As far back as I can remember I have wanted to be a scientist and to walk the path of rationality. What comes to me as a watershed moment was when I was 15 or 16 an my very Christian Grandfather came to visit. He told me that since I had a very scientific mind, he was giving me a scientific gift. It was a thin book with a title something like "Scientific Proof of the Bible".

Afterwards I remember sitting for what felt like hours in my room, staring at the closed book. "What if I was wrong?" I kept asking myself with dread. What if there really was scientific proof of the existence of God and what I had always taken to be the nonsense of the Bible? What if going to church and praying really WERE things I should be doing? If so, how could I justify not going. What was the guiding principal of my life, anyway?

In the end, I decided, my guiding principal was "Truth at any cost." If I was wrong, I wanted to KNOW I was wrong, and I would deal accordingly. So, I picked up the book and started reading, and within a few minutes I was laughing in relief as there wasn't a cogent argument or scientific proof, or even the slightest bit of rationality in the entire thing.

But my Grandfather had given me a great gift, although not the one he thought. From then on, I was willing to lose arguments since my desire was to know the actual truth, and not to merely have the comfort of thinking I was right. That, as they say, has made all the difference.

Since it would be impossible to disentangle and explain all the different factors, and all the studies say people are terrible at determining what events influence them anyway, I'll just tell the event in my transition to rationalism that makes for the best story:

When I was around five, my kindergarten teacher decided to initiate my friends and I into the Great Miracle Of Life by bringing an incubator full of chicken eggs into the classroom. I watched them hatch, loved the little chicks, and (after some time and other events including a bad experience at a meat-filled Asian restaurant) decided to become a vegetarian and eat neither meat nor eggs.

When I was about eleven, I got quite into politics, and like most people in my area ended up as a typical liberal. And so I was of course pro-choice: why should we respect the rights of fetuses when they're just a collection of cells and not even really alive?

It took me a while to realize that I was simultaneously refusing to eat eggs because potential-chickens were valuable living beings who deserved respect, and condoning abortion because potential-humans weren't.

If I'd been a little older and a little cleverer, I'd have made up some typical political excuse why it was really about freedom or human rights or society or something (or else just learned the difference between fertilized and unfertilized eggs!)

But I was young and innocent enough to take a moment to think "Maybe my brain is just telling me what it thinks I want to hear in each situation, instead of really thinking things through. I should find a way to stop that."

My family is Jewish and we all went to a Reform synagogue. This sect of Judaism is very liberal in the scheme of things, making it very clear that the bible is not literally true and accepting of just about anything, even agnosticism (if not atheism).

At the age of 16, Reform Judaism has a confirmation ceremony where one makes a statement of faith to the assembled congregation. I realized that I couldn't go up in front of a crowd and in good faith profess a belief in God. I had understood all of it to be just stories for a long time, at least since the age of 13, but I hadn't quite realized that meant I was an atheist. I just never really thought about it, but when I finally did it seemed obvious in retrospect. I ended up reading a poem to the congregation and it was very well received as it was the shortest speech given that day.

The next year, I decided I wasn't going to go to synagogue for the High Holidays (where my liberal synagogue had 3 hour long worship services). My parents weren't quite sure how to react, but they told my grandparents and my grandparents responded by deciding they weren't going either. This particular decision set off a chain reaction where it was determined that no one in my family from my grandparents on down were believers and we had all just been going along for each other's benefits. On the holidays now, my 92 year old grandfather always mentions how nice it is that the holidays give us reason to get the entire family together.

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:

I was raised in a religious household and took it very seriously. At the same time, I always enjoyed skepticism and debunking, because I was always entertained by such things. But when it came to philosophy I was completely full of it. I got away with it by living in an area where I only encountered other Christians, not many atheists. When I did actually encounter some atheists, I would do some hand-waving about how there was something Deep and Intellectual about Christian apologetics that they were missing.

I dated someone who was extremely, well, hippie. Completely non-judgemental about even the most absurd hypotheses. I really hated that kind of attitude--where was her intellectual curiosity? So I got more into specific skeptic arguments. I fell in love with James Randi and watched almost every video of him that existed on Youtube at the time. But I waited to apply any of the lessons to the Big Question. Christianity was a huge part of my life; my entire family is still very seriously Christian, and a huge chunk of my social network used to be.

I started reading Overcoming Bias because, hey, Mason econ student, why wouldn't I read another great blog? There are several lessons on that site that I still summon all the time in arguments, but it took some internal realization to understand what applied where.

First, if I hadn't been trained in orthodox statistics--if I didn't know specifically what methods science used--I never would have gotten many of the arguments. I would have been happy to get this training much earlier in life. That's a basis by which "science can't know anything" arguments immediately fall apart.

From there, these are the posts that most helped me and why.

First, being raised in a presuppositionalist church, I had to be convinced that it really did come down to evidence and not assumptions. For this, "How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3" was a good starting point, and it even helped me address some false claims in Austrian Economics. "Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable" also helped, but it took a while for me to get to the point that I was willing to look at this argument head-on with the idea that I should consider it with my best judgement rather than dismiss it as missing-the-point.

To get there, I needed the point made in "The Bottom Line": it is illegitimate in epistemology to start from the bottom line. That is rationalization, which can take more than one form. I thought back to my education in geology, where I was presented with indisputable evidence that the earth was several billion years old. Back when I was taking that class, I researched creationist arguments on the internet and found that all of them had been soundly refuted. But instead of immediately questioning my religion, I put all of that away in a box, to be dealt with later. When I brought some of it up to my mom, she said, "Tim, you're creative enough to come up with some kind of explanation that can fit." I accepted this back then: indeed I was, though I never seriously tried. But to even have such a thought is to outright admit that you're wrong beforehand, that the only way to reconcile your opposing beliefs is to come up with a fancy lie.

Then I was more receptive to "Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable." Eliezer presents the best defense against presuppositionalism I've ever seen: presuppositionalism is to be found nowhere in the Bible. It is evidentialist through and through. Miracles are presented as evidence of God, are cited constantly throughout as proof of the One True God above all the others. Paul's entire defense against the Roman government in Acts is simply, "The claims I'm making about miracles are true and here are the witnesses."

So I decided I finally had to see if I could reconcile the fact of the discovery of natural sciences with the Bible. I never found Intelligent Design convincing, quite frankly because I had begun to respect the biologists who dismissed it more than the religious leaders who touted it. But of course as I researched it individually anyway, well. I needed a better theory of evidence, which I got from "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation" and "The Conservation of Expected Evidence." Bayes + my traditional probability training started working their way into my mind, so I could evaluate different evidential claims much better than before.

Also important was "Occam's Razor." I had never seen a technical definition of Occam's Razor provided, and I was suddenly floored by the outright wrongness of arguments like, "God is the simplest explanation for the universe."

There's more to the story than that. After all, changes like this never have one true cause. I began to see the disconnect between my thoughts about morality ("I have to admit that homosexuality is wrong") and my feelings about it ("But I can't feel like my gay friends are really bad people"). I started getting kind of disgusted by the sheer number of bad Christian arguments parroted about like it was nothing. The entire time I was studying economics, which I put a lot of stock in, and theories about interest rates being evil, the necessity of Christian governance, and so on, all started to look less and less like God's wisdom and more like the same old ignorance that every society has.

It was this feeling of disgust that forced me to finally admit I didn't consider myself a "Christian" anymore, and the arguments I had gathered in my mind in the mean time that led me to fill the gap with "atheist."

This is all relatively recent, so it is in much better detail than the other influences. Surely there must have been something in my brain that led me to be able to reject Creationism long before I ever considered myself a "rationalist."

For me, it all happened quite quickly. My family was never very religious (my grandparents are ardent anti-theists, my mother is an atheist, and my father is a nominal catholic who hasn't been to church in at least twenty years).

Still, when I was a young child, I was well-equipped with the standard delusions: Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and a vague idea of God (never really considered in any detail, at that point). Then, one day, when I was thinking about it, I realized that Santa Claus was, in a difficult to pin down way, fundamentally different from nearly everything else in my mental hierarchy of being. Santa didn't play by the rules. Santa used magic. Thinking about it, I decided that magic was more like books than it was like real life, and I had to throw the deity out with the bathwater. I stopped believing in Santa Claus and Jesus over the course of about five minutes of really clear thinking.

I've refined my methods since then, and discovering Less Wrong has been absolutely fantastic, but that was the start.

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?

I became an atheist fairly early, but it took me longer to realize there was no Santa Claus. The idea didn't make sense, but the presents appeared under the tree, and my parents denied being responsible, so clearly they'd gotten there somehow. I concluded that I just didn't understand some important part of how the world worked.

One year, we'd just moved into a new house. For the first time, we had a real fireplace, made of brick. I excitedly spoke of how this would make visiting much easier on Santa, but wondered how he could make it down a chimney at all, and began making plans to string a net of dental floss across the opening in an attempt to see how Santa dealt with the obstacle.

I had been leaning on the brickwork, looking up the flue, as I said these things, and as I turned around I intercepted a look my parents were giving each other. Translated into English, it might have said something like "Isn't this precious?"

In that moment, I intuited that there was no Santa Claus, and that my parents had been lying to me because they thought my belief was cute.

I had already learned that not everyone was my friend. I already knew that some people who weren't my friends actively wished to harm me. But that was the first time I really grasped the idea that my parents had goals and preferences of their own that they would choose over my welfare, that I couldn't rely on them not to harm me for their own benefit.

Before that time, I took for granted without thinking about it that people's stances toward things could be easily derived from what they said and did. Enemies were obvious; so were friends. Only afterwards did I really understand not only that appearances were deceiving but that people would actively create false appearances.

Instead of relying on my first impressions, I began to withhold judgment and (although I lacked the words to describe it at the time) actively seek new evidence to test my beliefs.

How rational was your transition to rationality? A sudden transition seems more suspicious, as that looks a lot like the sudden transitions humans tend to make between social groups. After all, there is usually little social benefit to sitting between social groups; social rewards come more to those firmly within one group or another. A gradual transition, on the other hand, seems more plausibly to match the more steady rate at which relevant info arrives on such topics. How much more relevant info could you really have obtained via one story or essay? Whatever your conscious thoughts, if you had a sudden transition I'm guessing that was your subconsious mind thinking something like "Yes, this looks like a good social group to join."

When I was in second grade, about seven years old, it was my turn to do a show-and-tell project, so I decided to bring a game I'd learned from a book that purported to be about geometry or math or something but seemed to mostly involve silly arguments between a talking turtle and a greek athlete. I assumed my fellow students would enjoy it, since the rules were relatively few and simple (compared to, say, spelling homework) and the victory conditions utterly unambiguous (compared to the bitter disputes of scoring in various playground activities). It seemed to relate to what we were learning, so the teacher might even approve further study.

I could hardly have been more wrong.

The rest of the class just stared blankly, and even the teacher didn't seem to get it. "But," she said, "You've got 'mu' right there at the start. Why don't you just cross out the rest?" I protested that such a move would be against the rules, but was unable to convey the underlying significance before show-and-tell time was determined to be over.

The book was Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstader. I figured that if the teacher couldn't begin make sense of it, none of the other kids were interested, and even my dad was baffled by some parts, I would have to press on alone and figure it out myself.

Of course, I was way out of my depth, and there's still quite a bit about recursion, intelligence, axiomatic systems and so on that I'm not sure I've got a good handle on. It's that basic attitude, 'the only thing I know is that I want to know everything,' and some other stuff derived from it, that keeps me honest.

I am a scientist. The truth has always held aesthetic value for me. Nonetheless, I was for many years a religionist as well. This was pretty much purely through the force of wishful thinking -- the idea of annihilation after death scared the crap out of me, and so I avoided it. A few particularly excellent posts on that other blog we all read (along with some other helpful nudges) finally broke me of my childhood religion. In February 2008, out of a concern purely for the aesthetic value of truth, I renounced the Dark Side, and all its works.

And so, the Dark Side retaliated by taking from me that which I held most dear.

Would it be ... too petty of me to say that I have sworn vengeance? That I hold a grudge against religion in general for one harm done to me?

I think it's not. If I held a grudge against theme parks in full generality because she ran off with a guy she met working at one, that would be petty. There's no reason to expect theme parks in particular to cause significantly more harm to others along those lines than other working environments. Religion is different.

The Dark Side encourages isolation. A false belief which you feel you must protect means you also have to protect yourself from anyone who can explain to you why it's wrong. It's no accident that the rules of kosher are insanely complicated and difficult to keep. The point is to make it hard for a Jew to break bread with a gentile -- to isolate the religious memes from anything that might challenge them.

And so religion gives us one more reason not to come together. It gives us one more reason not to find the people who could make us happy.

It gives us one more reason to be alone.

And it hardly needs pointing out that the way we are currently wired, we need reasons to be alone like we need holes in our heads.

So, this is what I fight, and why. I don't know how, but I wish to see the end of religion's sway over this world.

I never believed in God, even though my parents are casually religious. The idea was simply prohibited by absurdity heuristics. At the same time, I was surrounded by believers in supernatural, alternative medicine, and had a couple of memories of apparently supernatural events. The specific God was absurd, but the invisible dragon of supernatural explanation was clearly true. I knew things normal people didn't, I knew that my alternative medicine worked while all those silly doctors didn't believe in it, I knew that supernatural exists. This gave a clear feeling of superiority.

I started to part with supernatural at University, on Traditional Rationalist grounds. I studied physics, and there was nowhere for supernatural to hide. Mystical retreated in a dark corner of the garage, not allowed to touch real things, not allowed to show in specific tricks, but still lingering as uncertainty. I called myself agnostic back then, taking pride in having an open mind, not excluding the supernatural or even a more abstract God, while not believing in them.

The systematic breakthrough started less than two years ago, when I began thinking about AI. Before then it didn't occur to me that my own beliefs can be treated as reductionistic phenomena, something that has to obey certain laws, which I can reason about, not just with. The supernatural and religion turned out to be mere symptoms of a more important problem, poor mental hygiene, and in their explicit form left the list of matters of concern.

Christianity drove me to rationalism. I went to a Catholic college where we had to take 2 semesters of theology and 3 semesters of philosophy.

We studied Aquinas for weeks. Knowing that Aquinas was generally regarded as the smartest person in the Middle Ages, I was stunned by the stupidity of his arguments. Aquinas could not have been stupid. Therefore, social pressure was capable of warping the minds of the smartest people on the planet for a thousand years. Therefore, it could be warping my mind right now.

Another thing we did was to study a parallel edition of the gospels. That means that it has one column each for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Laying them out side-by-side, I saw many places where Matthew, Mark, and Luke had identical sentences. They couldn't have come up with the same grammar and word choice independently. At least 2 of them had copied from someone else. I had studied the Bible all my life, and was surrounded by hundreds of people who also studied the Bible regularly. Some of them had read it every day for decades. And none of them had ever noticed this; or if they did, they didn't mention it. (It is universally known to Biblical scholars; but most churches take a dim view of Bible scholars.) I realized that they couldn't see it, no matter how smart they were or how much they read the Bible, because their preconceptions prevented them from looking for it.

I was astonished that most Christians have never read the entire Bible. If you believe that God wrote one book in which he said everything he wanted to say to the world, you would read that book. Yet even being aware of this, I found it hard to read. (To this day I suspect I may not have read Haggai.) I knew that this meant my rationality was broken (although at the time I attributed it to sin).

But now I remember an earlier event: I was about five. I was in the car, on a long trip with my family. Traffic stopped. There was an accident ahead. I saw a little dog walking away from the accident, down the road. I said that it was probably from one of the cars in the accident, and that I wanted to get out and pick it up before someone hit it. My parents said that was foolish, and that the dog could be dangerous. Then someone hit it. And I realized that I had been right - and that the fact that there were hundreds of grown-ups around me in their stopped cars, and none of them had done anything, didn't mean a thing.

I don't remember any sudden move towards rationality - I was raised in a godless household in a mostly godless country (France). I've always been pretty interested in science-fiction and in religion (though not as something I might believe in).

What pushed me a bit more towards rationalism:

• Maths classes that required a lot of demonstrations (and having to be able to do them again on the blackboard with an examinator)

• A physics teacher who insisted that we always include an uncertainty factor throughout our calculations, and not give excess decimals (I've noticed that I tend to think in terms of probability distributions more than others around me)

• Questioning a lot of my political opinions, and noticing when my brain was "up to no good", for example when EvaluateAsLeftWingOrRightWing(idea) was being called before EvaluateTruth(idea).

• Getting annoyed with atheists who consider religion to be the only domain where one can be irrational

• Working as a programmer, which doesn't leave much place for wishful thinking

• Reading Overcoming Bias daily

I was born in China, and moved to the US at the age of 10. My parents were both educated in Communist China and therefore atheists. I do not recall any anti-religious education in school, but do have a fairly vivid memory of watching a state-produced television program on the evils of 迷信 (superstition), which somehow left a deep impression.

After moving to the US, I remember watching Star Trek (reruns) as a teenager and admiring the Spock character. But I don't think I ever had a strong interest in learning how to be more rational, and instead just had an intellectual curiosity in topics that happen to be related to rationality, like economics, game theory, cooperation, the nature of probabilities and anthropic reasoning, the future, the Singularity, moral philosophy, etc., which led me to OvercomingBias and then LessWrong. Even now I think I'm driven more by a desire to satisfy my curiosities than to accomplish any larger goals.

I think my experience may be a counterexample to Something to Protect and Try Harder, but I don't really see how to generalize it.

It was akrasia, Dostoyevsky, and the sacrament of confession that turned me into a rationalist. Seriously.

I became very religious as a teenager (for social reasons, as I'd later realize), and drifted more and more traditional and conservative (since I could see that liberal Christianity is generally logically incoherent). This drew me into theology (thus philosophy), so that I'd been exposed in college to all the arguments I needed to reject Christianity; I just refused to apply them, generally taking them one at a time and playing One Argument Against an Army.

What changed in grad school had to do with the internalization of the virtue of honesty. Because I had to confess my sins frequently, I became more and more aware of my rationalizations and self-deception (in areas of discipline and akrasia, not of course rationality). I took to heart what Dostoyevsky wrote in "The Brothers Karamazov":

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.

Before long, though, the practice of listening for the signs of self-deception and rationalization had an unexpected consequence: my doubts of the faith, which I'd battled as a sin again and again, were growing worse as I recognized the bad arguments I was letting myself be satisfied with. It finally came to the point of recognizing that I was striving to rid myself of doubt when I thought I was striving to investigate it.

From there, it was a comparatively short leap to atheism and to a more consequentialist and physicalist reevaluation of my interpretation of the world. Nietzsche helped greatly, which is why it saddens me when he's dismissed for the wrong reasons (as invariably happens with people who've only heard of him, or only read short bits). But enough about that.

(I later got hooked on OB because the early posts rang very true to what I'd gone through, though I'd never expressed it as clearly as what I saw there.)

My point is that my birth as a rationalist isn't identical with my fall from religion; it merely caused it as a side effect. My real rationalist beginning was learning to doubt beliefs that felt like they needed no argument, because I'd realized that feelings of certainty arise for reasons besides entanglement with truth.

When I was 5 or 6, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I ended up with a small collection of fossils and whatnot, as well as an awareness of both evolution and how old the Earth is. As the infallibility of the Torah was obvious, I assumed that its interpretation, which I wasn't yet old enough to learn, explained how everything could be reconciled. In any case, I had much more serious things to worry about. For instance, the boys and girls I knew showed no inclination to date or marry - therefore the human race would shortly end, unless the Moshiach came. Having tagged 'God exists, Judaism is right' as being obviously true, I simply didn't think about questioning it for a long while. As time went on, I did realise, slowly, that just because I'd decided something was correct, like inexorable human extinction, didn't make it so, and that I was not infinitely smart.

When I was 13, I had my Bar Mitzvah and was surprised that I didn't start observing the strictures of Orthodox Judaism, such as not manipulating electricity on Saturday. Now that I was responsible before God for my actions, I should have been much more compunctious, but I couldn't believe that I would be punished for such things, while non-Jews wouldn't be. I became obsessed with the idea that people like me existed who didn't believe in the infallibility of Judaism. They believed in something else, like the Koran or the New Testament. Why was I Jewish, except that my parents were? I started to think of reasons, but somehow they all depended on the infallibility of the Torah... OK, so suppose for the sake of argument that I don't believe in Judaism; what arguments would convert me to Judaism and not, say, Islam? I realised two things at that moment: first, that I would never have believed the truth of the Torah if I'd learned science first, and second, that Buddhists didn't even believe in God, never mind the Bible. From then on I was provisionally Deist, having no better explanation for the beginning of the universe. I wasn't a very strong Deist, because of what I knew about physics and evolution, but a Creator seemed logically necessary. My idea of looking at my 'deepest beliefs' from a neutral standpoint seemed so much smarter to me than just about every other thought I'd had, that I began to do it all the time. So, at this point I'm a Deist and starting to think rationally a lot more often.

I thought a great deal about God in the next months. When I tried to work out what sort of God could create the universe, I (eventually) realised that the most I could say was that it could create the universe. I'd become very well accustomed to bad logic after a few months of reconversion attempts, so it was obvious that I'd just proven the tautology "If a Creator exists, it exists." My intuition had led me astray: there was no compelling argument for an intelligent Creator on the tip of my tongue, just an unquestioned assumption that the universe had to be caused. That was the end of my Deism.

Edited

The distant: I am diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (an autism spectrum disorder). I was unpopular at school, I understood poorly how to fit in, but I understood well how to get smarter. I took high school completion mathematics exams in primary school, university exams in high school, and while I never bit a teacher like in HPMoR, I did punch a student one time and demand that the teachers back me up.

As I remember it, said student was talking about a "tirus" which was supposedly like a next-generation virus which would eat up your computer unless you washed your motherboard properly with soap and water. Being a nerd with some technical aptitude, I told him that he was a bullshitting liar and he was to show me what he was on about or stop it immediately. He continued, so I told him to shut up or I'd hit him. He still continued, so I punched him in the stomach, which winded him and made him shut up. The student was surprised that I had carried through my threat, the teachers were surprised that I was unapologetic, and I was surprised that the teachers (this was at a religious school) were putting a distinctly man-made and exception-deformed rule about limits to hitting over a clear and obvious divine commandment against lying.

In retrospect I think I was somewhat lucky here. I was a youth in an argument turning violent, which is hardly a rational state to be in at the best of times, and in the process of trying to excuse myself for committing violence, I happened to take a stupidly defiant stance on the ground of "He was lying!" and got this bound up with my identity, the boy who really hates lies, for the next few years.

The local: I was arguing on Civilization Fanatics' Center in the Off Topic forum some years ago when a poster named Integral gave me a link to 'applause lights' at Overcoming Bias. I then read OB a lot, read the posts that would eventually get moved to Less Wrong, and ended up here.

Some of my earliest childhood memories, age 4 maybe, are of Sunday School, enjoying the stories and the socializing, but being secretly astonished that the sweet little old ladies that ran the Sunday School made such a show of believing in their stories, of pretending they could actually communicate telepathically with a character in a story.

On reflection, I'm not so much surprised that I didn't accept the BS, but surprised that I knew instinctively not to question them about it and rock their boat.

But then, more recently I've started worrying that one of these days the mothership is going to come back and pick me up and debrief me. "What have you learned from over fifty years of living on this planet, among these people, as one of them?" And I'll have to admit I don't understand this species at all.

I think I began as a rationalist when I read this story. (This was before I had run across anything Eliezer wrote.) I had rationalist tendencies before that, but I wasn't really trying very hard to be rational. Back then my "pet causes" (as I call them now) included things like trying to make all the software transparent and free. These were pet causes simply because I was interested in computers. But here, I had found something that was sufficiently terrible and sufficiently potentially preventable that it utterly dwarfed my pet causes.

I learned a simple lesson: If you really want the things you really want, then you need to think carefully about what those things are and how to accomplish them.

Hi everyone. Just to note from the beginning of this comment, I'm a bit different from the typical LW demographic, so maybe this will help shed light on another way of coming to rationalism.

I was born into a mildly Jewish agnostic household, but when I was about 4, I became strongly drawn to Christianity. I didn't know much about it, but I somehow heard about heaven and hell, and that was definitely what drew me in. I was terrified of the idea that people didn't get what they deserved, that bad things happened to good people, that when people died they were really gone forever. When I asked my mother about concern she explained that life isn't fair. But I knew that couldn't be true. Because if it was, if there was no supernatural protection against evil and death, then of course everyone would be frantically working to make it better all the time. I knew there were kind, intelligent people in the world, and they weren't doing this, so they must have a good reason, like that they didn't need to for reasons I didn't know about. I was very confused, and the idea that most people believed in heaven and hell, and it was "okay" that life wasn't fair and we were all going to die because the afterlife was fair and lasted forever, made a great deal of sense to my 4-year-old self. I was quite relieved.

But when I learned more about the Christian afterlife, and realized you either got profoundly inexpressibly screwed forever or bliss forever, and which one you got depended more on where you were born and how much you followed the rules than anything else, I realized that was no more fair. Maybe less so, since the result would last forever. And, I thought, if Christians really believed that, why didn't they go around trying to convert people 24/7? Were they psychopaths? They thought everyone's eternal soul might be condemned eternal torture and they didn't spend every waking moment eating, pooping, or prosthelytizing? Little-me tried to think about being tortured for an hour and not being almost done. And a day and a year and a hundred years and I realized it all didn't make sense.

So I modified my belief to fit my moral code, making my own personal version of the afterlife a new life where everyone got exactly what they deserved. Which helped me rest easy for a short while. But I noticed that other people didn't like my version of the afterlife as much. And they didn't seem that interested in how unfair the world and their vision of the afterworld were so lacking in justice. I know I was a naive little kid, but I felt very alone, like I was the only person really trying to make sense of things. But the truth, that we die, sometimes young and sometimes horribly and sometimes after being treated like shit for our whole lives, was too terrible and strange for little-me to believe in for a while.

I remember the first time I heard about cryonics, when I was 7. I was staying up late with my father watching some scientist talk about some new cryoprotectant. It took about 5 seconds to convince me that cryonics was a good idea. I started crying and my father couldn't understand why. I simply hadn't realized there might be another option besides dying within my lifetime. But even this possibility disrupted my fair-afterlife fantasy. It didn't seem to make sense to base all of my actions off of incredibly slim chance that everything would suddenly get fairer when someone died, especially if I was willing to abandon the belief when I learned I might not have to die. So I kept trying to find out something that didn't depend on a frail, unknowable hope.

I think the disparity between what people professed to believe was true and what they acted like was true initially pulled me away from rationalism. I felt like there had to be some big simple explanation that I had somehow missed but made it all make sense. When I realized this wasn't true, I became much more rigorous about examining my beliefs and the beliefs of others, to make sure everything I was learning wasn't logically insane. I started informally studying psychology to try to understand the why people don't all sign up for cryonics, and why Christians don't spend all their time converting non-believers.

There were a few notable "aha!" moments.

One was that same night, at age 7, asking my father whether he had signed me up for cryonics, and hearing him say no, because he thought death was beautiful and lent meaning to life. I asked him whether, if every other parent had signed up their children, he still wouldn't sign me and my little siblings up because death was "beautiful", and hearing his voice crack as he struggled to lie to me with a straight face was one of those.

Learning about phrenology and angelology was another, because it confirmed my suspicions that just because lots of people did lots of work for many years in a respected field didn't mean everything they were doing wasn't wholly useless. I realized I needed a tool to make sure everything I did wasn't useless. Rationality seemed to help with that.

Other moments included:

• randomly picking up Peter Singer's Animal Liberation at age 12, and thus learning about utilitarianism.

• realizing that I could win arguments even when I knew I was wrong and the other person was right (because I didn't want to lose my reputation as the local smart person), which meant I could probably win arguments against myself to protect myself from similar discomfort.

• reading Watchmen and thinking about a scenario where (spoiler) the enemy turned out to at least maybe be right all along, and maybe (which contrasted, at least in my mind, with "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and the idea that utilitarianism was wrong in some ineffable way that could be proved through storytelling).

Since finding HPMOR and LessWrong, I've had many more, but I think the priming that came before was necessary, at least for me. A lot of the time, just hearing someone else say the ideas I've had all along, but felt weird/crazy/unwelcome for trying to articulate has been crucial.

I was brought up to be a "traditional rationalist". My parents were atheists/traditional rationalists and never tried to indoctrinate me with any mysticism, spirituality, 'mystery' explanations or fairy tales (i.e. Santa Claus). Being a very small child I think my intuition was that some form of god was true with a probability of 25%. That number went creeping down until basically 1% (for "intelligent design") and much less than that for an interventionist god. Also, even as a child, I always had the intuition (and still do) that reality has always existed (or time is an illusion and past and future are just different parts of some atemporal symmetry that exists). I've recently started reading a lot of popular physics books on that matter but it's taking a lot of repetition and effort to be able to grasp concepts which are well above my IQ level. In far mode, I've always valued rationality and tried to be as responsive to evidence and reality as possible. In near-mode, however, only fairly recently (last 7-10 years, now being 27) have I considered myself rational. My memories of childhood of social relationships, responding to life challenges, making (practical) life goals, etc. were all very instinctive, emotional, and VERY sub-optimal. During adolescence it got worse, and I made every cognitive error possible (science as attire, blue vs green, pure tribalism, hatred for different ideas, wanting to "win" debates, etc etc.) most of it was emotional rage due to hormones I think.

Then when I reached about 19 years of age, my life changed a lot. I quit college to play become an professional poker player (which I was VERY successful, even though in retrospect I think it was 75%opportunity/being at the right time at the right moment, 20% discipline and just 5% IQ), and at the same time made a side-goal of striving to learn and self-improve (so as to not fall behind other people in terms of cognition. Since most of my friends continued to study and/or had more mentally stimulating jobs). I got into politics debates and study groups and was instantly drawn towards anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism (according to the popular saying "a young person who is not a socialist has no heart, a old person who is not a capitalist has no brain" I was an Ice-cold rationalist!), but somewhere along the line I started to think I was being dishonest to myself and was falling into the trap of having beliefs in order to signal being a contrarian, have a tribal mentality and dismiss any argument of differing beliefs. So I made probably the rarest political-mentality journey of them all of starting out as a strict libertarian to being a moderate libertarian, and from being a moral absolutist (like Ayn Rand) to a moral relativist (or amoralist depending on definitions). Then about 2 years ago some other relevant things happened. Poker ceased being profitable to me (after some good 6 solid years) so I retired from that, and a bit after that I met Patri and David Friedman on a visit they made to Brasil. Having conversations with them, I immediately saw that they were at a whole other level of rationality (one that I haven't encountered in ANYONE in my local country). So In the last year, I started reading Overcoming Bias and found out that all my intellectual interests (rationality, economics, evolutionary biology, philosophy of mind, future tech) were all closely related in certain academic circles, notably the link between GMU economists, Singularity Institute, Future of Humanity institute, Humanity+, etc... So I got the opportunity to come to GMU and spend some time here and I have to say, this is the most interesting, brilliant and imo unbiased group of social scientists anywhere in the world at the moment. I don't have any long term life goals and am currently just living the present and satiating my intellectual appetite. I feel I have to somehow be involved with this group of people/community but I am insecure about my intelligence (I saw the results of the last LW poll and everyone had 140+ IQs) and sometimes I think I'm way over my head in terms of my interests. I feel it takes a LOT of time reading and re-reading the same concepts over and over for them to assimilate. I wish I could upgrade my brain, I would trade almost any amount of money to be able to read G.E.B. without having to skip over the parts where logical code is presented. Only the simplest kinds of notation are manageable to me! My inference machine however is very well calibrated intuitively. I now work part-time with trading/investments and dabbled successfully with pro sports betting also, so these are practical skills to have on these jobs. Maybe I should just give up on formalism/logic/physics, trust the relevant experts, and stick with what I'm better at?

Anyway, I'm just rambling now! I hope to go to some LW meetups now that I'm living temporarily in the U.S.

Eliezer asks "how did you come to rationality?" It surprises me how many people answer: "this is how I lost my religion"

Clearly you can't be rationalist, while also being religious, but there is a more to rationality than simply absence of religion..

Anyway... personally: there's no one moment, but I'm a natural born sceptic and persistently urious analyst. Perhaps rationality attracted because it seems like methodical, organised, analytical scepticism

Single biggest book: Hofstadter's G-E-B, right when it first came out. I just didn't know there could be a book like that....

Are you sure "rationalist" is a good label here? It suggests the claim that you are rational, or at least more rational than most. "Rational" has so many associations that go beyond truth-seeking.

I followed the standard Questioning Religion(TM) route. When I was twelve, our family had a bit of a crisis: my dad's job looked insecure, my mother was having difficulty with her side of the family, and I was home schooled and acutely aware of the fact that this was why I had no social contact with my peers. At all. The solution, as my fundamentalist curriculum (complete with pictures of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden with dinosaurs(!) in the science texts (!!!) ) put it, was to pray for God to magically fix it. Which of course he could do, he's omnipotent! He's God! And he loves all the little children, right?

Several weeks of ardent praying later, my twelve year old self began to smell something fishy. Coincidentally, in the mandatory Bible class (these were DVD correspondence courses), the teacher told the class, "God answers prayers with 'Yes, no, or maybe.' "

"Well, what on earth is the point of praying, then?" said my twelve year old self. I stopped praying. Coincidentally, my life drastically improved after that, so I felt that prayer hadn't altered the outcome one iota. I came to the gut conclusion that Christianity couldn't be right. Mandatory reading of the Bible convinced me that the God of the Bible was a pretty evil guy, if he existed. However, I was limited by the aforementioned abomination of a science text, revisionist history books (which identified all groups who disagreed with the author's exact viewpoint as being wrong and/or Communists), and I was too intimidated by my mother to go check out some decent books on evolution to get the counter-arguments to the Fundamentalist propaganda I was being fed. It would take me another eight years to actually be able to fully back up why I wasn't religious.

On a side note, my grandmother used to be really into New Age... stuff. She gave my mother a whole bunch of books on meditation and seeing energy in trees. The ridiculousness of this stuff probably inoculated me against religion in general, because I could easily see that New Age stuff didn't match with reality (I couldn't see energy in trees) and that left me skeptical of all religion. Also, my dad himself is non-religious. He never really spoke about his lack of belief to me (I think my mother pressured him not to), but he set an example as a completely awesome, well-put together guy who didn't need religion to prop up his life. Also, we watched a lot of Star Trek and astronomy shows together.

Once I hit college, I focused on shoring up the leaky holes in my education. I finally got my hands on Dawkin's The God Delusion, which finally killed the specter of religious indoctrination that had been lurking in the background. I found LW's Sequences not too long ago as well, they went a long way towards explaining why people around me seemed so insane and illogical. I gave myself a new commitment towards seeking the truth and have finally started slowly coming out as an atheist and a rationalist. (Working on my mother, now, and very much not looking forward to that conversation.)

So yeah. It was oddly anti-climatic, really. Once I escaped to the relative sanity of community college, the religious stuff stopped being so controlling in my life, and my dad is very supportive of my atheism/rationalism. I am oddly grateful for religion giving me that initial distrust of authority that turned me towards rationalism.

Must everyone begin as not trying to be rational? I probably did too then, but I don't remember it. Trying to be correct by making your thought processes accurate seems like a pretty obvious thing to do (I assume that's what's meant by rational). I've rarely been so shocked as when I realized (at about 12 I think) that it's normal and not embarrassing in society to have opinions for 'arbitrary' reasons. I'm still kind of puzzled about what else you would think you were doing, even if you are delusional about your success. What did you folk transition here from?

I bet my experience is pretty typical: it's just been one really long of string of oops, as far back as I can remember. I realized I was wrong, I updated. I started with nothing... no beliefs, just professions that I think I realized were transient. Slowly but surely I converged on agnostic Buddhist Epicureanism with a little Sagan, then atheist scientific liberal majoritarianism at RationalWiki with a little Dawkins, then neorationality here with Yvain and Eliezer, then hyperrationality at SIAI with a whole bunch of really strong thinkers, and now I just keep on working at it. Lately I've been reading a lot of source materials (Tooby/Cosmides, Dawkins, Jaynes, Buddha) and asking a lot of "Why do I believe what I believe?"s which have both been rather useful at sharpening my thinking. I'm not sure where to go from here; keep learning math, I guess? Read more source materials? I think I'm getting diminishing marginal returns and might soon start having to really paint my own art. That said, at this point it seems the true field of battle will be on the front of instrumental rationality.

Apologies for coming to this party a bit late. Particularly as I find my own answer really, really frustrating. While I wouldn't say it was an origin per se, getting into reading Overcoming Bias daily a few years back was what crystallised it for me. I'd find myself constantly somewhere between "well, yeah, of course" and "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" Guess the human brain doesn't tend to do Damascene revelations. We need overwhelming evidence, over a long period of time, to even begin chipping away at our craziest beliefs, and even then it's a step-by-step process.

The analogy I sometimes go over is something most people find fairly obvious like egalitarianism. You don't find many people who would attest to being pro-inequality. But all the same, you find very few people who have genuinely thought through what it means to be in favour of equality and really try to fit that into everyday life. The first step to becoming a rationalist is to admit how irrational everyone is without monumental efforts to the contrary.

BTW, I am totally on the road to de-Catholicising my mother. This is on the order of converting Dubya to Islam, so if I can manage that I'm awarding myself an honorary brown belt.

When I was a little kid we would take car trips to visit my grandparents, and my father would borrow books on tape from the library. He borrowed Asimov's "I, Robot", which if you haven't read it is basically "House, M.D." except that instead of people you have robots and instead of Dr. House you have a pair of underpaid robot repairmen. It didn't introduce any concepts of rationality directly, but in the book the heroes won by figuring things out, rather than by being strong or passionate or morally correct. It made figuring things out cool, and it turns out that if you want to figure things out, you use rationality.

I can’t remember a time when I was not very much concerned with rationality. I think my father (a neuroscientist) encouraged those kinds of ideas from the time I was learning to speak my first few words, always reasoning with me, nudging me to think straight. I developed a deep interest in science from about the age of five and there was never any competition from other ways of viewing the world. Things like game theory and heuristics and biases came to me much later (when studying economics), and although I was excited about it, it didn’t really rock my world. I had always been searching for tools with which to improve my own thinking, these just happened to be unusually powerful ones.

Although I don’t remember any awakening to rationalism, I do remember some early clashes with irrationalism, which I think was quite formative. From the beginning, I had taken rationalism for granted. As I started to interface with the world outside my family, I realized that the norm was in fact massive irrationalism, and this drove me crazy. The prime example was when I encountered religion.

My parents were second-generation atheists, and socialized exclusively with other atheists. Also, I had the good fortune to grow up in a country where a vast majority of the population is nonreligious. For these reasons I didn’t even know that such a thing as religion existed until I was about eight years old. At that point, I joined a classmate from elementary school to an after school activity group arranged by a church. I came home afterwards and told my parents about the stories I’d heard about this person called Jesus. They said simply that if I wanted to go there and listen, that was okay, but it was important that I realize from the beginning that the stories were just stories, as in any book of fiction. That was the first and last thing my parents ever tried to teach me about religion.

Some time later I realized that religious people actually believed the biblical stories, without any kind of reasonable evidence, and I found this absolutely horrifying. I remember feeling deeply offended that such ignorance could exist, and still it took a long while for the full scale of the offense to sink in. A couple of years later I slept over at a neighboring family’s apartment and was shocked when, shortly before going to sleep, the parents of the family expected me to get down on my knees and pray. They were equally shocked when I said that I had no idea how to pray. In any case, I was thoroughly disgusted by this first encounter with actual people actually practicing religion, and ever since, I’ve had to struggle just to keep a straight face when I meet religious people. (My parents advised me to take it easy and tolerate religious people, saying that some of them actually were good and decent people, it was just that they happened to have this slightly “childish” aspect to their characters, which should be tolerated in the same way as, for example, low intelligence.)

I never read Overcoming Bias for the rationality stuff. Although I have certainly learned a lot from these posts, I have never felt that they were very revolutionary for me personally (allthough I guess they would be for most of the world). My main interest here is Mr Yudkowsky himself. I have a life-long interest in the nature of genius, and reading the things he writes seems to me an unusually unobstructed view into the mind of a living and ever-developing genius. What he happens to be writing about at the moment (I’ve been following his work for over five years now) is of secondary importance.