I tried to justify some of my hobbies to see if I could come up with anything that couldn’t be called a “rationalist hobby” to determine if it’s a useful designation or not.
Knitting—Trains your attention to fine detail. After you knit a pair of socks, whenever you wear knitted clothes you’ll instinctively think, “I could make this. There are no great unknowable secrets in manufacturing, only time and labor.”
Music Radio DJing—You learn how to speak fluently and without pause, and put together an entertaining set of music, which are both useful for signalling in social situations.
Reddit—Its up/downvoting system teaches how to quickly decide whether or not something is interesting to you, and the ability to submit content to be judged by the crowds can train your ability to write short copy that will appeal to large audiences.
I feel like I’m stretching, but also like science fiction, video games, chess and poker are probably also stretches.
I think DJ’ing and Reddit teach skills but not necessarily the skill of rationality.
Knitting, especially when you design your own patterns, does teach you the ability to make things. It sometimes disturbs me how possible it is to go through an adult life without making anything, and how long I go without making anything. (I’m not just talking about handicrafts; I’m talking about the process of designing and producing an entire new thing, that you can call “yours.” Writing a program is “making something.”)
Knitting—Trains your attention to fine detail. After you knit a pair of socks, whenever you wear knitted clothes you’ll instinctively think, “I could make this. There are no great unknowable secrets in manufacturing, only time and labor.”
Which quickly generalizes to any sort of physical making—woodworking, metalworking, etc.
Which quickly generalizes to any sort of physical making—woodworking, metalworking, etc.
Knitting is more like programming than woodworking and metalworking are, at least if you are designing your own knitting patterns. Knitting is a digitizable activity. To design a knitting pattern is to create an executable digital script, whose success is subject to digitizable constraints.
While these skills do help in some things, fluent speaking and making snap decisions are not really rationality skills in an epistemic sense. With luck, most any hobby can help you in an instrumental sense.
Science fiction and video games are stretches, but I can see poker and probably chess. For what it’s worth, I like and do the former two but not the latter.
I except poker because, while there is nontrivial discussion of it here and especially on Hacker News, I don’t think poker is strongly associated with nerds. My gut impression is that poker as a hobby is still predominantly non-nerds. Hence, it’s the only entry that was not a nerd hobby.
(I would agree that anime is nothing special for rationality. This includes the many science fiction anime.)
I always figured the good poker players were all nerds, and the folk view of poker as this manly dominance contest of nerves etc just provided an endless stream of prey for them. I used to play Magic: The Gathering and read MTG blogs etc, and the pros drifted into poker because there was more money in it.
Poker, like other games of hidden information such as MTG, very strongly rewards rationality because it presses upon an important bias. Few people understand that the right play is the one that maximises your chances of winning given your information, not the one that will win given all the information.
Most people just can’t accept this. When they make the right bet and lose it messes them up—they start thinking of what they should’ve done differently, and their play diverges from the correct line. They can’t accept that they played correctly. The same thing happens when they make an incorrect play that happens to win.
Of course, if you abstract “Chess” and “Poker” to “board games” (which can then be abstracted together with video games to “games”) then this distinction vanishes!
This sounds like a list of ‘any nerd hobby’ (with the honorable exception of 1 out of the 6, poker).
I tried to justify some of my hobbies to see if I could come up with anything that couldn’t be called a “rationalist hobby” to determine if it’s a useful designation or not.
Knitting—Trains your attention to fine detail. After you knit a pair of socks, whenever you wear knitted clothes you’ll instinctively think, “I could make this. There are no great unknowable secrets in manufacturing, only time and labor.”
Music Radio DJing—You learn how to speak fluently and without pause, and put together an entertaining set of music, which are both useful for signalling in social situations.
Reddit—Its up/downvoting system teaches how to quickly decide whether or not something is interesting to you, and the ability to submit content to be judged by the crowds can train your ability to write short copy that will appeal to large audiences.
I feel like I’m stretching, but also like science fiction, video games, chess and poker are probably also stretches.
Building up a really huge record collection—you learn that this is not such a great idea when you have to move house. It’s a subclass of this one.
I think DJ’ing and Reddit teach skills but not necessarily the skill of rationality.
Knitting, especially when you design your own patterns, does teach you the ability to make things. It sometimes disturbs me how possible it is to go through an adult life without making anything, and how long I go without making anything. (I’m not just talking about handicrafts; I’m talking about the process of designing and producing an entire new thing, that you can call “yours.” Writing a program is “making something.”)
Which quickly generalizes to any sort of physical making—woodworking, metalworking, etc.
Knitting is more like programming than woodworking and metalworking are, at least if you are designing your own knitting patterns. Knitting is a digitizable activity. To design a knitting pattern is to create an executable digital script, whose success is subject to digitizable constraints.
While these skills do help in some things, fluent speaking and making snap decisions are not really rationality skills in an epistemic sense. With luck, most any hobby can help you in an instrumental sense.
Science fiction and video games are stretches, but I can see poker and probably chess. For what it’s worth, I like and do the former two but not the latter.
Well, for example, anime is not included, because when I asked Eliezer, he apparently didn’t think it offered any rationality lessons.
Why do you make an exception for poker? Is there anything else you think should be on the list?
I except poker because, while there is nontrivial discussion of it here and especially on Hacker News, I don’t think poker is strongly associated with nerds. My gut impression is that poker as a hobby is still predominantly non-nerds. Hence, it’s the only entry that was not a nerd hobby.
(I would agree that anime is nothing special for rationality. This includes the many science fiction anime.)
I always figured the good poker players were all nerds, and the folk view of poker as this manly dominance contest of nerves etc just provided an endless stream of prey for them. I used to play Magic: The Gathering and read MTG blogs etc, and the pros drifted into poker because there was more money in it.
Poker, like other games of hidden information such as MTG, very strongly rewards rationality because it presses upon an important bias. Few people understand that the right play is the one that maximises your chances of winning given your information, not the one that will win given all the information.
Most people just can’t accept this. When they make the right bet and lose it messes them up—they start thinking of what they should’ve done differently, and their play diverges from the correct line. They can’t accept that they played correctly. The same thing happens when they make an incorrect play that happens to win.
Of course, if you abstract “Chess” and “Poker” to “board games” (which can then be abstracted together with video games to “games”) then this distinction vanishes!