This wasn’t precisely the reason I got here, but I think the biggest reason that I was open to the idea of rationality when I finally stumbled upon LessWrong and the whole Effective Altruism idea was my experience of becoming gay, after diverging from my christian upbringing.
During my time going to bible school (yes, I was in that deep), there was a lot of theology where I was confused and felt like I didn’t understand why something was true, but just accepted that “I’m sure some high-level theologian out there has a reasonable answer for this, I just don’t know it.” However, once I began living on my own, naturally drifted away from the church, and then discovered that gay stuff wasn’t as bad as I’d been told, I realized (this is how I think of it now) that there was a very large black mark on the source of knowledge internally labelled as “religious authority.” That was the first frayed thread in that anachronistic tapestry I had properly seen unraveled for myself, and I suspect that there are many more of such threads that I overlooked previously.
This wasn’t precisely the reason I got here, but I think the biggest reason that I was open to the idea of rationality when I finally stumbled upon LessWrong and the whole Effective Altruism idea was my experience of becoming gay, after diverging from my christian upbringing.
During my time going to bible school (yes, I was in that deep), there was a lot of theology where I was confused and felt like I didn’t understand why something was true, but just accepted that “I’m sure some high-level theologian out there has a reasonable answer for this, I just don’t know it.” However, once I began living on my own, naturally drifted away from the church, and then discovered that gay stuff wasn’t as bad as I’d been told, I realized (this is how I think of it now) that there was a very large black mark on the source of knowledge internally labelled as “religious authority.” That was the first frayed thread in that anachronistic tapestry I had properly seen unraveled for myself, and I suspect that there are many more of such threads that I overlooked previously.