Vladimir Nesov: Your presentation is impenetrably chaotic.
ama: How wonderful that I have met with a paradoxical contradiction and contradictory paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.smile
With regards to Niels Bohr, as quoted in L I Ponomarev, The Quantum Dice.
Out of my impenetrable chaos, you did get the penetratingly orderly sense that my presentation was impenetrably chaotic?smile
And, isn't there order in chaos, and vice versa?smile
So, you should now be able to do the opposite thingy!smile
Thanks too for your all the words in your thought.
And please ask questions, if there are any at all.
You're not really ready for this site, I'm afraid. Why don't you have a read of some of the posts that brought us here, such as the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, or some of these posts on sister site Overcoming Bias and see if what we're doing here is something you can get behind. Sorry!
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).