jswan comments on Rationalist Sport - Less Wrong

3 Post author: MathiasZaman 17 June 2014 08:10PM

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Comment author: jswan 21 June 2014 02:51:19AM 2 points [-]

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.