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).
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?
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.