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).
It was with my first hit of LSD in 1970 that I started to be conscious of thinking (rationally?) and that (in my environment which was emotionally and intellectually poor and extremely abusive) put me at odds with the most of my world and with time I'd have to say it's only gotten worse for me. Spending long survivalist stretches in the Great Basin alone or with a dog has been the best of it for me.
But I can't honestly say what thinking rationally means? I do know that I can easily see flaws in much of humanities arguments based on my experiences of living and thinking but that is all. I really don't have much going in the way of formal education and am possibly way out of my league here.
Most of what I consider my rational thinking and conclusions would be abhorrent to the vast majority of humanity. For instance embracing Antinatalism. I rationally don't see a "cost effective" way to "fix" what life seems to be. Especially as a human animal. It seems all of us can go in almost all ways due to a little push from chance and chance is not likely to be lucky IME.