our body has some impact on our brain and physical activity has some (positive) impact on our body, it seems rational to me to engage in some physical activity rather than "waisting your intelligence" on playing chess (which I also did a lot).
Huh? In the absence of further evidence I'd think the best way to get better at abstract reasoning is to practice abstract reasoning, which chess is going to be better at than sports. Sure, sport has effects on your brain, but so does chess.
The positive effects of chess may be higher, but I presume that the average rationalist or LWer practices 8 hours of abstract reasoning a day, simply by doing their job. Let us think about Bobby Fischer. He probably practiced at least 10 hours a day - maybe then another hour of chess did not have an impact as positive as an hour of tennis, swimming etc. At least, he did not think so.
The situation is of course very different, if you are a professional athlete. Then some hours of chess in the free time is (probably) a better way to train your brain, but so w...
This post is a bit of an experiment; Most of the time, Discussion post lay out an idea and this idea then get commented upon. This post, on the other hand, will be purely about discussion on a topic. If this works out well, I'll might post more of these in the future.
On to the meat of this post:
I got this idea from a reddit post on /r/LessWrong.
To quote:
So have at it.
I only ask for one thing and that is to hold off on proposing solutions for 24 hours before giving suggestions for actual sports. In the first 24 hours, please discuss what makes current sports unappealing to rationalists and what aspects a sports designed for aspiring rationalists should have.
Edit: The 24-hour window has closed and solutions and suggestions can now be given.