Too many people run marathons and lift heavy weights for me not too say them.
I don't think that increased strength and increased metabolism are great benefits now. There are few instances in today's world where strength matters, and increased metabolism is really only important if you really like food, or are a competitive food eater.
Beyond not being obese and being able to play a game of pick up basketball with the guys, I am not convinced that exercise really means anything, beyond increasing status to some groups of people.
I would simply recommend doing the type of exercises that will make your body type appeal to those who you want to impress, or get along with, that don't have a high risk of injury(unless you like impressing the risky crowd, up to you)
SIAI's Fellows Program is looking for rationalists with skills. More specifically, we're looking for rationalists with skills outside our usual cluster who are interested in donating their time by teaching those skills and communicating the mindsets that lead to their development. If possible, we'd like to learn from specialists who "speak our language," or at least are practiced in resolving confusion and disagreement using reason and evidence. Broadly, we're interested in developing practical intuitions, doing practical things, and developing awareness and culture around detail-intensive technical subskills of emotional self-awareness and social fluency. More specifically:
We're interested learning how to "make stuff" in order to force ourselves down to object level from time to time, practice executing plans in the real world and to refine our intuitions about material phenomena. Examples:
We're interested in learning skills that require one to pay very close attention to the detail of the physical world - how things actually are instead of what our mental representation says about them. Examples:
We'd like to get better at working with people, both inside the institute and outside. Examples:
We want to become more aware and in control of our emotions. Emotional self-awareness seems very important for productivity, social success and understanding our tendencies toward motivated cognition. Aside from things that traditionally train emotional awareness like acting and meditation, we expect that certain formal systems of kinesthetic practice such as Iyengar yoga will also help because of the close association between emotional states and patterns of muscle tension. Examples:
We obviously don't have the time for everyone to learn all of these skills right now, but we would like to get the ball rolling on what's available. Whether you're interested in joining the fellows program, visiting regularly or even just video conferencing occasionally, if you think you can teach one of these skills or something else that seems to align well with the faculties we're interested in training, please send me an email at jasen@intelligence.org.
Even if you don't live in the Bay Area, I encourage you to post your skills here anyway, in case one of the regular Less Wrong meetup groups are interested. There are regular meetups in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. As always, if there aren't already meetups in your area I encourage you to start one.