Sports—By watching sports and being a fan, you can learn about biases, first recognizing them in others and then in yourself. You can learn to evaluate strategies based on how well they help one win. By taking part in arguments and analysis, especially in more statistically sophisticated (sabermetric) communities, you can learn to reason based on data and evidence and to judge the quality of an argument. You can test yourself by making predictions and observing the results, especially if you gamble or play fantasy sports. (See also here and here.)
I upvote sports, although I’m not a sports fan, because it’s another area where you bump up against reality. Teams have to make the right choices or they lose. It’s another way to gain intuitive experience with probability.
Of all the things you could watch on TV, sports are probably the best for your brain. Scripted TV shows accustom you to narrative logic, not real-world probabilities. TV news does the same thing.
When I read this comment, it strongly reinforced the part of my mind that was wondering how many hobbies existed that couldn’t be construed as rationalist exercises if one wished to do so. However, you may want to discount me slightly because I’m not a fan of sports at all, and am sometimes slightly irritated at seeing sports on TV for reasons that I have not paid much close attention to.
With that said, I propose that we come up with a list of hobbies that shouldn’t be considered “rationalist,” and see if anyone else can come with a convincing enough note regarding them to convince us otherwise.
So, to semi-stick my head out, my hypothesis is that the space of hobbies that could be considered “rationalist” is too large to be very useful to us. Grouping these according to the skills that they purportedly train may help counteract this; perhaps it would be useful to rank skills in each group so that we could quantify opinion on which ones increase certain skills more than others.
Sports—By watching sports and being a fan, you can learn about biases, first recognizing them in others and then in yourself. You can learn to evaluate strategies based on how well they help one win. By taking part in arguments and analysis, especially in more statistically sophisticated (sabermetric) communities, you can learn to reason based on data and evidence and to judge the quality of an argument. You can test yourself by making predictions and observing the results, especially if you gamble or play fantasy sports. (See also here and here.)
I upvote sports, although I’m not a sports fan, because it’s another area where you bump up against reality. Teams have to make the right choices or they lose. It’s another way to gain intuitive experience with probability.
Of all the things you could watch on TV, sports are probably the best for your brain. Scripted TV shows accustom you to narrative logic, not real-world probabilities. TV news does the same thing.
When I read this comment, it strongly reinforced the part of my mind that was wondering how many hobbies existed that couldn’t be construed as rationalist exercises if one wished to do so. However, you may want to discount me slightly because I’m not a fan of sports at all, and am sometimes slightly irritated at seeing sports on TV for reasons that I have not paid much close attention to.
With that said, I propose that we come up with a list of hobbies that shouldn’t be considered “rationalist,” and see if anyone else can come with a convincing enough note regarding them to convince us otherwise.
So, to semi-stick my head out, my hypothesis is that the space of hobbies that could be considered “rationalist” is too large to be very useful to us. Grouping these according to the skills that they purportedly train may help counteract this; perhaps it would be useful to rank skills in each group so that we could quantify opinion on which ones increase certain skills more than others.