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).
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 difficult to find. Applicability to the real world, even remotely, wasn’t of interest, only challenge and elegance. Most of them went into pure math afterwards, and continued to work on fascinating theoretical problems. I was one of the few to go into an applied field.
A much more prosaic problem with math camps as an environment was finiteness. After a few years of accumulating knowledge and contest awards and friendships, I got to the end of the road - namely, I graduated from high school. I came to visit during my university years a few times, and did some teaching, but it wasn’t the same. I had fallen out of the loop. But I walked away with a sense of what an awesome community of smart people is like, and how much more people can do together with the right set of values and social norms.
During my undergrad years, I was often finding myself being ineffective and confused, chasing tasks that were handed to me instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to do. Then I went to rationality minicamp, and I was struck by a sense of deja vu. It was another group of smart people solving problems together, only the people were adults and the problems were real. They were throwing their intelligence and creativity at optimizing life.
Finiteness was still a thing, though. The week of learning useful life hacks and deep conversations and bonding came to an end, and everyone dispersed around the country. We set up regular skype chats to keep in touch, and they even happened for a year or so. I tried many of the techniques, but found myself increasingly bogged down in my old habits of thought and action. The buddy chats, though encouraging and useful, were too infrequent and distant for a significant effect.
I did get sufficiently inspired by the community aspect of minicamp to start going to local LessWrong meetups in Boston. Regular meetings with the same people were helpful for reconciling my usual worldview with rationalist memes. Last year, I visited the newly formed New York rationalist house, then called Winterfell, and felt ridiculously envious. While I got out of my grad school bubble to go to the meetup once every few weeks, these guys met every day, knowing and supporting each other much more deeply. This was the kind of place I wanted to live in, and the kind of social environment I wanted to have.
At one of the following meetups, I brought up the idea of forming our own rationalist house in Boston, and a number of people put their names down. In summer 2013, we found an awesome 7-bedroom apartment in a vibrant Somerville neighborhood, and thus Citadel came to exist.
When we moved in in early September, the first thing that struck me about living here was the sheer overdose of socializing of high information density (spoken as an extrovert). The layout of the house is admittedly ideal for running into each other - two floors with all the rooms adjacent to large common areas that are connected by a spiral staircase. It was surprisingly easy for me to add structure to our social evenings by “decreeing” weekly rationality sessions. The first week, we had a quorum for the goal factoring, and the writing, and the strategic review, and the habit training. Later, we tacked on a communal dinner at the beginning of these, and while the sessions are generally late, they still happen. I am now spending much more time on self-improvement activities than I would be able to do alone, and having the input and support of my housemates has been immensely helpful.
We are generally good at developing systems for group dynamics, from chore allocation to a token economy of gems that we use for reinforcing each other. There is also a lot of playfulness - ever-changing titles, silly drawings posted on the walls, dancing outings, a countdown since the last occurrence of Pascal’s Mugging… We care about each other, we help each other be awesome, and we have a lot of fun doing it. After all these years, I feel like I’m in the right place, and this time there is no obvious reason for it to end.
I used to think that my default environment doesn’t matter, and that I “should” be able to be effective in any setting. I came to realize that this is like expecting to be healthy and strong while living on junk food, because default settings are extremely important. I hope that more people will figure out how to create a supportive social environment for themselves and each other.