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.

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.)

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 my family belongs in church but that doesn't really show in daily life. Still, I did believe and getting rid of that made did a big difference. My mother has told be that at some of the first years in school I was confused because I had asked her about why world exists and been told about Big Bang and in the school the teacher had told that it was greated by God. So I might have gotten a few years of hints before getting it. :)

Currently I'm studying theoretical physics and until recently my rationalism has been what Eliezer would call Traditional Rationalism and what you get from scientific education, but it has been changing since I discovered Overcoming Bias and especially Eliezer's posts. They've been mind-expanding to read, I'm in debt to all of the contributors. It remains to be seen if I can actually turn them into pragmatic results. Hopefully LW can help me and everyone else on that journey.

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.

The Fountainhead

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

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.

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.

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 things with not much fear of the consequences.

What really turned me on to rationalism specifically was Eliezer's posting on Overcoming Bias. He inspired me to try to go into the field of math and science in large part because I couldn't understand barely anything he said and what I did understand supported several pre-conceived notions I held that made me feel superior to other people.

Trying to fix that now. Yep.

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".

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 social peers, especially on issues where being wrong has little negative impact, like who should be President.

So what is the "rational" thing to do, given these realities? Is it really rational to seek after truth knowing that it is going to hurt you? Wouldn't a true rationalist try to improve his circumstances and maximize his happiness, choosing to accept that this will mean believing falsehoods?

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, girlfriend, and friends felt almost unbearable at the time, but now I feel much more resilient against social pressure.

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World was my first exposure to traditional rationality. I took this book to heart as a teen. I progressed through some of the standard canon of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rand, Shermer, Dawkins, Hofstadter, and Dennett. I discovered transhumanism through Anders Sandberg's site, which helped me flesh out some of the ideals I picked up in science fiction. I think I came upon Overcoming Bias soon after it formed through Tyler Cowen or Bryan Caplan and their enthusiastic praise of Robin. I've been a daily reader since then.

As far as recent influences, Eliezer has been by far the single strongest shaper of my beliefs. Jaynes, Gary Drescher's Good and Real, and Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion have also been major contributors over the past couple months. I'm becoming more aware of my biases and still acquiring new insights daily.

Addendum: The posts that first brought me to OB were We Can't Foresee to Disagree and The Modesty Argument. The article that really clarified the distinction between Bayesian and traditional rationality was A Technical Explanation.

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.

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.

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 of hundreds of traps you see. In retrospect, that should have tipped me off to a deeper problem. Luckily, I didn't work on anything important with that mindset, just hung about in forums and IRC showing off my "rationality".

After doing that for about two years, on my last birthday, I received a copy of Godel Escher Bach as a present, and saw Douglas Hofstadter make an abridged version of the idea in the Principia Mathematica, an axiomatic, logically rigorous way to do number theory, and it became apparent to me that informal ways of "proving" things were just inadequate. Shortly afterward I discovered Overcoming Bias, where Eliezer's essays greatly inspired me to think rationally when I don't need something proved. Going through SICP and learning the mathematical basis of Newtonian mechanics hammered home the logical, axiomatic approach.

Here's hoping the trend continues and I experience a third cascade in another few years.

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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).

I then thought that an effective way to do good was to remove pain, and I became a transhumanist. The achievement of an AGI became my strongest wish. But since I'm neither a cognitive scientist nor a programmer, I chose to raise the public awareness by making a movie.

I've been on this project for several months now, this will be a kind of Permutation City but with REAL fun (needless to say I totally agree with Eliezer's latest posts about utopias). I don't know how long it will take to do it, or even if it will even be made, but I think it has a huge potential.

Ok, I haven't talked only about the origins, but, well, that's my rationalist story.

Added a post scriptum, see above.

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 could you possibly know which one is right? Wouldn't you rather be right than keep the same wrong beliefs?" I don't know that it was a turning point for me, but it was the first time I had really had that thought out loud (and it was probably the start of my deconversion and subsequent start down the road of rationality).

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."

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.

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 beliefs can be treated as reductionistic phenomena, something that has to obey certain laws, which I can reason about, not just with. The supernatural and religion turned out to be mere symptoms of a more important problem, poor mental hygiene, and in their explicit form left the list of matters of concern.

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.

1. 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 union but I knew as I sat there in class one day, looking at other people, that both I and they existed and we were apart.

2. Once I knew that I could think and could act I slowly over time learned that I was in fact responsible for my actions and thoughts and the consequences of them. The way this happen was strange. I still had a hard time believing that other people could think and act themselves but I knew that when my actions harmed other people they seemed to feel pain or become upset. And this caused me to become upset. I had no intuitive answer for why this was so but it was plainly obvious that it was. Because of this I decided that other people likely function according to the same rules as me.

3. The toughest bit for me to swallow was the idea that I was never safe. There is no truth, no plan, no philosophy or set of rules that will keep me from making mistakes. Because of this much of my life has been trying to escape from fear. I took refuge in any mode of thought that seemed to promise an escape from uncertainty, from my personal responsibility. And every time I learned that reality was more complex than my philosophy and deeper than my understanding. I could never escape from myself, from my thoughts or from the consequences of my thoughts. And I could never escape from my failures.

4. To recognize and accept that I did fail and very often is what led me into my current state. If failure happens then what are the reasons? This is where I am now in my personal journey and this is the stage that I stumbled into contact with this social group.

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 altering my beliefs when they occasionally found some.

Frankly my memory of my childhood is so appalling it'd be hard to have any confidence in a story if I told one.

Here we are nearly twenty years after that and drifting across a couple of OB posts from Eliezer through links elsewhere, probably during the QM series, maybe a bit before, led me to put OB into my RSS feed.

I'm always so far behind reading my RSS feed that feels like the discussion is over by the time I read anything there though, so never posted.

Pre..............

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

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?

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 method, Karl Popper, etc. I was raised Catholic ostensibly but my mother is a Unitarian (though one who believes in a fair bit of New-Agey gobbledygook) and my Catholic father is a doubter and extreme skeptic. The areas I've lived in have always been fairly non-religious and relatively non-Christian (until I attended a Catholic university).

The answer to the question "what got the transition started?" is probably a just knowledge of the rationalist position and hearing an unbiased version of rationalist arguments. What made the transition possible was valuing truth and having few significant barriers to pursuing the truth. What makes people value truth, I suspect, usually comes before most people's conscious memory and not recognizable at the time.

However, I did have an experience that increased the how much I valued truth-My parents got divorced and told me contradicting stories. Hypothesis 1: Being lied to increases one's subjective value of truth. Hypothesis 2: Being lied to by people who answered all of your initial questions and guided your initial decisions increases one's subjective value of truth.

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....

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.

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).

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 with irrationality. The fact that the only irrationality in my genes is intermittent (when emotional) and mild may have even acted as a "vaccine".

One of the driving forces for me to actively try to be rational (as opposed to just not letting myself be knowably stupid) was that I enjoyed being contrarian on issues where people cared and were wrong. It was enjoyable to find things that people get wound up about, think about them rationally and see what crazy sounding ideas come up (stuff like Robin's proposals for fixing health care).

Another driving force is that I hate to lose (being wrong), so that I made sure to express uncertainty when I wasn't certain, and changed my mind when necessary to stay on the "winning team". It was ok to be 75% sure of something and change your mind (hell, it should happen one time in four), but when one claims p ~=1, being wrong is an obvious failure of rationality. This helped me prevent wild overconfidence at the extremes of the scale.

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 excited my imagination. As I encountered other belief systems I found interesting I tended to engage in apologetics (aka feeding my confirmation bias). Through people I respected in the martial arts I was introduced to aspects of Buddhism and Taoism that seemed, to me, to have some truth to them. Maybe this is akin to what Robin Hanson describes: I wanted to bridge the gap between social groups that I liked. Internally, I began to adjust my religious beliefs to be looser, more "mystical", less dogmatic, to accommodate the beliefs of other people. The big breakthrough happened while taking survey course in Western literature that included readings in Judaic and Christian texts. Looking at these texts from a strictly literary perspective had a big effect on me. I panicked and read The Case for Christ, but in the end I concluded that a strictly literary perspective on the Bible was the really most valuable way to actually engage with "The Bible" if you're actually searching for truth. In my head I saw a thousand exegetical scholars and apologists spread across history, all frantically waving their hands.

"How dangerous is self preserving belief," I thought, staring down at the tracks, waiting for the downtown A train at 34th Street. "And how utterly comfortable." I felt immensely alone in that moment, scared about having to confront the people I care about and their treasured beliefs, and say, "You're wrong."

An experience last year made the idea how biases can just friggin screw things up much more apparent to me. I had a friend and mentor I admired as one of the most a) intelligent and b) altruistic people I'd ever met. In short, what happened was she accused me of doing something bad to her that I did not do. I didn't hear this from her directly: she just stopped talking to me, and I had to really bug our mutual friends. What was she had accused me of doing was utterly ridiculous, but I understood that it would be nearly impossible to convince her otherwise. My friend is the kind of person who makes negative conclusions about people with immense consternation, something I used to think was a virtue. But once she had decided I, an important and close person, had done something bad, no level of discussion could convince her otherwise. She could muster the equivalent of a thousand apologists to defend her existing belief. (Example of intelligent people shooting themselves in the foot.) Aside from the fact that I had just lost a very dear and important friend, I was angry, so angry that someone so good and smart could make such a fatal error. We talk about cognitive biases in public policy, in global catastrophic risk, as an obstacle to human progress and knowledge. But here I experienced a very dramatic and personal example of irrationality's consequences. Likely she'll go on the rest of her life with the belief that a close friend of hers had betrayed her. I do think that avoiding the destruction of the world, and preventing the purposeless deaths of all people is a more important to study rationality. This was just an up-close reminder to me that the dangers of irrationality are here, now, and devastating consequences do lie in wait. I wish I didn't need such an experience, and I know should be careful with hos it influences my beliefs and actions in the future. Robin Hanson's point is especially relevant here when he asks if our transition to rationality was rational. This was a very emotional reaction to a bad occurrence. Yet it is what, at least initially, increased my desire to be, shall I say it, Less Wrong.

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.

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 that site that I still summon all the time in arguments, but it took some internal realization to understand what applied where.

First, if I hadn't been trained in orthodox statistics--if I didn't know specifically what methods science used--I never would have gotten many of the arguments. I would have been happy to get this training much earlier in life. That's a basis by which "science can't know anything" arguments immediately fall apart.

From there, these are the posts that most helped me and why.

First, being raised in a presuppositionalist church, I had to be convinced that it really did come down to evidence and not assumptions. For this, "How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3" was a good starting point, and it even helped me address some false claims in Austrian Economics. "Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable" also helped, but it took a while for me to get to the point that I was willing to look at this argument head-on with the idea that I should consider it with my best judgement rather than dismiss it as missing-the-point.

To get there, I needed the point made in "The Bottom Line": it is illegitimate in epistemology to start from the bottom line. That is rationalization, which can take more than one form. I thought back to my education in geology, where I was presented with indisputable evidence that the earth was several billion years old. Back when I was taking that class, I researched creationist arguments on the internet and found that all of them had been soundly refuted. But instead of immediately questioning my religion, I put all of that away in a box, to be dealt with later. When I brought some of it up to my mom, she said, "Tim, you're creative enough to come up with some kind of explanation that can fit." I accepted this back then: indeed I was, though I never seriously tried. But to even have such a thought is to outright admit that you're wrong beforehand, that the only way to reconcile your opposing beliefs is to come up with a fancy lie.

Then I was more receptive to "Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable." Eliezer presents the best defense against presuppositionalism I've ever seen: presuppositionalism is to be found nowhere in the Bible. It is evidentialist through and through. Miracles are presented as evidence of God, are cited constantly throughout as proof of the One True God above all the others. Paul's entire defense against the Roman government in Acts is simply, "The claims I'm making about miracles are true and here are the witnesses."

So I decided I finally had to see if I could reconcile the fact of the discovery of natural sciences with the Bible. I never found Intelligent Design convincing, quite frankly because I had begun to respect the biologists who dismissed it more than the religious leaders who touted it. But of course as I researched it individually anyway, well. I needed a better theory of evidence, which I got from "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation" and "The Conservation of Expected Evidence." Bayes + my traditional probability training started working their way into my mind, so I could evaluate different evidential claims much better than before.

Also important was "Occam's Razor." I had never seen a technical definition of Occam's Razor provided, and I was suddenly floored by the outright wrongness of arguments like, "God is the simplest explanation for the universe."

There's more to the story than that. After all, changes like this never have one true cause. I began to see the disconnect between my thoughts about morality ("I have to admit that homosexuality is wrong") and my feelings about it ("But I can't feel like my gay friends are really bad people"). I started getting kind of disgusted by the sheer number of bad Christian arguments parroted about like it was nothing. The entire time I was studying economics, which I put a lot of stock in, and theories about interest rates being evil, the necessity of Christian governance, and so on, all started to look less and less like God's wisdom and more like the same old ignorance that every society has.

It was this feeling of disgust that forced me to finally admit I didn't consider myself a "Christian" anymore, and the arguments I had gathered in my mind in the mean time that led me to fill the gap with "atheist."

This is all relatively recent, so it is in much better detail than the other influences. Surely there must have been something in my brain that led me to be able to reject Creationism long before I ever considered myself a "rationalist."

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.

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 looking for alternatives I ended up reading a spell on internet forum that had a strong point about what works [2]

After enrolling to study psychology I read and completed excercises in SICP[3] for various reasons. It was very inspiring to read and especially 4. chapter (Metalinguistic abstraction) was very enlightening. I think that both programming and learning psychology both increased my yearning for being more rational.

There could be other events too.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_World
2. http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/rites/buff.html
3. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

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 world. I had always been searching for tools with which to improve my own thinking, these just happened to be unusually powerful ones.

Although I don’t remember any awakening to rationalism, I do remember some early clashes with irrationalism, which I think was quite formative. From the beginning, I had taken rationalism for granted. As I started to interface with the world outside my family, I realized that the norm was in fact massive irrationalism, and this drove me crazy. The prime example was when I encountered religion.

My parents were second-generation atheists, and socialized exclusively with other atheists. Also, I had the good fortune to grow up in a country where a vast majority of the population is nonreligious. For these reasons I didn’t even know that such a thing as religion existed until I was about eight years old. At that point, I joined a classmate from elementary school to an after school activity group arranged by a church. I came home afterwards and told my parents about the stories I’d heard about this person called Jesus. They said simply that if I wanted to go there and listen, that was okay, but it was important that I realize from the beginning that the stories were just stories, as in any book of fiction. That was the first and last thing my parents ever tried to teach me about religion.

Some time later I realized that religious people actually believed the biblical stories, without any kind of reasonable evidence, and I found this absolutely horrifying. I remember feeling deeply offended that such ignorance could exist, and still it took a long while for the full scale of the offense to sink in. A couple of years later I slept over at a neighboring family’s apartment and was shocked when, shortly before going to sleep, the parents of the family expected me to get down on my knees and pray. They were equally shocked when I said that I had no idea how to pray. In any case, I was thoroughly disgusted by this first encounter with actual people actually practicing religion, and ever since, I’ve had to struggle just to keep a straight face when I meet religious people. (My parents advised me to take it easy and tolerate religious people, saying that some of them actually were good and decent people, it was just that they happened to have this slightly “childish” aspect to their characters, which should be tolerated in the same way as, for example, low intelligence.)

I never read Overcoming Bias for the rationality stuff. Although I have certainly learned a lot from these posts, I have never felt that they were very revolutionary for me personally (allthough I guess they would be for most of the world). My main interest here is Mr Yudkowsky himself. I have a life-long interest in the nature of genius, and reading the things he writes seems to me an unusually unobstructed view into the mind of a living and ever-developing genius. What he happens to be writing about at the moment (I’ve been following his work for over five years now) is of secondary importance.

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 typical political excuse why it was really about freedom or human rights or society or something (or else just learned the difference between fertilized and unfertilized eggs!)

But I was young and innocent enough to take a moment to think "Maybe my brain is just telling me what it thinks I want to hear in each situation, instead of really thinking things through. I should find a way to stop that."

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.

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 churches take a dim view of Bible scholars.) I realized that they couldn't see it, no matter how smart they were or how much they read the Bible, because their preconceptions prevented them from looking for it.

I was astonished that most Christians have never read the entire Bible. If you believe that God wrote one book in which he said everything he wanted to say to the world, you would read that book. Yet even being aware of this, I found it hard to read. (To this day I suspect I may not have read Haggai.) I knew that this meant my rationality was broken (although at the time I attributed it to sin).

But now I remember an earlier event: I was about five. I was in the car, on a long trip with my family. Traffic stopped. There was an accident ahead. I saw a little dog walking away from the accident, down the road. I said that it was probably from one of the cars in the accident, and that I wanted to get out and pick it up before someone hit it. My parents said that was foolish, and that the dog could be dangerous. Then someone hit it. And I realized that I had been right - and that the fact that there were hundreds of grown-ups around me in their stopped cars, and none of them had done anything, didn't mean a thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 actively wished to harm me. But that was the first time I really grasped the idea that my parents had goals and preferences of their own that they would choose over my welfare, that I couldn't rely on them not to harm me for their own benefit.

Before that time, I took for granted without thinking about it that people's stances toward things could be easily derived from what they said and did. Enemies were obvious; so were friends. Only afterwards did I really understand not only that appearances were deceiving but that people would actively create false appearances.

Instead of relying on my first impressions, I began to withhold judgment and (although I lacked the words to describe it at the time) actively seek new evidence to test my beliefs.

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 things, while non-Jews wouldn't be. I became obsessed with the idea that people like me existed who didn't believe in the infallibility of Judaism. They believed in something else, like the Koran or the New Testament. Why was I Jewish, except that my parents were? I started to think of reasons, but somehow they all depended on the infallibility of the Torah... OK, so suppose for the sake of argument that I don't believe in Judaism; what arguments would convert me to Judaism and not, say, Islam? I realised two things at that moment: first, that I would never have believed the truth of the Torah if I'd learned science first, and second, that Buddhists didn't even believe in God, never mind the Bible. From then on I was provisionally Deist, having no better explanation for the beginning of the universe. I wasn't a very strong Deist, because of what I knew about physics and evolution, but a Creator seemed logically necessary. My idea of looking at my 'deepest beliefs' from a neutral standpoint seemed so much smarter to me than just about every other thought I'd had, that I began to do it all the time. So, at this point I'm a Deist and starting to think rationally a lot more often.

I thought a great deal about God in the next months. When I tried to work out what sort of God could create the universe, I (eventually) realised that the most I could say was that it could create the universe. I'd become very well accustomed to bad logic after a few months of reconversion attempts, so it was obvious that I'd just proven the tautology "If a Creator exists, it exists." My intuition had led me astray: there was no compelling argument for an intelligent Creator on the tip of my tongue, just an unquestioned assumption that the universe had to be caused. That was the end of my Deism.

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.

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 selected to go with some other students to an economics conference. The conference was run by a strongly right wing institute and myself being left wing, and wanting to signal my intellect by challenging much older and much more knowledgeable people got into (and probably made a fool of myself in) numerous debates.

I recall over the next several months starting to realize that my own views and conclusions might be mistaken. For the first time I started seriously considering how to actually think about and try to find the truth which is probably the same place I'm at today.

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 protect yourself from anyone who can explain to you why it's wrong. It's no accident that the rules of kosher are insanely complicated and difficult to keep. The point is to make it hard for a Jew to break bread with a gentile -- to isolate the religious memes from anything that might challenge them.

And so religion gives us one more reason not to come together. It gives us one more reason not to find the people who could make us happy.

It gives us one more reason to be alone.

And it hardly needs pointing out that the way we are currently wired, we need reasons to be alone like we need holes in our heads.

So, this is what I fight, and why. I don't know how, but I wish to see the end of religion's sway over this world.

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 listening for the signs of self-deception and rationalization had an unexpected consequence: my doubts of the faith, which I'd battled as a sin again and again, were growing worse as I recognized the bad arguments I was letting myself be satisfied with. It finally came to the point of recognizing that I was striving to rid myself of doubt when I thought I was striving to investigate it.

From there, it was a comparatively short leap to atheism and to a more consequentialist and physicalist reevaluation of my interpretation of the world. Nietzsche helped greatly, which is why it saddens me when he's dismissed for the wrong reasons (as invariably happens with people who've only heard of him, or only read short bits). But enough about that.

(I later got hooked on OB because the early posts rang very true to what I'd gone through, though I'd never expressed it as clearly as what I saw there.)

My point is that my birth as a rationalist isn't identical with my fall from religion; it merely caused it as a side effect. My real rationalist beginning was learning to doubt beliefs that felt like they needed no argument, because I'd realized that feelings of certainty arise for reasons besides entanglement with truth.

Hey all,

Just joined.

Got here via Naked Capitalism and Yves Smith when she linked this article: "Self-Haters Donate More," which then linked "Haters Cheat Less."

Then the name of the site "Overcoming Bias" definitely got my attention!

My Rationalist Origin Story: ROS:

I had been digging in the Bible's backyard -- it's really the front yard, smile -- as a 37 year-old, and found over and over again where it was written that Moses only did as he was told when he had been told what to do and how to. It's in later chapters of Exodus. So Moses could not do as he had been told until he had been told how to do it.

Hmmmmm It got me thinking: What did that remind me of?

3 days later it hit me like Eureka:

Love your neighbor as myself,

as per Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Matthew and Mark and Luke!

Hmmm,

since no one had ever sat me down and taught me to love myself, why did I think, why had I assumed that I knew how to love myself?

Hmmmm

Then Aha:

If I didn't know how to love myself,

that explained

why I did not love my neighbors and/or found it so hard to do,

and why I found it so hard to love my neighbors as much as I loved myself, or THOUGHT I loved myself,

and why I found it so easy to hate my neighbors!

Hmmmmm

But,---I DID love myself: I loved myself as man and as right and as wise and good and friend and family and as etc!

But hey,--I also DID NOT love myself as woman and as wrong and as fool and as bad and as enemy as stranger and as non-etc!

So?

I was both loving myself and hating myself at the same time!

So I was also loving the neighbor I hated, and hating the neighbor I loved!

So it was only an illusion that I ONLY loved me and ONLY hated my neighbors: I was doing both all the time!

So by hating myself, I had been also teaching others how to hate ME all along!

Which meant that they had to be hating themselves too,

and which then compounded my Hate for myself,

and re-justified me to hate myself and so to hate them as myself since we justify hating others by hating ourselves,

and I was hating myself a lot more than I was or had been loving myself, which explained perfectly why I had been and was hating my neighbors a lot more than loving them, in fact to the same degree and extent that I was hating myself and loving myself!

Oooops!

I went to my wife:

If you promise me one thing,I'll take you out to dinner every week! What do you want? Nothing! Just promise me that you will love yourself and concentrate of loving YOU! She laughed: I already do! Fine!

And the rest is history:

I eliminated my Bias of Hate for myself as any words over a period of the next year by inserting the Bias of Love for myself as all words!

And how I did that and what it means for all others is what I would love to share with this forum, so that each of you can do it for yourselves, and spread the word of how we can overcome bias.

It is very easy, but that very easiness makes it the hardest thing you would have ever tried to do!

"A great many people think that they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." William James

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.” Hermann Hesse

"The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which the wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean – please forgive me for mentioning it – is Love, the Love or compassion of Christ.

If you have and so feel this Love, you have the motive for existence, the guide for action, the reason for courage, and the imperative necessity for intellectual honesty." The Impact of Science on Society, Lord Bertrand A. Russell.

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 polluting my mind?"

As for how I found OB; if I recall correctly I was reading up on AI and happened upon one of Eli's posts. Fascinated, I jumped from post to post and found myself deep in rationalist territory. I found home.

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 thought I "believed" in. While I don't recommend it, being under the influence of opiates allowed me to question many of the beliefs that I had an emotional attachment to.

After a couple years of abuse I got clean. Looking back at this time I now realize it was critical in changing me from a "believer" to what people at this site appear to call a "rationalist." Also important in my transformation was the study of statistics, probability, logic, economics, and Western Philosophy.

This site looked like a good place to learn more?

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(Sherlock Holmes, House, Jedi knights, whatever). I tested myself against those whose beliefs I found stupid(creationists, ghost hunters and stuff), and tried to understand the nature of being wrong or right. To support that, I also read a lot about human psychology and overall epistemology and philosophy of consciousness. All uncoordinated and pretty ineffective, but then I found a website dedicated to "refine the art of human rationality".

So, the key event for me could maybe be posting this comment. I'm expecting a lot.

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.

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.

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 interested, and even my dad was baffled by some parts, I would have to press on alone and figure it out myself.

Of course, I was way out of my depth, and there's still quite a bit about recursion, intelligence, axiomatic systems and so on that I'm not sure I've got a good handle on. It's that basic attitude, 'the only thing I know is that I want to know everything,' and some other stuff derived from it, that keeps me honest.

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 scientist, since I had an unquenchable thirst for science and had gotten quite good at guessing the teacher's password. I thought that was real knowledge at the time. Consequently, it wasn't a big leap to go from absorbing authoritative claims in Popular Science Magazine to reading about how the Grey Aliens are most certainly kidnapping defenseless farmers and experimenting on them. From reading biographies of Abe Lincoln or 60s books on black holes to reading about people's auras and ghost hauntings.

I quickly absorbed as much information about those mystical subjects as I had learned about science (we aren't talking quality of data, just number of bits), and it soon felt like I had a master's level grasp of the topics. And yet I could not see auras, just afterimages. I could not contact or gain any knowledge of ghosts. I imitated my mother's tarot reading with a deck of playing cards, and crucially, I noted all the claims that turned out false (almost all) along with the ones that turned out true (not many). Even when I guessed rightly in a seemingly spectacular way, it still just felt like guessing. And so my first step away from the brink of madness came as my curiosity drifted away from these now boring matters and back to science and mathematics, which were surprisingly good at holding surprises no matter how much I learned about them. One could say that my curiosity stopped being interested in curiosity stoppers.

I have since worried many times about how different my life might have been if I stayed in lala land, or if the pendulum reversed course and I went back to it. I now think that this concern is a waste of effort, since mysticism holds no mystery like reality does. Even if all that mystery is just map-territory confusion.

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).

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.

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 value it.

My understanding of Rationalism:

Rationalism is simply the way of understanding, in what is, the simplest, most effective and efficient manner. To know what is...what was...what will be...and to correct wrong by giving the what should be. In short...the scientific method.

If I am wrong....please tell me...I am the above...whatever name has been given it.

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 keep on working at it. Lately I've been reading a lot of source materials (Tooby/Cosmides, Dawkins, Jaynes, Buddha) and asking a lot of "Why do I believe what I believe?"s which have both been rather useful at sharpening my thinking. I'm not sure where to go from here; keep learning math, I guess? Read more source materials? I think I'm getting diminishing marginal returns and might soon start having to really paint my own art. That said, at this point it seems the true field of battle will be on the front of instrumental rationality.

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 its not a property of topic X, but of the person I talk to and my presentation. Got a somewhat reasonable opinion on many many many topics, found out that libertarianism leads to many of those by easier reasoning. Became an atheist. Read the common know Feynman books somewhat before. (actually had those recommended to me by a physicist, who is a member of a little known religion from the 1844s). Discussed with atheists, learned some rationality stuff. Found OB, read OB. Got a rationalist girlfriend that pointed out the flaws in OB/LW writings, learned to some degree to understand that. Had my brain hacked by someone who claims rationality, and shares many many ideas with me, but got important things very wrong. Left that group, left libertarianism and basically ran out of political labels. Read Harry potter and laughed a lot.

Not all in this order.

The hook point on OB was 'that alien message' which I found over reddit, and tried to understand by reading it three times over a few days. Then I went all awwww and since then I basically read stuff and try to implement it.

The first hookpoint into reasoned thinking seems to have been the lexicon. (They became quite popular here. Its a bit like myth busters without the stunts, and in writing.) But I was already really curious before. Being the youngest of three brothers with a age gap of 6,7 might have created a runaway optimization pressure, because for years I was always the one knowing least. That has changed by now. Same for having bright older friends. What also helped was doing different things with/in different groups of people, and having a inhomogeneous circle of friends. Both age and occupation wise. Its odd how many people seem to know only folks their own age, doing basically the same thing. Sadly no one I learned from took anything from me. And also there was no one to recommend GEB to me at any point. The book is 2 years older than me! My curiosity to understand things lead me pretty far, and I value it much. But there is still a long way to go to WIN