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).
Isn't that just what I said? I contrasted such a Jesus-figure with one who did not do those things, and said that the Jesus-figure you describe would count as a historical Jesus and one that did not do those things would not.
When I start doing that then you can legitimately criticise me for it. Until then you are blaming me for something I haven't done yet.
There could be many reasons, but the most obvious possibility is that Paul (or whoever) made up a story with those elements, and those who came afterwards had to work within that framework to maintain suspension of disbelief. If you've been proclaiming on street corners for years that you are followers of "Jesus of Nazareth" it could well be hard to suddenly rebrand yourself as followers of "Jesus of Bethlehem" when you figured out you'd have broader appeal if you claimed your messiah was the foretold Jewish messiah. They might wish with hindsight that they'd said he'd been born somewhere else to different parents with a different name, but you can't change your whole brand identity overnight. That doesn't mean the story is true, it just means that the person who made it up didn't perfectly foresee the later opportunities to piggyback on other myths.
If you think about it, the argument that they must have had to keep those elements because they were real doesn't actually make any sense. From the late first century onwards neither the people making up the Christian mythology nor their audience would have had any means to check whether those elements were factual or not. There would have been constraints on their ability to change their story, but historicity would not have been one of those constraints.
I'm still not clear why you assume the zero point of the graph is a real story, as opposed to a made-up story. The fact that they changed it later isn't evidence it's real, just evidence that you can't turn a cult on a dime.
I don't understand. My version just has four elements: being an itinerant preacher, being called "Jesus of Nazareth", being crucified by the Romans, and having his followers begin the Christian movement.
You already conceded there were many itinerant preacher, so that's nothing special that we'd expect documentary evidence ... (read more)