I read HPMOR. That got me interested in Lesswrong. The most I can say for pre-rationalist!me was that I was curious and a bit creative.

...of course, for fullness's sake let me state that I also have an anti-rationalist backstory, a defeatist backstory, a horrible, shameful struggling-to-be-patient-with-my-kid backstory, and a rather intense backstory of saying goodbye to my pre-marital values (like saving the world). I'm just so full of them! And any one can explain my current behaviour with at least some plausibility!

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: