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).
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.
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 enti... (read more)