I don't ask my friends about their childhoods—I lack social curiosity—and so I don't know how much of a trend this really is:

Of the people I know who are reaching upward as rationalists, who volunteer information about their childhoods, there is a surprising tendency to hear things like: "My family joined a cult and I had to break out," or "One of my parents was clinically insane and I had to learn to filter out reality from their madness."

My own experience with growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family seems tame by comparison... but it accomplished the same outcome: It broke my core emotional trust in the sanity of the people around me.

Until this core emotional trust is broken, you don't start growing as a rationalist. I have trouble putting into words why this is so. Maybe any unusual skills you acquire—anything that makes you unusually rational—requires you to zig when other people zag. Maybe that's just too scary, if the world still seems like a sane place unto you.

Or maybe you don't bother putting in the hard work to be extra bonus sane, if normality doesn't scare the hell out of you.

I know that many aspiring rationalists seem to run into roadblocks around things like cryonics or many-worlds. Not that they don't see the logic; they see the logic and wonder, "Can this really be true, when it seems so obvious now, and yet none of the people around me believe it?"

Yes. Welcome to the Earth where ethanol is made from corn and environmentalists oppose nuclear power. I'm sorry.

(See also: Cultish Countercultishness. If you end up in the frame of mind of nervously seeking reassurance, this is never a good thing—even if it's because you're about to believe something that sounds logical but could cause other people to look at you funny.)

People who've had their trust broken in the sanity of the people around them, seem to be able to evaluate strange ideas on their merits, without feeling nervous about their strangeness. The glue that binds them to their current place has dissolved, and they can walk in some direction, hopefully forward.

Lonely dissent, I called it. True dissent doesn't feel like going to school wearing black; it feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

That's what it takes to be the lone voice who says, "If you really think you know who's goin...

Roland7

Roland7

Roland7

Roland7