Rationalist Sport

I remember my sociology textbook explaining that sports often show what a group values.

Of course that's what the sociology textbook will say. Otherwise what's the point of sociology?

In particular I think that being a rationalist means that you can choose a sport based on it's merits instead on the values it's projects.

What do we want?
-A low rate of accidents
-Cardiovascular benefits
-Muscle development
-Coordination and control over muscles.
-Social interaction
-Developing confidence

I hate to sound machiavelian here, but i think an important criterion for a good sport missing from this discussion is "gain friends, respect, and a conversational topic with people who don't identify as rationalists".

A lot of us are going to be short on opportunities to achieve these goals. So the most instrumentally rational sport may be the one which happens to be popular in your immediate social environment.

discuss what makes current sports unappealing to rationalists

(1) Like CronoDAS, I dispute your assumption that current sports are unappealing to rationalists. To the list of counterexamples already furnished, I add American football (with its astoundingly sophisticated strategizing) and baseball (with its well-developed culture of betting and probability calculations).

(2) Yet it does seem to me that aspiring rationalists are less interested in athletic sports than your average person. But even if this is true (and even if it remains true after controlling for education and income), it doesn't entail that the fault lie in sports. A more plausible explanation is that rationalists turn up their nose toward sports because of the kind of people who shout about sports at bars. In other words, aspiring rationalists actually just dislike sports enthusiasts, and the sports themselves get the hate spattered on them by association.

The real answer is: Whatever you can get yourself to do regularly.

If you don't exercise regularly, deciding on a sport is like a picking a programming language before you've learned even one of them. There is no one-size-fits-all sport or exercise. It really depends on your interests, physical abilities, social circle, the weather, what's near you, etc. This discussion might help give people ideas, but so could a list of sports. The most important thing is to get out there and do something.

Also, your quoted example sounds like a just-so story. I thought bowling and football were popular because they're an excuse to drink with friends.

Chess-boxing! Cultivates the ability to think while under stress.

Although the games themselves do not involve much physical activity compared to other sports, a lot of professional RTS players (Starcraft, League of Legends, etc.) end up on surprisingly strenuous exercise regiments to improve their reflexes and hand-eye coordination and gain the physical benefits mentioned (Cardiovascular benefits, muscle development, coordination and control over muscles) as a side-effect of preparing to compete at a professional level.

Certain kinds of war games might also qualify as a rationalist sport if they were modified a bit. If military war games were made less fake, airsoft and paintball made less dangerous, and laser tag made more realistic they would each meet all of these desiderata.

I like people's attempts to step outside the question, but playing along...

LW-rationalists value thinking for yourself over conformity. A LW sport might be a non-team sport like fencing, a team sport in which individuals are spotlighted, like baseball, or a sport that presents constant temptation to follow cues from your teammates but rewards breaking away from the pack.

LW-rationalists value cross-domain skills. A LW sport might involve a variety of activities, like an n-athlon, or facing a quick succession of opponents who all trained together so that lessons learned against one are likely to apply to the next.

LW-rationalists value finding ways to cooperate with people whose values are different. A LW sport might involve a tension between behavior that supports the team and behavior that wins personal glory, like basketball, or it might involve more than 2 sides and more than 1 winner with potential for cooperation.

LW-rationalists value an ability to recognize when a previously useful heuristic isn't working, and break out of it. A LW sport might involve subtle shifts in the playing field that weaken some strategies and strengthen others.

The shooting sports have a lot of attributes that appeal to different mental aspects of rationality:

• they require careful observation of internal mental states
• academic knowledge can directly contribute to success (such as knowing a lot about human vision)
• lots of opportunities to indulge in obsession over microimprovements
• pre-event, post-event and on-the-fly computational skills are immensely useful
• unusual conscious states, such as time slowdown, are relatively easy to achieve without chemical assistance

Potential drawbacks: associated in the USA with right-wing politics; distrusted by liberals; expensive; requires ownership of dangerous tools.

Since when are current "sports" unappealing to rationalists? We've got plenty of Magic, poker, chess, and Go players here. Do you mean that we're not so interested in spectator sports?

Rock-climbing:

• Individualistic
• Meditative
• Works many different muscles

I'm not sure I believe the hypothesis, but I think most of the skills we value are mental, rather than physical, and so a contest designed to test these things would likely be considered a game, rather than a sport (e.g. something like forum mafia incorporates a lot of skills rationalists value, or I'd make the case for mahjong).

We value making probability estimates based on limited information, changing your mind appropriately when the information changes, and avoiding being influenced by others. We don't like blindly following orders (something that's necessary in many current team sports). I suspect many of us dislike arbitrary tribal affiliation (required for any kind of sports fan-experience really), the win-lose structure that means each match gives a risk of an unhappy result, and the value placed on physical ability.

So a rationalist sport would want to have physical ability relatively unimportant (secondary to skill and intelligence), either no teams or fluid teams, and some positive-sum scoring structure where it's possible to play risk-aversely and do well. And even then, that might be something we'd enjoy playing, but you wouldn't get the fan dynamics of mainstream sports.

I want to try Frisbee Go, modeled after Ultimate frisbee. Get a frisbee. Find a football field that you can mark up. Spray paint a 9x9 grid on it (or a finer grid if you dare). Have a Go board and stones off the field to keep "score" with. Divide the players into two teams of relatively equal physical and/or Go skill. Flip a coin for which team tosses first.

Teams start on opposite sides of the field. The first team tosses the frisbee toward the middle where it can be caught or picked up by the other team. An individual with possession of the frisbee must stay fixed in place; if they catch the frisbee while they are in motion, they must stop ASAP and return to where they caught it. An individual with possession of the frisbee may "toss" it or "tap" it.

Tossing a frisbee is throwing it so that another player might catch it. A tossed frisbee may be caught in the air by a member of the same team if there is at least a whole square of the grid between the tosser and catcher. A tossed frisbee may be caught in the air anywhere by a member of the other team as an interception. A frisbee that hits the ground before being caught, or that is caught ought of bounds, or that is caught by the same team too close to the tosser, results in a turnover.

Tapping a frisbee is touching it to the ground between one's own feet without losing control of it. If the frisbee is tapped within a square corresponding to a legal playing point on the Go board, the team that tapped it places their color Go stone on that point. The teams return to the sides of the field, and the team that tapped tosses the frisbee to the other team. If the frisbee is tapped within a square corresponding to a illegal playing point, it results in a turnover.

(Physically skilled teams may be able to play multiple stones in a row, unlike in standard Go.)

The team that wins the Go part of the game wins the Frisbee Go game.

Disc golf.