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bisserlis comments on Rationalist Hobbies - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
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.")
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.