wasn't really trying very hard to be rational. Back then my "pet causes" (as I call them now) included things like trying to make all the software transparent and free. These were pet causes simply because I was interested in computers. But here, I had found something that was sufficiently terrible and sufficiently potentially preventable that it utterly dwarfed my pet causes.

I learned a simple lesson: If you really want the things you really want, then you need to think carefully about what those things are and how to accomplish them.

[-]Gram_Stone10y110

Hello, everyone. I feel that I have taken an unusually circuitous route to becoming a rationalist. I started out close to rationalism in ideaspace, went really far, and then came all of the way back. I have to begin by saying how rationalism was 'epistemically proximal' to my early beliefs. After that, I'll show how far I went. Then, I'll show how I came back.

I think it can be said that my intellectual influences have been relatively epistemically favorable. I think it all started with the film adaptation of Jurassic Park when I was a kid; I think that it made me find joy in the merely real. If dinosaurs are that awesome, and they were dead and science brought them back, then science must be awesome! Then I became interested in outer space and all of the other things that kids automatically love when they love science. When I was older, like many others, I sometimes felt the urge to write science fiction. If I remember correctly, I was researching terraforming for one story, and then I came across a Wikipedia reference to Robert Freitas' respective estimations for how long it would take biological organisms and nanotechnological machines to sequester all of the carbon dioxide in th... (read more)

[-]Vika11y110

Here is my long-winded origin story, with an emphasis on the importance of community.

My first exposure to a community of like-minded intelligent people was in high school math camps. The amount of motivation could almost be felt in the air. After a whole day of lectures and problem sessions, when there was finally time to chill out and play some card games, many people were still discussing the most interesting problems from the sessions, or whatever other math they had on their minds. It was a place where it was ok to care about something enough to work on it all day, and I could never match that amount of cognitive output during an ordinary day at school. Even the card games were of the more mentally challenging sort, like Mao with its ever-accumulating arbitrary rules to be guessed and kept track of. Thinking was not considered effortful.

The Canadian math camp community made my high school years a golden age of sorts. It did, however, have a narrow focus that was unsustainable on the long term. Math contest problems are neat and challenging and elegant but they are still just toys - made to be solved within an hour or two, guaranteed to have a nice solution, even if devilishly... (read more)

[-]ksvanhorn13y110

Oddly enough, politics was the catalyst for me.

I grew up in a very religious, very conservative Mormon family. From my father I acquired the attitude that there are few things more shameful than dishonesty. From reading science fiction, particularly Asimov and Heinlein, and reading science books, I acquired the ideal of intellectual honesty. My father had very strong religious and political opinions that brooked no dissent. In attempting to formulate a consistent political philosophy of my own, I found my opinions diverging from his, but I lacked the courage to openly contradict him. After I had been away from home for several years, in my early twenties, I went through a period where I made a serious effort to root out any inconsistencies in my political philosophy and just honestly follow the consequences of my principles wherever they led. I ended up a libertarian anarchist.

I didn't know it at the time, but that was the beginning of the end for my religious beliefs. Intellectual honesty had long been an ideal for me; now it was an important part of my self-image. I found that I could no longer ignore the special pleading I engaged in when it came to my religious beliefs. If I ap... (read more)

1Dmytry13y

You see, there's always that thing about religion... I just can't get how people can be honestly religious. There's the part of brain honestly believing in a dragon in the garage - and there's the part of brain having a perfectly good model of nonexistence of the dragon. And they honestly don't collide. It's easy for people who honestly can't see they are being dishonest to very strongly promote honesty; this sometimes works as it should, pushing away those who do understand they need to reconcile their beliefs with each other to be honest.

[-]botogol16y110

Eliezer asks "how did you come to rationality?" It surprises me how many people answer: "this is how I lost my religion"

Clearly you can't be rationalist, while also being religious, but there is a more to rationality than simply absence of religion..

Anyway... personally: there's no one moment, but I'm a natural born sceptic and persistently urious analyst. Perhaps rationality attracted because it seems like methodical, organised, analytical scepticism

Single biggest book: Hofstadter's G-E-B, right when it first came out. I just didn't know there could be a book like that....

[-]RobinHanson16yΩ2110

Are you sure "rationalist" is a good label here? It suggests the claim that you are rational, or at least more rational than most. "Rational" has so many associations that go beyond truth-seeking.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16yΩ3100

We need some kind of word that means "seeker after less wrongness", and refers pragmatically to a group of people who go around discussing epistemic hygiene and actually worrying about how to think and whether their beliefs are correct. I know of no shorter and clearer alternative than "rationalist". There are some words I'm willing to try to rescue, and this is one of them.

8Daniel16y

Perhaps it's not worth complaining, but historically "rationalist" was contrasted with "empiricist." Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza were rationalists, while Locke and Hume were empiricists. Obviously that's not a contrast you mean to be invoking, though maybe that use of "rationalist" is rare enough that there's no risk of confusion.

7MichaelVassar16y

More recently, rationalist has tended to have a meaning closer to its current one, but with strong negative affect associated with it. Peter Drucker, for instance, seems to use it as a term of reproach in "Adventures of a Bystander", to mean the sort of small souled narrow-minded person who thinks that they can be right and others wrong and are allowed to say so because they have reasons for their beliefs instead of having made them up to express feelings but the assumption is that one shouldn't do this because doing it leads to communism, fascism, or other forms of authoritarianism. If people don't have the right to believe what they want then some authority must have the right to tell them what to believe. Traditional conservatives can associate this attitude with communism and other badness. Basically, rationalism is used to mean affiliation with authoritarian regimes who claim the prestige of science.

1bizop16y

@Daniel, I agree with this observation. Minimizing being wrong is a pretty recent intellectual development. Epistemic minimax is probably logically a better name, although it sort of sucks.

6MichaelVassar16y

We don't want to minimax since we aren't playing a zero sum game. We just want to maximize expected utility with a few caveats and with a few blanks filled in.

6Tiiba16y

Apparently, "aletheia" is Greek for truth, and "veritas" is Latin. You can pick either and stick "phile" at the end. So, say, veritophile. (My reliable source is two minutes with online dictionaries)

2Kenny16y

'Info-maximizers'? It's too bad we can't use 'philosopher' – you'd think you just provided it's definition.

-1cdj16y

How about "asymptotist"? A Google search suggests it is available.

-3Jay16y

"Skeptic"?

3Davorak14y

The James Randi definition of skeptic seems to have much overlap. I would guess that what EY is looking for has James Randi definition of skeptic as a subset of EY's rationalist belief processes.

7Kenny16y

'Aspiring rationalist'? I don't get a sense that Rationality significantly diverges from truth-seeking, especially the philosophical sense of the concept. What associations of 'rational' are beyond truth-seeking?

2thomblake16y

An interesting question. I've been unwilling to accept EY's use (rescue) of "rationalist", though that might just be because I've been calling myself an "irrationalist" (in the spirit of Nietzsche's "amoralist") for many years now (for some values of "many").

-1anonym16y

I agree that rationalist has baggage in the minds of most people, and it evokes rationalization and related antithetical concepts for many. If Less Wrong expands the community and shapes future discussions on rationalist topics in the way that I expect it to, this might just be the last good time to coin a new term. I nominate righters and truthers, in that order.

3thomblake16y

"righter" is straight out - it sounds like "writer" in spoken English. .

1anonym16y

It would be clear from context which was intended. English has many homophones, and they don't seem to cause much difficulty. Is that not your experience with the many existing homophones?

1thomblake16y

I wouldn't say that English has 'many' homophones. And yes, I think they're generally very annoying, when they can be used as the same part of speech. There isn't much confusion between 'led' (past tense of 'to lead') and 'lead' (the heavy metal). However, it always takes a moment to catch up when someone uses 'right' as a verb, and I imagine 'righter' would be even worse, especially as an obscure jargon term.

1anonym16y

We are getting a bit off-topic, so this is my last post in this thread. I'd argue that this constitutes many (note the restrictions too, which result in excluded entries). With regard to how noticeable homophones are, it feels to me like there is a priming effect due to the context, which results in the sense that was intended being obvious and coming to mind effortlessly. For example, cents and sense sound the same in some dialects, but I doubt many would even consider interpreting the sound in question as cents if they heard the previous sentence spoken. I think most homophones are like that, most of the time, and that it usually takes effort to even notice them, as when trying to think of a pun. I will grant you though that righter and writer are more alike in terms of their meaning, and thus easier to confuse, but I just wouldn't consider that sufficient reason to not even consider it as an option.

3[anonymous]16y

Truthers is already used for people who think Bush was behind 9/11. Righters isn't used for anything that I know of, but sounds like it means "people who think they're right all the time", which was one of the problems with "rationalist". It also sounds like it could mean "right-wingers" or "people who believe in rights".

1Johnicholas16y

In my dialect of english, "righter" and "truther" have unpleasant connotations about as strong as the connotations around "rationalist". My dialect may be different than yours, of course.

1anonym16y

What is your dialect? In my dialect (Californian American), neither word has much of a connotation at all. They both have a vague feel of something I might read in a modern science fiction book talking about different factions of posthumans, or something in that vein, but I don't think most people where I live (in the SF bay area) would think they have any connotation. I was intentionally trying to think of a new word without any pre-existing baggage.

2Johnicholas16y

I live in the american northeast. To be specific, "Righter" sounds to me like religious right and righteousness. "Truther" sounds like 9-11 truther and Colbert's truthiness. It might just be me.

2anonym16y

Interesting. I've heard right-winger, but never righter alone. I hadn't heard of 9-11 truther, but that definitely rules out truther for sure. I am familiar with truthiness, but it didn't come to mind for me in thinking about truther. It's interesting how idiosyncratic language is, especially when it comes to connotation.

[-]Mass_Driver14y100

The first time I explicitly saw myself as someone who cared more about rationality than the people around me was on the playground, in third grade. Like other kids my age, I was fond of playing kickball at recess. We often had arguments over whether a baserunner had been successfully tagged out.

The odd thing was that, even though most people in the group didn't like watching arguing for more than a minute or so (you could tell because people started yelling things like "Shut up" and "Just play" with big scowls on their faces), nobody could resist the temptation to take sides in the argument long enough to end the argument. Yes, people thought that it didn't much matter whether Eddie was out at second, but they also couldn't help but point out that Eddie was obviously safe/out, inevitably prompting a renewed outburst of cries that Eddie was obviously out/safe. Sometimes we argued about whose fault it was that we were arguing so much instead of playing.

I never took sides. At some level, I already cared more about my goal (having fun playing kickball) than I did about tribal politics.

The kickball thing quietly but powerfully framed the way I looked at friendships,... (read more)

[-]Visser_One11y90

I grew up in a Reconstructionist Jewish household with an Orthodox dad and an Israeli mom. I'm sure they used to think that I'd become this great Jew - I was sent to a Jewish private school, and I realise now that I was (and still am) a perfectionist, which meant I felt the need to do all the prayers and ceremonies properly. The first push towards rationality came sometime in second grade, when I asked my parents if I was adopted (long story) because I'd never heard a solid answer in either direction from them before. When they said I was and that they had... (read more)

[-]pleeppleep13y80

I would never have identified as a rationalist had I missed this site. I never had a very strong commitment to the truth, as I am something of a chronic liar. I used to make deliberate attempts to try and manipulate people in ways borderline to the Dark Arts.

I did however desire to have a consistent set of philosophic rules that eventually led me into an existential crises of sorts. I was raised by a deeply conservative (in ideology, but certainly not action) father who is easily the smartest person I know personally at the moment. He was intelligent enou... (read more)

[-]Will_Newsome14y80

I bet my experience is pretty typical: it's just been one really long of string of oops, as far back as I can remember. I realized I was wrong, I updated. I started with nothing... no beliefs, just professions that I think I realized were transient. Slowly but surely I converged on agnostic Buddhist Epicureanism with a little Sagan, then atheist scientific liberal majoritarianism at RationalWiki with a little Dawkins, then neorationality here with Yvain and Eliezer, then hyperrationality at SIAI with a whole bunch of really strong thinkers, and now I just ... (read more)

[-]SwitchContext11y70

Disclaimer: Cognitive science says that this incident probably didn't happen the way I remember it.

When I was 5 years old, my mum sent me to Sunday school because she was casually Church of England and that's what you did. It was only the second or third time I'd been and after the lesson they had us pass around a box full of sweets and told us each to take one. I remember thinking that there was something I really didn't like about this as the box was coming around so I passed it on without taking a sweet. One of the women running the group noticed and as... (read more)

[-]Cakoluchiam12y70

I want to say that my own origin lies in having been raised Unitarian Universalist with the most amazing minister who never invoked "God" as anything more than the common good or interpersonal kindness. I want to believe that UU Sunday school attendance, or, more interesting to me even at that young age, ditching class and sticking through the "adult" section of the worship, where she would give the most awe-inspiringly inspirational sermons, would be enough to awaken any child as a rationalist. Alas, I am fairly certain I was prepared ... (read more)

[-][anonymous]15y70

Most of the math and explicit rationality came later, after I learned to program, but my first step down this path was probably when I was around six. I was suspicious of the whole idea of the tooth fairy, so one night after losing a tooth I did a little experiment: I put it under my pillow without telling anyone. The next morning, I showed my parents, and they actually came clean (obviously they couldn't keep things going with santa claus or anything else like that). I think I still kept a vague sort of religion for a few years after that, though.

[-]Nominull16y70

[-]Ziphead16y70

I can’t remember a time when I was not very much concerned with rationality. I think my father (a neuroscientist) encouraged those kinds of ideas from the time I was learning to speak my first few words, always reasoning with me, nudging me to think straight. I developed a deep interest in science from about the age of five and there was never any competition from other ways of viewing the world. Things like game theory and heuristics and biases came to me much later (when studying economics), and although I was excited about it, it didn’t really rock my w... (read more)

[-]ourimaler11y60

I spent the first six years of my life in Israel, and the rest in France. Now, my immediate family wasn't really religious, but cultural osmosis did lead me to believe in the better-known Old Testament stories - a vague belief in God, as others might believe in Santa Claus (I also believed in the Tooth Fairy. And that she looked like Gonzo in a skirt. Muppet Babies may have been to blame).

Around age 8-10, I became enamored with science, which became central to my worldview. Now, one of the books I owned around then was a children's animal encyclopedia, and... (read more)

[-]Dichotomous13y60

I began my journey to becoming a rationalist at the age of six. This was the time when I first began to read fantasy. There are other contributing factors such as my parents inclination to free thinking. In following my dad's work we moved considerably, introducing me to many ways of thinking and setting me up for a bookish, introverted perspective (friends are much more difficult to stuff into boxes and ship to Africa.)

Choosing to read fantasy was the first conscious choice I made that influenced my development towards rationalism. I've always found the m... (read more)

[-]gwern14y60

My story isn't very interesting, sadly.

As a very young child*, at Sunday School I was told that prayer was supposed to be a conversation and not a monologue by just me. After a year or two with no one talking back and no other religious experiences to speak of, I began to wonder if there really was someone at the other end.

A year or two later still, I decided that if there was, I would have heard something by now, and became a full-blown atheist. (Although to avoid jeopardizing Christmas and Communion and Easter, and because it'd probably annoy my family, ... (read more)

[-]beriukay14y60

I can't really say what defining moments could be considered my rationalist origin story. However, I can speak of my brief foray into the world of woo, and how the first virtue both endangered me and gave me a savings throw.

Back in high school, I was on the tail end of being a theist, having grown quite bored with Confirmation Classes. I saw little value in memorizing the order of the books of the bible, and was desperate to hear something more than the half-dozen stories they told week after week. In those days, I also felt like a budding renaissance ... (read more)

[-]Jonii15y60

When I was around 12, I figured that since adults think I'm smart, and to some degree people of my own age agreed, there must be something I can do to avoid being so clumsy, awkward and stuff. I tried to use best methods I could find to improve my goals and methods to gain those, using every single way I could find. I tried to improve on board game called "Go" to do that, I studied mathematics, read about game theory, and overall tried to gain perspective by learning about the world, and made effort to find suitable role models from fiction(Sherl... (read more)

[-]olimay16y60

I can't trace my present efforts at rationality back to one "Aha" moment; and trying to do so feels akin to applying the Sorites paradox to subjective experience: lots of problems there. But, for what it's worth, I remember certain events and thoughts I associate with "breakthroughs"--spans of time after which, I became more eager and aware of my own biases.

Here are a few that I remember:

Like many other people, confronting my religious beliefs was a milestone. I'd grown up Roman Catholic, and as a child Christian myth and metaphysics ex... (read more)

[-]jimmy16y60

I never had a sharp transition to rationality. I have been an "aspiring rationalist" for as long as I can remember. Though there were a few significant events, it was mostly just a gradual improvement.

Now that I think of it, my upbringing seems almost ideal for creating a rationalist. My dad is probably the most rational person I know, and although my mom is normally very rational, she would occasionally get upset about something and be extremely irrational. Not only was I raised by atypically rational people, but I also had practice dealing wi... (read more)

2Raw_Power14y

The way you do this... that's almsot exactly how I used to operate. Even today, my never taking a vulnerable position in an argument has earned me the ire of people who accused me of always wanting to be right. As if there was something wrong with that!

-19[anonymous]14y

-25Username14y

[-]NQbass716y60

I don't remember a time when I wasn't in some sense interested in rationality in some sense... but I can remember one time being at a bookstore and seeing Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" (this being back when I was one) and thinking "Maybe I should read that and see what the other side says." I came home with it and my mom saw it and asked why I would want to read that when it might make me doubt. I clearly remember thinking about it and responding with something along the lines of "If you don't know both sides, how... (read more)

[-]Lawliet16y60

Something always felt wrong when somebody said "because I say so", so the truth from others couldn't be trusted. I knew I wanted never to become the kind of person who answers with "because I say so".

[-]Cassandra16y50

After thinking about it more and looking back on my own life I think I have figured out at least four things that led me to this path.

When I was very young I learned that I was a person and that people are separate things. When I think my thoughts are my own, when I act my actions are my own. This can as a very great shock to me. How is it possible that I, of all people, had an identity which is separate from others? I could not see the dividing line between me and others and I could barely even understand why we weren't all one big group mind acting in

... (read more)

[-]Roko16y50

I've always been an above averagely skeptical person. At the age of 10, whilst being subjected to a school assembly lecture by a local evangelical Christian organization, I came up with an alternative hypothesis to explain why so many people believed in God: perhaps they were just pretending to believe, with the purpose of making money through the donations of believers! A shocking moment of rational glory, though I kept it to myself.

At university I always felt there was something missing from my education in mathematical physics and later pure mathemati... (read more)

[-]Todd16y50

Anselm's a priori proof for the existence of God. 1982. I was young, thought the argument was elegant and remarkable - and somehow flawed. I had to figure out why.

[-]badger16y50

I had a broad interest in science and philosophy as an adolescent, but the first issue I really had to confront was religion. My parents are Mormon, and the town I grew up in predominantly LDS, so I felt an enormous pressure against expressing the most basic doubts. It took a significant amount of research before I felt confident leaving my religion behind. Once I had broken the initial barrier, my mind was made up quickly, but I wanted to form an airtight case I thought should convince anyone. The friction this generated between myself and my family, girl... (read more)

[-]inklesspen16y50

I think the thing that made me a seeker-after-rationalism is the same thing that made me an agnostic: Greg Egan's Oceanic.

I grew up in a fundamentalist household and had had one moment of religious euphoria. Oceanic made me confront the fact that religious euphoria, like other euphoria, is just naturalistic phenomena in the brain. Still waiting on my fundamentalist parents to to show evidence for non-naturalistic causes for naturalistic phenomena.

[-]Dues10y40

When I was a child, my parents took me to church a few times. My brother and I always pitched a fit, so eventually our parents gave up. I would love to say that was the start of my journey and that we did it because the things they tried to teach us didn't make enough sense, but that would be a lie. The real sin that the local church made was to be super boring. So with my sanity waterline firmly unraised, I started my own religion. It had aliens, because aliens were cool. I even got a convert. (You are now free to laugh at middle school me.)

Eventually my... (read more)

[-]Fossegrimen11y40

I never had a watershed moment when I ‘discovered' rationalism. For those of you who grew up with religion and take faith as a more or less given part of society, I must have had a rather peculiar childhood; When I was little, I spent quite a lot of time with my grandfather who was an uneducated farmer and had never heard of Bayes’ Theorem. (But loved it when I recently explained the basics to him.) I remember starting sentences with "I believe…" and I never got any further before being interrupted with "If you want to believe, you can go... (read more)

[-]Blackened13y40

To a considerable degree, I was "born rationalist" (although I can easily see how I could have been born as a lot more of a rationalist than I was). I have always passionately sought efficiency, and I liked rigor.

I was raised by irrational people and it took me long to break some of the irrational beliefs - I was 16 when I realized that "older people are nearly always much smarter than kids, and this implies that they are also right in nearly all cases" is wrong. At that time, I already knew about expected outcome - in the past few yea... (read more)

[-]Jotto99913y40

Hello, Less Wrong.

With no particular or unusual intellect (that I could objectively test aside from an IQ test in elementary school, which scored somewhere around 115-125), as well as low school grades, I found myself as a teenager who took issue with religion. I suppose my journey in becoming rational started when I decided I was an atheist. I was finding various flaws with religion, as well as enjoying material put out by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I consider that as the starting point because it was when I realized that humans are inhe... (read more)

[-]aluchko16y40

I can't really relate to the religious stories, my parents, though not atheists, are pretty secular so I never had the brush with religious indoctrination. In reality I've probably always been an atheist. I think this gave me an early start on rationality, not so much because atheism taught me rationality, but because I never had to abandon a rational line of thought for fear of challenging my religion.

As for consciously trying to be rational though I don't know of any one defining moment though I can recall a slight watershed. During grade 11 I was selec... (read more)

[-]insaneabd16y40

It was happening slowly while I was growing up. I can remember many small times when I was breaking away from tradition and the beliefs of my parents and family. Things started to speed when I discovered OB and Eliezer... Then I started university.. A very rigorous course in maths emphasizing the axiomatic approach to maths. A very logical course in physics. Then I started reading the quantum physics sequence, something I had not done before. I read No Safe Defense, Not Even Science (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/no-defenses.html) and that was the crucial "Aha!" point that pushed me over the edge. This was only a few months back. And here I am.

[-]PhilGoetz16y40

I might not be a rationalist by Eliezer's definition. Eliezer said that there must be a rational solution to Newcomb's paradox. I find that belief irrational. (Although there may be a rational solution to Newcomb's paradox.) Rationalists don't have faith in rationalism.

4insaneabd16y

Or maybe the evidence he has justifies his belief in the possible solution to the paradox, and similarly for you. Its only after you two share your evidence and fail to agree that one of you can be called a non-rationalist (on these grounds).

5PhilGoetz16y

No. He believes he has a proof now. But he said that he tried to build a proof because, before finding a proof, he believed there must be a proof - and it seems, from what he wrote, that he found the lack of such a proof offensive. That's faith.

4Eliezer Yudkowsky16y

That's a mixture of Trust in Bayes and the original driving purpose that causes me to define the word "rationality" a certain way. In any case, I did find an elegant answer and so I have no reason to label the driving intuitions involved as wrong.

[-]thomblake16y40

I went to a very good Catholic elementary school, one run primarily by priests trained by Jesuits. The priests commonly visited classes, and anything could be interrupted to have an impromptu theological or philosophical discussion. The classes encouraged questioning and doubt in all areas of study. We actually read philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Aquinas in the later years.

While I doubt that every child who went through this experience with me came out an ardent seeker of truth, I nonetheless believe this had a huge impact on who I'd become. Also, I should note that I've heard most Catholic schools aren't this awesome.

1thomblake16y

Did I really say "Dominicans"? I meant "Jesuits", of course. It's been a while.

1Raw_Power14y

Didn't we have an article on the Jesuits and their investigation of doubt?

[-][anonymous]16y40

deleted

[-]chiao16y40

When I realized in graduate school how difficult it was to resolve disagreements, and how disturbingly common crucial disagreements were.

[-]tototavros7y30

One of my (recently met) good friends is a rationalist, on LW, etc. She had made some offhand comment about "Tell Culture", so I looked it up, found Thing of Things and started reading about it; it sounded like a good idea. Linked at the bottom was "Cis-By-Default", which described my feelings on my gender better than anything else. I started reading SSC after reading a lot of Thing of Things, then decided to make an account here!

[-]timeholmes10y30

I am a sculptor of the human body and a deeply religious person. So I come from a sector far from most others here. That's why I believe I may have a useful perspective. Primarily this might surface as a way of looking at reality that includes things that might be invisible to many in our increasingly mind-driven world. I believe that intelligence comes with a frightening blind spot that causes me increasing concern (outlined in my TED talk, "The Erotic Crisis" on YouTube). The body's intelligence is every bit as complex and sophisticated as the ... (read more)

3ChristianKl10y

To be useful you actually have to be able to argue your perspective in more depth. It's quite easy to say that you find the human body important, but alone that's no reason for other people to also find it important.

[-]SystemsGuy10y30

Hi all. I'm a seasoned engineer, BSEE plus MS in Systems Engineering, with a couple of decades in electronics systems architecture, team management, and now organization management. I'm a big picture guy who can still somewhat do the math, but not really much anymore (ahhh, back in the day.......). Myers-Briggs says I'm an INTJ.

I've had some classes and additional practical experience in decision theory, statistics, communications theory, motivation, common biases and fallacies, utility, and such basics. I am beset with an interest in almost everything... (read more)

5Vaniver10y

Welcome! Function follows form; a forum website mostly leads to forum-style discussions. But other things are going on in forms that are more conductive to action verbs, like physical meetups or workshops run by CFAR. (And the changes mostly happen in the lives of people reading the site, like you could see in the bragging threads or rationality diaries.)

2SystemsGuy10y

Thank you for the welcome! I will review CFAR, as at a glace it has some significant clients and at least some success. There are no meetups near me, it seems. I appreciate the feedback.

2ChristianKl10y

If you have a specific problem that you want to get solved that you think fits the website, feel free to open a thread in discussion. But I don't think there's no problem solving. Out of the first site at the moment there are: 1) Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining (The thread is about chosing how the OP focuses his scientific research which is a practical problem) 2) Breaking the vicious cycle (Solving a community problem, that important for some members) 3)The Centre for Effective Altruism is hiring to fill five roles in research, operations and outreach (Recruitment is a clear practical problem) 4) I just increased my Altruistic Effectiveness and you should too (Shares a practical technique about increasing the size of donations) 5) Shop for Charity: how to earn proven charities 5% of your Amazon spending in commission (Practical technique for increasing money going to charity) 6) Memory Improvement: Mnemonics, Tools, or Books on the Topic? (Sharing of practical techniques) 7) I Want To Believe: Rational Edition (Sharing of practical techniques) 8) Financial Effectiveness Repository (Sharing of practical techniques) 9) How to build the skill and the habit of experimentation? (Sharing of practical techniques) I don't consider that a bad output.

0SystemsGuy10y

Thank you for the welcome! This site is unusually populated with internal links -- that must take some discipline for the posters (and either good search tools or good memories, or both!). I will review your links, and I much appreciate your sharing.

[-]waveman14y30

On one account, our rational brains exist to provide convincing rationalizations for our actions for the benefit of other people. Often the stories we tell ourselves are a lot of cobblers.

E.g. We invaded Iraq to the Iraqui people can be free, or to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction (not because of their oil!).

I will try to tell the true story of my conversion from religion.

I was about 12 years old. My parents were forcing me to be 'confirmed'. As part of this I had to make various affirmations. At that age my brain, incited by various hormones, w... (read more)

[-]mayonesa14y30

When I was a child, I read the classics of literature and philosophy and quickly became a realist.

I don't say I'm a rationalist because rationalism implies a universal quality to human judgment, when empirical evidence convinces me no such thing exists.

Since then, I've left behind liberalism (pure emotion, defensiveness) and become a conservative realist, monarchist, conservationist and idealist (in the Kant/Schopenhauer sense).

-4Peterdjones12y

Monarchist? There's a rational justification for Monarchy? Tom Paine must be doing 1000rpm!

6ErikM12y

Here's one: less jockeying for power. Monarchs don't need to pander to interest groups to get elected.

[-]wedrifid12y130

Monarchs don't need to pander to interest groups to get elected.

Merely to keep their heads attached.

3Peterdjones12y

I'll. say. They don't need to take anyone else's interests into account. It would take a rather special kind of mind to treat self-interest as admirable detachment.

-6Peterdjones12y

[-][anonymous]16y30

I don't remember BECOMING a rationalist, just going through life thinking how stupid everyone was.

When I was seven or so, I asked my mother if she and dad believed in god, and she gave some handwavy answer about believing in a kind of magical force to the universe, like in star wars, and I thought "Boy, that's stupid."

I don't use the word "rationalist" to refer to myself, because it throws me in with you lot, most of whom I still think are stupid.

2Vladimir_Nesov16y

By this logic you may as well not call yourself a human, "because most humans are stupid".

4[anonymous]16y

To my way of thinking, "rationalist" has a certain stink to it, it has connotations of people sitting around arguing about arguing, writing pages of tedious probability math using "prior probabilities" they pulled out of their asses. In one sense, being a rationalist just means that you try to be rational. But it seems like a stupid thing to wear on your sleeve, because everybody tries to be rational. There's a sense in which objectivism is just the belief that reality is mind-independent. But I don't go around calling myself an objectivist either.

2Nick_Novitski16y

Not everyone tries to be rational. Some people despise rationality because of the same stink you attribute to it, or because of others. To them it might connote atheism, or linking themselves to low-status entities like "the man" or "the sheeple." A rational person is someone who applies rationality. A rationalist is someone who advocates the application of rationality, just as a racist is someone who argues the fundamental importance of racial status and history, or a "homosexualist" is someone who (purportedly) wants to make homosexuality part of all our lives. There's a dangerous potential to be confused between (for example) "objectivity" (the belief you mention) and "objectivism" (membership in the low-status group you mention).

[-]Jack16y30

My sense is that people value the truth to varying degrees. Further, people encounter barriers to pursuing the truth to varying degrees. Whether or not someone ends up here is likely a function of them caring about truth enough to make the relevant social and psychological sacrifices to get past the barriers.

For me, I don't remember when I started caring about whether or not my beliefs were true. I know that the moment the possibility of God's non-existence was put to me I immediately became an agnostic- and an atheist when I learned about the scientific ... (read more)

[-]Patrick16y30

There were two big rationalist cascades that I have gone through.

The first was kicked off at age 14 when I learned about the idea of a logical fallacy, which lead me to going through a binge at wikipedia in an effort to learn all of the ones listed. This directed me to the skeptic's dictionary and Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit, as well as some books listing common errors in thinking.

After about a year, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what counted as a good argument, one that didn't fall in to any of the traps that I was aware of, I was aware ... (read more)

[-]HalFinney16y30

Perhaps a more fundamental question is, why do you want to be "rational"? Where rational means, as Eliezer suggests, less wrong, more right(!), more accurate in your beliefs.

It seems obvious that there are practical advantages to being more accurate on many issues. Choosing what route to drive to work, deciding whether to bring an umbrella, wondering if you should ask so-and-so out, you want to get it right.

OTOH there are well established situations and circumstances where you will do better to be wrong. You'll often do better to agree with your ... (read more)

[-]Cassandra16y30

I believed very strongly that my mind was not functioning correctly and I wanted to find techniques to be able to sort through what was real and not real. This led me to begin a very rigorous program of self-examination where I picked at and questioned everything that I am and might become. I continue to do this now but I have learned that I at least seem surprisingly sane compared to my previous view of my self. I have also always had a very strong sense of curiosity tied up with a very impulsive nature. Over time I just experimented with all sorts of thi... (read more)

[-]kluge16y30

I have very few memories of my childhood (or indeed anything older than a few weeks), but perhaps the turning point I remember was in Lutheran confirmation school when the priest was discussing conscience. I realized that the notion of God was actually superfluous and everything that had been said would stand as well without it. After this I looked at every discussion and explanation with different eyes and soon lost my faith, although I dind't officially leave religion until four years later after high school.

I was never very religious, probably because m... (read more)

[-]salij11y20

I grew up in a strict Christian household. I did not seriously question the way I was raised until about 12-13, when I started experiencing depression. I thought something was wrong with me since I was not able to fit in with society, and so I became a frequenter of the self-help section of libraries and bookstores.

My senior year, I journaled that my life goal was to see things objectively, separate from myself, because I realized that seeing things through a faulty lens was what was causing me to suffer. I did not know how to, though.

I did not know that R... (read more)

[-][anonymous]11y20

Hello. I don't identify as a rationalist. I try not to identify at all, but I fail: next best thing, I identify as 'urban scum' - a term I use in an idiosyncratic sense. Individualist, pro-freedom (not necessarily liberal), self-reliant, network-conscious, versatile. A hippy, maybe. And a discordian. The story is very long, so I'll condense it: for a variety of reasons (not least of which were the encounters between my grandparents/parents and WWII), I came out of childhood as somewhat damaged goods. I emigrated from my native Hungary in 1986, at age 17, a... (read more)

[-]learnmethis12y20

I’ve got kind of a fun rationalist origin story because I was raised in a hyper-religious setting and pretty much invented rationalism for use in proselytisation. This placed me on a path of great transformation in my own personal beliefs, but one that has never been marked by a “loss of faith” scenario, which in my experience seems atypical. I’m happy to type it up if anyone’s interested, but so far the lack of action on comments I make to old posts has me thinking that could be a spectacularly wasted effort. Vote, comment, or pm to show interest.

[-]Epiphany12y20

"How do you interest people in rationality?" is a question I have been thinking about for a very long time. The most important insights I have into this are below.

How I crossed the first divide:

There was a sense of being expected to think for myself by my peers as a teen - the "think for yourself" mantra was a core part of our culture. This seems especially relevant because peer pressure gets through to people who aren't rational.

After being influenced by the "think for yourself" mantra that was being repeated by the other... (read more)

[-]Tripitaka14y20

Having been born/brought up in germany, where religion is almost a nontopic, I always read Science Fiction/Fantasy and always felt inclined to rational decisions. In my 12/13th year of school I had an exceptional good philosophy teacher, and found myself to find Utilitarism on some level logical. Again some years later (some before the time of the comment) I finally updated my mind/made the rational conclusion:

I should choose the most efficient path to reduce suffering in the world. I saw only two conclusions, getting really rich or becoming a successful ... (read more)

[-]Kellopyy16y20

At best I might call myself aspiring rationalist (like Kenny elsewhere in this thread suggested) because I fail very often as rationalist.

As for experiences that have led me to try to be more rational...

I read Sophie's world[1] when I was about 14 years old and that inspired me to think I how I could tell if I wasn't actually living in a 'real world'.

I was curious about different beliefs humans have in my teens and if there might be truth to some of those beliefs (and which ones). After finding local christianity unsatisfying for several reasons and loo... (read more)

[-]anonym16y20

A critical thinking class in which nothing was sacred and everything was suspect. We spent a semester uncovering the fallacies, lies, and manipulative rhetorical devices in advertisements, television and movies, government propaganda (related to sex, drugs, the military, etc.), journalistic publications, academic papers, wisdom our parents taught us, and much else.

3AnnaSalamon16y

Where was the class? What did you read?

3anonym16y

The class was at college (in the USA). And I ended up reading philosophy (I assume you meant your question in the British sense of read), which I partly regret. It would have been better to do math at school and philosophy on the side, rather than the reverse.

[-]Jason16y20

Reading Thaler's Anomalies' series for my Intro to Behavioral Econ class during undergrad- oddly enough, I hadn't before questioned the validity of the rational actor model.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16y20

Added a post scriptum, see above.

9AnnaSalamon16y

Could you specify what you mean by "getting the transition started" or "crossing the first divide"? I'm surprised by the question. In both my own history and the people around me (both people I know from rationalist communities, and people more representative of the broader American public), I tend to see fairly continuous gradations of rationalist skill and of rationalist disposition/goals, without an obvious "first step" to notice.

1Raw_Power14y

I think he's looking for a trigger we can activate in normal people. But I've read most of these stories and so far it seems the vast majority among us had a natural disposition for this ever since babydom. We could ask those who 'didn't have that disposition to give more details?

[-]bmon16y20

I've resolved not to blame myself as much as I used to, I was young and not at all sure how to deal with the fact that my dad was dying. That and I didn't quite know he was dying, as my parents effectively told us lies of omission about his condition. That's part of what lead me to understand that there are real evils in this world, a realization which put me on track to being the best I can be...

Anyway, I know now that I was only quasi-rational then, and that this was partially the cause my mistakes. Mistakes which caused grief and wretchedness that I can sometimes hardly bare. I'm on track now though - never again.

[-]Kenny16y20

The Fountainhead

[-]hoofwall10y10

After seeing an image I thought was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen I tried to create an imaginary friend of her and after she became established enough in my mind I guess, she immediately gave me ideas on what it truly meant to be right(which was a first to me since my philosophy on everything was very unfortunate prior) and I've been effectively living vicariously through her since...

[-]nitrat66510y10

Here is the story of my path to becoming a rationalist.

As far as I remember myself, I used to read anything I could get my hands on – my mom even jokes sometimes that I learned to read before I learned how to speak. So, long story short, at some point, when I was about 5-6 years old, I got my hands on a Bible. Having thoroughly studied that particular document, I decided to go forth and become baptized. I guess that I am one of the rare cases of child baptism being a somewhat educated decision – at least, I took time to familiarize myself with the tenets o... (read more)

[-]Epsilon72512y10

For as far back as I can remember, I have always been a Rationalist, even before I knew what it was. I'd examine something from all angles, and think about things most people from my home town would not even consider. I saw this as me being smarter than them. I actually am smarter than them, but not only for that reason.

I could never really relate to anyone, back home. I saw them as dumb, uneducated, boring people that refused to think about anything. They openly refused to understand logic. They were stupid. They wasted their childhoods failing school and... (read more)

[-][anonymous]12y10

Well, I'm not quite sure if I'd say I have a "story", but there was definitely a series of factors that pushed me toward becoming a rationalist. As a child, any time I was involved in some sort of group vote, upon winning or losing (being in the majority or minority), I noticed that my desire was focused more on whether I won or lost, rather than whether the agreement the majority reached was fair or not. I suddenly stopped being a majoritarian, and began seeking the right answer, rather than the "right" answer. This was further reinfor... (read more)

[-]UngnsCobra13y10

(I'm sorry about the grammar etc, hope the content comes through) I was 17, when I first had a "burst" of enlightenment, it was more or less the time I started to think critically for myself, coming from a society that I found to be very narrow minded, I at that point felt an urge to read more, learn more and be better. I heavily started to write about my experience's and yielded a great content from it. I naively adopted the notion that: we are what we sculptures us into, our potential is unrealised and too wide and deep to be generalised. With ... (read more)

[-]FeatherlessBiped13y10

If by "rationalist", the LW community means someone who believes it is possible and desirable to make at least the most important judgements solely by the use of reason operating on empirically demonstrable facts, then I am an ex-rationalist. My "intellectual stew" had simmered into it several forms of formal logic, applied math, and seasoned with a BS in Computer Science at age 23.

By age 28 or so, I concluded that most of the really important things in life were not amenable to this approach, and that the type of thinking I had learne... (read more)

2Kutta13y

Welcome to Less Wrong! You might want to post your introduction in the current official "welcome" thread. LW's notion of rationality differs greatly from what you described. You may find our version more palatable.

1soreff13y

I'm probably also an ex-rationalist. Simply looking at the list of biases that I should really be correcting for in making a decision under uncertainty is rather intimidating. I'd like to be right - but do I really want to be right that much? Frankly, the fact that I still maintain a cryonics membership is really status quo bias: I set that up before * Reading The Crack of a Future Dawn - downgrade by 2X if uploads/ems dominate and are impoverished to the point of being on the edge of survivable subsistence. * Watching the repugnant Leon Kass lead a cheerleading section for the grim reaper from the chairmanship of W's bioethics council. Extending human lifespans is a hard enough technical problem - but I hadn't imagined that there was going to be a whole faction on the side of death. Downgrade the odds by another 2X if there is a faction trying to actively keep cryonicists dead. * Watching Watson perform impressively in an open problem domain. The traditional weakness of classical AI has been brittleness, breaking spectacularly on moving outside of a very narrow domain. That firewall against ufAI has now been breached. Yet another downgrade of 2X for this hazard gaining strength...

[-]Nick_Roy13y10

I resolved my typical adolescent existential crisis (for the time being) in a somewhat atypical fashion, concluding after much deliberation that I ought to pause the crisis until I know what's True and what's not, which might mean pausing it forever.

How can I resolve an existential crisis without knowing what meaning, purpose, value, etc. Truly are? Rationality makes the most persuasive claim to the distillation of Truth, so I am an aspiring rationalist.

[-]ShiroiTora14y10

I wish I had a great story to tell...I do not. I am a very simple man...with a simple mind. My memory is terrible....for me to remember things...I must understand concepts. There never was a time that I have thought differently...I have never been religious...I am an Atheist. I operate on basic country common sense. I am neither highly educated nor am I especially intelligent.

I argue essential points for its pragmatic value. If an argument is purely an academic one....one in which the answer holds no value to true application in life...I do not val... (read more)

[-]Simulacra16y10

For me it began as a bored student picking up a book on probability (specifically Randomness by Deborah Bennet) and discovering my understanding of probability was seriously wrong. Following that discovery and armed with my improved understanding I began to look at what other ideas and beliefs might be flawed. I started with those beliefs that were most likely to be based on probabilities and found that nearly everything I thought was true was affected by a single inaccuracy. My mind has burned with a single question ever since: "What else is pollutin... (read more)

0jsalvatier14y

what was the one inaccuracy?

[-][anonymous]16y10

In a new school yard. I was 11 years old and I had to find out quickly and reliably who was friend and who was foe.

[-]Cyan16y10

My origin story began when I stumbled across Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. From it, I learned that I didn't have to make up an ad hoc method for grappling with uncertainty each time I encountered a new data analytic problem, and that the general rules encompass a great deal more that data analysis.

[-]steven046116y10

I could never stand when people made thinking mistakes, especially me.

I got into OB-style rationalism via Eliezer's writings on the Thing Not To Be Named. I got into that subject via >H and futurist sites (McCarthy, Bostrom, Sandberg, Pearce, Moravec, Hanson).

[-]pre16y10

I don't know really, certainly I can recall no specific incident. I suspect just the lessons in logic needed to learn to program computers properly, the basic lessons in the scientific method taught at school.

My folks are Christian, and I was still at Sunday School till I was about 14, but not really taking it seriously, still going just for the sake of a quiet life. By the time I was 18 at Uni I was certainly talking friends out of their theism, mostly by pointing out contradictions in their beliefs and challenging others to find some in mine. Then alteri... (read more)

[-]Florent16y10

When I was a kid, I had an uncle who claimed he was able to use telekinesis to move glasses. Strangely, when I asked him to show us his talent, it was never the good time ("I'm too tired", "it's too dangerous"...). From then I started questionning every weird claims/beliefs.

Later, as a teenager, I understood that the most important thing to do was, well... doing as much good as possible in the world (quite obvious indeed, but not for kids, and not for most adults - just try to ask them what is the most important thing they can think of)... (read more)

[-]outlawpoet16y10

I first began to separate the concept of truth-seeking from specific arguments of fact late in life, as a teenage catholic who was given a copy of The Case Against God.

[-]CronoDAS16y10

I read my father's issues of Skeptical Inquirer magazine as a kid. So, well, I basically grew up in this kind of culture.

(I comment as "Doug S." on Overcoming Bias.)

4MichaelVassar16y

But the Skeptics aren't even very good traditional rationalists. They are just a step up from the Objectivists and four or five steps up from mainstream America. The question is about when you started looking for sometimes lonely truth in places where people normally look for affiliation.

[-]kiboy8y00

It was with my first hit of LSD in 1970 that I started to be conscious of thinking (rationally?) and that (in my environment which was emotionally and intellectually poor and extremely abusive) put me at odds with the most of my world and with time I'd have to say it's only gotten worse for me. Spending long survivalist stretches in the Great Basin alone or with a dog has been the best of it for me.

But I can't honestly say what thinking rationally means? I do know that I can easily see flaws in much of humanities arguments based on my experiences of liv... (read more)

[-][anonymous]9y00

does anyone know a program that calculates bayesian probability?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]Shield11y00

I don't consider myself a rationalist, I feel that would indicate a confidence I don't have. I'm certainly trying, which is by far the most important step I think.

I suppose it was the first time I heard to proper definition of evidence, in that anything that is true only ever makes anything else more likely to be true if the latter has a higher chance of being true if the former also is (dumbed down but that's how I heard it). Id always been a bit skeptical of - effectively stated - all the bullshit but that's what really got me thinking about religion and... (read more)

[-]Polina11y00

Once my mom told me that when I was three years old, I suddenly asked her a philosophical question, “Mom, who gave birth to all the people on Earth?” Surprised, she answered, “Well, I gave birth to you, your granny gave birth to me, your great-granny gave birth to your granny...” Her explanation didn’t satisfy me, “No, Mom. I mean who gave birth to all-all-all people?” Now I am thirty-four and still curious about he answer. Darwin’s evolution theory seems to provide the most reasonable explanation available, but still is not conclusive enough to be accepte... (read more)

0A1987dM11y

I also believe there are three more such forces, namely electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction!

0Polina11y

What if they discover another force some day?

2Cthulhoo11y

A Nobel prize is awarded?

0A1987dM11y

Then I'll believe in one more force (assuming I'm convinced the discovery is not a fluke).

[-]anansi13312y00

"becoming rationalist"- there's an 'ism' there that raises my hackles a little. But there was one experience not long ago that piqued my interest in cognitive bias: I quipped to a friend, "When I do it, it's processing. When you do it, it's drama."

He called that attribution bias, and now I've started a collection of biases that I think I understand in my gut. Most of them seem highly mental and theoretical, but that's mostly because I have so few points of contact with other people.

[-]mytyde12y00

When I was in elementary school, I had a few very good friends. Every day after school, I would walk around the school fields with this small group of 3 friends and play D&D-like pretend games. Being that I was very healthy and athletic with good self-esteem, I was foremost confused by a large number of my classmates who attempted to bully me. Taking pity upon them, in the 3rd grade I began wondering what was wrong with them and, yes, I even posited that it was better for me to be the target of scorn than others when I could defend myself and even stri... (read more)

[-]AnthonyC13y00

I think my first step came from Christmas movies. I stopped believing in Santa when I realized that if he existed, all the adults in the movies would know there were presents under the tree that they hadn't put there- belief would have nothing to do with it. I didn't make the connect with religion until 15 years later- I was never religious, but I didn't actually call myself an atheist until a few years ago. I then benefitted in elementary school from having one or two not-very-smart teachers. This prompted me for the first time to start learning on my own... (read more)

[-]Mindey13y00

I had certailny been influenced by my father, who, after my parents divorced, told me to have my own goal of life. However, I wanted to have a truly good one, not an evil one. It caused me to search for precise definition of "universal good," - a precise criterion for deciding, what action is universally good and what action is not.

I know Bayes theorem now, such a wonder! But when I was a kid, I had not such a romantic and beautiful event as Elizer had, so I came up with a different criterion. The best is to let the world exist, and the worst is ... (read more)

[-]tomme13y00

I started to see myself as a rationalist when I was about 13.

Growing up in a very religious culture, I never bothered to question the beliefs that had been instilled in me. But one day, somehow, I began contemplating death, "How do I know what happens after I die?" or "Will I go to Heaven or Hell?" were questions that bewildered me profoundly. It was then that I realized that everything I had believed about death and the so-called afterlife was pure nonsense. It took me a while to accept that "absence of evidence is evidence of a... (read more)

[-]MartinB14y00

If you read this far you might actually want to read my story: Borrowed one of these 'popular misconception' books from my grandfather who was slightly into conspiracy stuff and revisionism, esp. in regards to Russian/German WW2 plans. Was super surprised that some really basic ideas of the book completely failed to be understood by anyone I talked to about. Had the same with some minor content of my first lecture on Economy. Read a lot, got weird hobbies, did PR work for some, got surprised by disinterest and/or hostility toward them. Systematized, that i... (read more)

-2Perplexed14y

This is a pretty well-informed crowd. You don't need to explain what a libertarian is, you don't need to explain who Feynman was, and most people will know what you are talking about if you mention Bahai. And those who don't know how to use wikipedia.

1MartinB14y

I do not think I explained things, did I? The Feynman books influenced me at a time, when they were new to me, thats why they play a part in my story. If I only heard about them here, then the effect would be far less. The reason for not mentioning Bahai is because I do not want to spread the name everywhere I go.

[-][anonymous]14y00

I'm just so curious. I'm the most curious person I've ever met. I'm insatiable in my curiosity.

I think this had something to do with it.

[-][anonymous]15y00

[-][anonymous]16y00

I joined the military at 22 in the attempt to bring some excitement to my life. After the Bush administration raised my pay by 15% I figured I must be a "Conservative?&quo... (read more)

[-][anonymous]16y00

I joined the military at 22 in the attempt to bring some excitement to my life. After the Bush administration raised my pay by 15% I figured I must be a "Conservative?&quo... (read more)

[-]DeeElf12y-10

I'm a little puzzled as to why the question contains the phrase "how you came to identify as rationalist." My introduction to what I think this site means by rationalism (not the "rationalism" of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza I HOPE) was through Robert Anton Wilson's books Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising (although this just watered some seeds planted earlier). R.A.W. led me to Korzybski and his famous "is of identity" polemics. So why does a site which attributes much of its influence to Korzybksi as me a question... (read more)

[-]Mitchell_Porter12y100

Korzybski and E-Prime are not well-known on LW. LW's ideal of rationalism is an AI which reasons perfectly using the available evidence and whose actions really are optimal for its particular goals. The Sequences are full of introspective tips and behavioral tests for telling whether you're on the right track, so in that sense the philosophy has been given a human form, but the rational ideal which LW humans seek to approximate is described mathematically and computationally, in formulae due to Bayes, Solomonoff, and others. It's a different culture and a different sensibility to what you find in RAW.

By the way, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza aren't so bad, especially if you remember that they created the ideas that we now associate with them. Who wouldn't want to be a creator and a discoverer on that level? Their shortcomings are your opportunity.

7Manfred12y

Well, I mean... "the map is not the territory" is Korzybski. Eliezer just sucked at citing clearly.

4DeeElf12y

It seemed like everywhere I went on this site yesterday talked about maps and territories. I don't recall exactly where, but I thought it was rightly attributed to Alfred Korzybski (AK). The map and territory heuristic is, AFIK, AK's coinage, and I just assumed all the map and territory references alluded to a strong Korzybskian foundation. E-prime was the invention of someone else (I forget his name-easily Googleable or Wikipediable) but closely followed AK. I find it impractical for language, but more helpful for reasoning.

4Risto_Saarelma12y

I know about Korzybski and his general semantics, but very little about the actual substance of the stuff. Beyond E-Prime, which seems cutesy but too flimsy for any serious lifting. My brain keeps wanting to slot him up in that weird corner of mid-20th century American ideaspace that spawned Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. He has the pulp science fiction connection, the cranky outsider contrarian fans who think the system as the end-all of philosophy, and yet his stuff seems mostly ignored by contemporary academia. None of this is an actual indictment, but with no evidence to the contrary, it does keep me from being very interested.

0DeeElf12y

i haven't heard that end-all of philosophy bit (could come from his strong following of Wittgenstein) , but I do know he is considered to be a principle predecessor of self-help psychology, which might explain the anti-academic bias...i would not stereotype him with likes of Rand or Hubbard (yikes!) The only academic I can recall talking to him about was my Learning and History & Systems of Psych. prof. who knew who he was (he had dual Ph.Ds in psych. and philosophy) but expressed being baffled as to why I liked him...however, this is the same guy who also said stuff like you don't need to read Wittgenstein to know language is a game, and, "Philosophy's a bunch of bullshit and Kant's the biggest bullshitter of them all," and who when I lent him my copy of RAW's Quantum Psychology held it up to the whole class the next day and lectured on why you shouldn't read books like that. He also was a cranky (outsider-ish) contrarian...but maybe he was right...maybe you don't need to read RAW or AK to know the map's not the territory

1Risto_Saarelma12y

Yeah, there's the difference between deciding that his stuff is actually the same kind of stuff as some very iffy stuff, and then skipping it, and just noting a vague and very possibly unfair surface resemblance to iffy stuff, and then not bothering to investigate further since the stuff is 70 years old and there should be more people saying it's important if it really is. What should I know about this one? I know that when a book has "quantum" in the title and is not a physics book, the odds are that it really is a book you shouldn't be reading. If my quick-and-unfair pattern match for Korzybski was Hubbard+Rand, my quick-and-unfair pattern match for something titled "Quantum Psychology" is The Secret. Then again, I do know that RAW should be more interesting than that, though I also have the suspicion that his stuff may be a bit too stuck in the counterculture of the 60s and 70s to really have aged well.

2DeeElf12y

I don't know enough about LW's culture to say yet, but for a site--and correct me if I'm wrong--whose "mission" includes taking the "curse" out of "singularity" Robert Anton Wilson's technological optimism strikes me as a great support for such a pursuit...no?

9Mitchell_Porter12y

Yes but: * RAW was chronically skeptical of everything, LW believes very strongly in the "reality-tunnel" of natural science. * RAW was very interested in parapsychology and the "eight-circuit model", to LW that's all pseudoscience and crackpottery. * RAW had an interest in mystical states of consciousness and nondualist ontology, LW in mind-as-computation and atheist naturalism. Eliezer's general ideas are the sort of thing that Wilson would have partly assimilated into his personal mix (he would have loved the site's name), and partly rejected as "fundamentalist materialism". Also, LW has a specific futurist eschatology, in which the fate of the world is decided by the value system of the first AI to bootstrap its way beyond human intelligence. There are people here who seriously aspire to determine safe initial conditions for such an event, and related concepts such as "paperclip maximizer" and "timeless decision theory" (look them up in the LW wiki) are just as pervasive here, as are the distinctive concepts of LW discourse about general rationality.

4DeeElf12y

How do you and/or LWers distinguish among science, pseudoscience and crackpottery? How do you and/or LWers distinguish mystical mental states from mind-as-computation mental states (that looks like cognitive reductionism from my perspective). Have you read his Nature's God? One could make a case for a naturalistic atheism from that and his similar works?

5Mitchell_Porter12y

Such a question demands a serious and principled answer, which I won't give. But it's a cultural fact about this place that parapsychology (and all other standard skeptics' whipping-boys) will be regarded as pseudoscience, and something like the eight-circuit model as too incoherent to even count as pseudoscience. There are thousands of people here, so there are all sorts of ideological minorities lurking in the woodwork, but the preferred view of the universe is scientifically orthodox, laced with a computer scientist's version of platonism, and rounded out with a Ray Kurzweil concept of the future. Mysticism isn't a topic that LW has paid any attention to. I think it would mostly be filed under "religious mental disorder", except that, because of the inevitable forays into reality-as-computer-program and all-is-mathematics, people keep reinventing propositions and attitudes which sound "mystical". This is a place where people try to understand their subjectivity in terms of computation, and it's natural that they would also do this for mystical subjectivity, and they might even regard an evocative computational metaphor as a plausible theory for the cognitive neuroscience of mysticism. For example... maybe mystical states are what happens when your global cognitive workspace is populated with nothing but null pointers! You could turn that into a physical proposition about cortical columns and neural activation patterns. That's the sort of "theory of mysticism" I would expect a LWer to invent if they took up the topic. These are topics in which I deviate somewhat from the LW norm. My trademark spiel is all about qualia-structures in quantum biology, not universe as Turing machine. Also, LW isn't all scientific reductionism, there are many other things happening here at the same time. In framing RAW vs LW as tolerance for mystical nondualism versus preference for atheist naturalism, I'm just singling out the biggest difference in sensibility.

3Vaniver12y

Meditation has received some attention here, though I can't think of other sorts of mysticism. Perhaps Crowley's writings.

2DeeElf12y

Would you please refer me to the discussions on meditation you're thinking of? This is a sticky subject. "Meditation" and "mysticism" differ from context to context. E.g., Christian mysticism (the telos of which is union with God) and what Crowley meant by mysticism are fundamentally different (the latter sharing more in common with Hindu yogi praxis where union or samādhi is not necessarily restricted to a Diety; and in Buddhist mediation the purpose of samādhi is subsumed under a different goal altogether.). Meditation can refer to so many different things the term is basically useless unless one gets very specific. But I'm not sure if that serve LW's purposes so I'll hold off saying anything else for now.

2Vaniver12y

Here are the two main posts tagged with Meditation, and here are the three discussion posts. Also see DavidM's posts (1 and 2, 3 appears to have never been written) and a more recent thread about it. I missed a few posts you can find by searching for meditation. The impression I get is that there are several people who find it interesting/useful, but it hasn't penetrated deeply enough to become part of the LW core. (I personally don't meditate, after a few initial tests suggested that noticeable effects would take far more time input than I was willing to give it.)

0DeeElf12y

Fair enough. I like your sense of humour and you (and pretty much everyone I've interacted with here) are very polite and civil which I appreciate a bunch. I've spent some substantial time on some internet forums and shit can get pretty heated in a hurry. I'm sure people go to battle here occasionally, but I haven't encountered anything to volatile (yet?). Anyway, just my way of saying thanks. Besides, I'm not here to make sure LW fits into to my perceptions about RAW et al. I'm here to learn more about rationality.

1DeeElf12y

This mis-characterizes him. He was too optimistic about humanity, technology and the future for this to be true. Furthermore, he preferred zeteticism over skepticism. please detail what you mean by this...I think I know but want to be sure before I proceed .

0DeeElf12y

"AI" as in artificial intelligence? Please link me to the explanation of that on this site. Thanks (if I don't find it myself first). I'm still reluctant to use phrasing like "LW humans" as that type of definitionalism sends up "group think" red flags. I'm not saying it's bull but that I need some persuading and time to snoop around (this site is HUGE). I didn't mean to say I'm entirely dismissive of rationalism, just that I want to be clear on what it means at LW. Epistemologically, I've generally been an empiricist, but have changed my mind on that, as some of my experiences with Buddhist practice has made me at least be open to the possibility that at least some of our knowledge comes from something other than "sense experience."

2hairyfigment12y

They mean 'rationalist' in the sense of following a rational approach, which we loosely associate with Bayesian thought. As for AI, this seems like the most relevant connection and also mentions a limitation of pure Bayesian reasoning. Then there's the middle icon at the top right of the page.

3beoShaffer12y

Since, I didn't write this post post I can't answer your main question, but I can shed some light on: We're entirely about rationality, not rationalism. I've mentioned that this can be confusing, unfortunately we couldn't think of a better alternative. This should clear up what we mean by rationality.

1arundelo12y

Eliezer got some early influence from the General Semantics-inspired Null-A books by A.E. van Vogt. (I'm leaving two versions of this comment in different threads because buybuydandavis also asked about Korzybski and LW.) Edit: I realized that this comment doesn't make much sense as a direct reply to yours. Consider it an addendum to Mitchell_Porter's comment.

[-][anonymous]16y-10

It must be a part of my biological disposition. I certainly was not raised in a pro-rationality household. My parents and siblings all have the same political and religious beliefs (Populist democrats and devout Roman Catholics) as those with which they were raised. My sister is a believer in astrology and the accuracy of horoscopes. My family members have been known to justify their religious beliefs with the "I believe because I have Faith" tautology.

I stopped believing in God in high school and moved away from my parent's political beliefs in... (read more)