Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story... at Less Wrong

post by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Eliezer_Yudkowsky) · 2009-02-27T04:06:15.000Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 0 comments

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(A beta version of Less Wrong is now live, no old posts imported as yet.  Some of the plans for what to do with Less Wrong relative to OB have been revised by further discussion among Robin, Nick, and myself, but for now we're just seeing what happens once LW is up - whether it's stable, what happens to the tone of comments once threading and voting is enabled, etcetera.

Posting by non-admins is disabled for now - today we're just testing out registration, commenting, threading, etcetera.)

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 becoming rationalists.  This worked surprisingly well.

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 a 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?

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