For coaches: McKenna & Davis 2009 say a coach should "draw out and deepen the client’s own theory of his situation and how he can deal with it most effectively. No matter how brilliant you are, the client will ultimately take or not take action based on his own theory. It’s more important that she be right than that you be right." So, it's better to be a great listener than a great problem solver. See also.

I was raised as a religious Muslim and was in the same Saudi private school from year 1 until college. Now, if you're planning to put your child in one of the most irrational hubs of life, my school was the place. Arrogance and emotional arguments were glorified. As you can imagine, I was a machine of irrationality. I had no concept of 'evidence', I only engaged in emotional arguments, and I was riddled with all sorts of biases. I was a big fool and a gigantic mess.

Then I met a friend in my second year of university who was once a Christian and became an Atheist thanks to Richard Dawkins. We spent a few months discussing religion, where I tried to outright deny, dodge and duck evidence, and do everything else that a massive idiot like myself would do. After these few months, I found myself cornered by my friend's arguments and then a wild, blasphemous thought occurred to me: There actually is no god.

Thanks to my dear friend, I never looked back. Through Dawkins I discovered Steven Pinker, Neil degrasse Tyson and Sam Harris. And through them all, I discovered a whole new world of science and reason. As someone who always identified myself as a 'smart' person, and who loved feeling smarter than the masses (self-esteem issues, I'm sure), I embraced this new world. But this process led to incremental change.

The real second big leap happened after I graduated from university. I took a year off to learn how to manage my finances and invest in the stock market and lo and behold, I stumbled across my heroes, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. They truly changed my life. They were radically different to everything I grew up with. They were rationality machines, and they introduced me to a little something called 'humility', which I needed very much. Thanks to them, I am learning, growing and becoming more rational every day.

I'd be happy to talk with anyone.

Time zone: EST UTC-05:00

Email: azerner3@gmail.com (or PM me)

Edit: I heard that the biggest downside of casual therapy is that the casual therapist will sometimes just say "I don't feel like doing this any more", which can be tough on the depressed person. So maybe the norm should be that if you are taking money in order to help someone, you should stay committed to helping them.

I'm very willing to make this commitment, and I think it's a great idea.

I wasn't sure if people would be willing to volunteer for free or not. You're more than welcome to.

The nice thing about money is that it helps the supply of listener hours expand to meet the demand, if they aren't well matched. I imagine if I had framed it as a volunteer thing, people would not be comfortable asking for money, even if being able to ask for money would have the beneficial effect of expanding supply to meet demand. So I think volunteering is fine but asking for money should be fine too.

I guess maybe I thought spending an hour a week talking to someone for an indefinite number of weeks felt like a lot to ask of a casual volunteer, but that volume of conversation also seemed like it might be pretty helpful for some people? Money helps avoid the awkward question of the point at which a volunteer's commitment ends. If the nature of a person's depression is such that they are very concerned about being burdensome, this could be important.

Edit: I heard that the biggest downside of casual listening is that the casual listener will sometimes just say "I don't feel like doing this any more", which can be tough on the depressed person. So maybe the norm should be that if you are taking money in order to help someone, you should stay committed to helping them.

Is the money a requirement? Ie. could you volunteer as a free resource, or would that mess the market dynamics up? What is the thinking?

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?

This was going to be a Discussion article where I panicked about becoming a Yudowksy fanboy, but I thought it might fit better here. Maybe.

I am extremely embarrassed by what I am going to write, but is has been weighting on my mind, and I was wondering if other Lesswrongers were feeling similarly.

See, the more sequences I read, the more amazed I am by the man's work. I mean, back at the beginning, I used to grudgingly respect the guy. Then, the deeper I delved into it, the more sucked-in I was. It was like finding a goldmine. We had the same "basic wavelength", for lack of a better term. There wasn't the dissonance I usually felt when reading other philosophers or writers. He viewed the world from a perspective very similar to mine, and derived his ethics and morality in much the same way I would. Except... we clearly aren't equals. The sheer volume of his work is staggering. The depth of his insights, and, more importantly, how diverse they are, all the fields he covers... He talks about nearly everything that I have ever thought to be relevant or interesting. And he keeps pouring them out. One article a day, isn't it? And then he has his fanfiction. And his day job on top of all that. Where does he find the energy? Despite the evident flaws that seem to be there to remind us that this is a human being rather than some... supernatural creature, after a while my attitude changed from "hey, this guy is pretty cool" to "[speechless]". I feel this is dangerous. "Admiration is the feeling that is furthest from understanding". But that's exactly it. I feel I cannot comprehend, cannot classify and make a model of Eliezer Yudkowsky in the same way I can make it of most humans. It's just too big. Even supposing a large chunk of his massive periodic output of Deep Thoughts is second hand, it makes me wonder where he had the time to read all that, process it and build something new out of it.

This distresses me. It distresses me that I am starting to unconsciously adopt a heuristic that, by default, I should trust his opinion. On a couple of occasions, he deliberately and declaredly left a flaw in his articles. Which I have been unable to find. It distresses me that he is the first author I read that can truly and completely fool me without me noticing something fishy. It distresses me to have found a Living Philosopher and only be one of the Disciples, like the kids in Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. If he keeps this pace up, I don't think I'll be able to formulate anything original in my life: the weight of his work is just too huge even to translate.

There is the relief I felt when I finally discovered something wothwile to read. I had despaired of philosophers, and litterate scinetists, and journalists, and social commentarists. I desaired of revolutions and dreams of the future, and I beleived we would be lucky as a species if we could avoid the major ecological catastrophe that's coming upon us. Everywhere I only saw lofty old people thinking they were the be-all and end-all, postmoderns endlessly talking out of their asses (excuse my Klatchian) and people intellectually walking in circles, pacing without a horizon or a compass. Then I found this guy and the shapes behind the darkness were brought out. The insanity behind most people's decisions was classified, labeled. My own self-delusions were painfully taken apart. Thoughts I had never dared to think, but were nibbling at the back of my mind, were gloriously developed to their ultimate conclusions. Pains I felt when looking at the world (including myslef) for which I had no name were sorted and tamed.

So. I can confidently say that I was a "proto-rationalist" ever since I had memory. That I always asked the difficult questions. Always went for the most complete point of view, analyzing a situation from all angles and perspectives I could think of. Which is the reason I could never believe my enemies were "evil mutants". But I was alone. Utterly alone. By the time I was seventeen, I thought I was the Only Sane Man alive. It was terrifying. I couldn't trust anyone. I could never relax my critical senses. My bullshit-detector was so sensitive most works from the media that weren't fiction were thoroughly unenjoyable.

Then I stumbled upon this place. While now I can detect bullshit much more easily, it affects me a lot less. Because now I know how normal it is. I know why people are like that. This has brought me such a peace of mind.

Another thing that has brought me much peace was the abandonment of the Quest For God. At last I knew why no one, regardless of political leanings or actual observance, seemed to take religion seriously and be consistent with it. And doing away with that pain, with the moral anguish of believing in a god that seemed to have values so different to yours, that was so incomprehensible if you took Him at face value, but so, oh so simple when you treated Him as a piece of fiction meant to hold a group together... Suddenly, I was alone. But the world was vast. Where to begin now, I asked myslef?

Then I found out that we guys could become a community. Join forces against evil. Problem being, most of you guys live in the USA. This is kind of inconvenient. The other problem is that, if I become a militant rationalist, I am certain to have a Sword of Damocles upon my head in Divine Right Absolute Monarchy of a home country. Should I exile myslelf, when there is so much I could do there to raise the sanity waterline?

I am now faced with interesting choices. "May you live Interesting Times" indeed:

More likely, he also "always thought that way," and the extreme story was written to provide additional drama.

Ultimately, I'm pretty sure I "always thought that way". The following ideas and their implications have always been obvious to me: consequentialism, reductionism, thinking at the margin, trade-offs, cost-benefit analyses, expected value.

But perhaps a) arguing with my parents, b) suffering through school, c) living in a world of irrational people, and d) being bullied influenced me by motivating me to think more deeply about things (often out of frustration and spite; which I'm not proud of, but am saying because it's true).

A: When I was younger, I was a bit mischievous. I would get punished a lot by my parents (a big problem I had was that I didn't know how to lose). When I was punished, I would have to sit in my room with all my toys having been taken away from me. And as a little kid with ADHD, sitting in a room by myself with nothing to do was pretty uncomfortable.

I would say things like "Your statement depends on A, B and C, so let me present my counter arguments, and if I change your mind on A, B or C, you should change your mind on the larger point" (except I didn't have the vocabulary to say this clearly). Sometimes I would present a good case and disprove A & B... but they always refused to change their mind on the larger point. This infuriated me. Usually I wouldn't receive an explanation, but when I did, it'd usually be "I'm the authority" or "that's just the way it is". "Just the way it is" is a huge pet peeve of mind.

So I used to dream of being a lawyer. I fantasized about this magical place called a court room where a judge enforced basic logic and let me make my points without being interrupted.

B: I found school to be incredibly boring. Perhaps this boredom motivated me to use rational thinking as a tool to help me avoid the unpleasantness (similar to Dan Ariely, but obviously to a lesser extent). Although I didn't have the vocabulary, the ideas of consequentialism, terminal vs. instrumental goals, Lost Purposes etc. were obvious to me at a very young age. I'd think:

Why do I need to do well in school? Grades -> college -> job -> money -> happiness. So then, I should only pursue grades and other instrumental goals to the extent that they lead to my terminal goal(s).

The boredom and frustration also motivated me to question the educational system itself. When school would do something that made me unhappy, I'd question, "Does it actually make sense that they're making us do this?". I'd often conclude that the answer is "no", and I'd be motivated to think about it from scratch and figure out a better system. Maybe this deep thinking helped me develop intellectually?

C: More generally, we live in a world where the sanity waterline is pretty low and there's a lot of stupidity around us (ex. refusing to admit that trade-offs exist; refusing to think at the margin). If there wasn't as much stupidity around me, maybe I wouldn't have been as motivated to think deeply about things, and wouldn't have developed as much. But because it's there, I think I just generally was frustrated and wanted to think deeply about topics to prove once and for all that the stupid person I was dealing with was wrong.

What would have happened if I grew up in a world of sane people? Without the extra motivation that frustration and spite provided me with, would I have been happy to sit back and play video games? Maybe. Maybe not. At this point, I'm mature enough to be motivated by things like truth and altruism, but I'm not sure if my middle/high school self would have been.

D: There was a point in middle school where I fought back against a bully and lost every friend I had for doing so. At the time, I was socially conscious enough to be a bit traumatized. But soon afterwards, I started to question things. Why care about social value? Through what mechanism do friends actually bring joy? I think this just further molded me into someone who questions/thinks about everything.

Other: I was raised Jewish. I remember believing in God and the bible stories when I was really young, but at the same time being confused by them. It was weird). I believed that there was some old man in the sky, but it made no sense to me that he didn't have a physical form. How could anything not have a physical form? And how could he be so powerful if he didn't have a physical form? I think I remember deviating a bit in my beliefs because of these questions I had. I think I believed that God was real, but that he had a physical form and wasn't quite what they told me.

In the years before my Bar Mitzvah, I definitely didn't believe in religion anymore. I was annoyed that I had to go to Hebrew School. I was also annoyed that I had to practice for my Bar Mitzvah, but wasn't opposed to having the ceremony to get the presents.

I also remember a specific day in 10th grade World History. We were learning about some African cultures and the Gods they believed in. I remember being taught that they had different Gods to explain different phenomenas. Like a God of rain, God of thunder etc. At that point, it really hit me that when humans don't understand something, they're capable of just inventing an explanation and believing it. "How is there water falling from the sky? It must be The God Of Rain".