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 becoming rationalists.  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).

Related to: Is Santa Real?, Raising the Sanity Waterline

Related on OB: Formative Youth

JulianMorrison writes:

If you want people to repeat this back, write it in a test, maybe even apply it in an academic context, a four-credit undergrad course will work.

If you want them to have it as the ground state of their mind in everyday life, you probably need to have taught them songs about it in kindergarten.

There's been some discussion here on the formation of rationalist communities.

If you look at any large, well-established religious community, you will see an extraordinary amount of attention being paid to the way children are raised. This is hardly surprising, since upbringing is how new members enter the community. Far more people become Mormons because they were raised by Mormon parents than because they had a long talk with two guys in white shirts.

This doesn't seem to be the case in the rationalist community. Looking at how we all got here, I don't see all that many who were simply raised by rationalist parents, and had a leg up. Maybe this is a sampling bias -- a straightforward, enlightened upbringing is not as dramatic as a break from fundamentalist religion, and perhaps people don't think it's a story worth telling.

But I don't think we can count out the possibility that we're just not doing the job of passing on our memes. I can even see a few reasons why this might be the case. In mixed marriages, it is usually the more devout parent, and especially the parent from the more demanding religion, who has the say in raising the children. Thus, we see spouses convert to Catholicism, to Orthodox Judaism, to Mormonism, but rarely to Congregationalism, or Unitarianism. On this totem pole, atheism seems to be pretty much at the bottom.

And perhaps this also has something to do with the shyness of the atheist parent. Even in unmixed marriages, the unspoken thought seems to be "so, our children will become atheists just because their parents were atheists, just as Baptist children become Baptist because their parents were Baptist -- are we really any better?"  We resent the idea of the religionists forcing their foolish memes on their children, and want ours to choose their own paths. We think if we just get out of the way, our children will do whatever is right for them, as though by doing this we could make them the ultimate source of their lives.

We have to make choices -- doing nothing is still a choice. There is nothing wrong with attempting to light our children's way to wisdom which took us time and effort to locate on our own.

So, best practices, resources, websites, books, songs, nusery rhymes; anything that will help us to raise rationalist children.

Related to: Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger), Test Your Rationality, 3 Levels of Rationality Verification.

Robin and Eliezer ask about the ways to test rationality skills, for each of the many important purposes such testing might have. Depending on what's possible, you may want to test yourself to learn how well you are doing at your studies, at least to some extent check the sanity of the teaching that you follow, estimate the effectiveness of specific techniques, or even force a rationality test on a person whose position depends on the outcome.

Verification procedures have various weaknesses, making them admissible for one purpose and not for another. But however rigorous the verification methods are, one must first find the specific properties to test for. These properties or skills may come naturally with the art, or they may be cultivated specifically for the testing, in which case they need to be good signals, hard to demonstrate without also becoming more rational.

Follow-up To: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists

Related on OB: Formative Youth

Eliezer suspects he may have chosen an altruistic life because of Thundercats.

Nominull thinks his path to truth-seeking might have been lit by Asimov's Robot stories.

PhilGoetz suggests that Ender's Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people.

For good or ill, we seem to agree that fiction strongly influences the way we grow up, and the people we come to be.

So for those of us with the tremendous task of bringing new sentience into the world, it seems sensible to spend some time thinking about what fictions our charges will be exposed to.

Follow-Up to: On Juvenile Fiction

Related to: The Simple Truth

I quote again from JulianMorrison, who writes:

If you want people to repeat this back, write it in a test, maybe even apply it in an academic context, a four-credit undergrad course will work.

If you want them to have it as the ground state of their mind in everyday life, you probably need to have taught them songs about it in kindergarten.

Anonym adds:

Imagine a world in which 8-year olds grok things like confirmation bias and the base-rate fallacy on an intuitive level because they are reminded of their favorite childhood stories and the lessons they internalized after having the story read to them again and again. What a wonderful foundation to build upon.

With this in mind, here is my challenge:

Look through Eliezer's early standard bias posts.  Can you convey the essential content of one of these posts in a 16-page picture book, or in a nursery rhyme children could sing while they skip rope?

Write the story, and post it here.  Let's see what we can come up with.

At Tom Talbot's suggestion, I have created a Less Wrong Facebook group, in hopes that being able to see one another's faces will improve group bonding.

Previously in series:  Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?
Followup to:  Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute?

I am generally suspicious of envying crazy groups or trying to blindly copycat the rhythm of religion—what I called "hymns to the nonexistence of God", replying, "A good 'atheistic hymn' is simply a song about anything worth singing about that doesn't happen to be religious."

But religion does fill certain holes in people's minds, some of which are even worth filling.  If you eliminate religion, you have to be aware of what gaps are left behind.

If you suddenly deleted religion from the world, the largest gap left would not be anything of ideals or morals; it would be the church, the community.  Among those who now stay religious without quite really believing in God—how many are just sticking to it from wanting to stay with their neighbors at the church, and their family and friends?  How many would convert to atheism, if all those others deconverted, and that were the price of staying in the community and keeping its respect?  I would guess... probably quite a lot.

In truth... this is probably something I don't understand all that well, myself.  "Brownies and babysitting" were the first two things that came to mind.  Do churches lend helping hands in emergencies?  Or just a shoulder to cry on?  How strong is a church community?  It probably depends on the church, and in any case, that's not the correct question.  One should start by considering what a hunter-gatherer band gives its people, and ask what's missing in modern life—if a modern First World church fills only some of that, then by all means let us try to do better.

So without copycatting religion—without assuming that we must gather every Sunday morning in a building with stained-glass windows while the children dress up in formal clothes and listen to someone sing—let's consider how to fill the emotional gap, after religion stops being an option.