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).
I had basically the same origin, just born/raised rationalist I guess and mostly agnostically christian enough to have done sunday schools and nightly prayers. Things like magic and such never really made sense, as much as I liked to imagine them, and used to hallucinate a different world frequently in which I had such abilities. Obviously I was just crazy but rational enough to at least accept that others didn't see the things I did and thus it just made more sense that they weren't real, that imagination and reasoning were clearly two different things (not mutually exclusive, you can combine them as this place seems fond of trying to do in some way or another). If anything I've felt too restricted by leaning to far toward rationality for most of my life and feel as if I'm only just beginning to understand that Maybe All Myths Are Actually True Somewhere. Regardless, that's more philosophy than science and until we find such a somewhere or such a true myth (which we frequently do in smaller scale concepts) doesn't seem too worth worrying about, but that's my natural rationalist bias that I'm struggling to "overcome."