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ChristianKl comments on How can I spend money to improve my life? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Than I'm happy to hear about which goals you achieve better by taking up archery than by taking up martial arts. For what goals does archery happen to be an optimal solution or even a good one.
We're kind of kicking at different goalposts here. You're trying to show that archery isn't the best possible use of time (presumably for fitness) and I'm skeptical of your specific claims about it.
A couple things to consider.
Hopefully that gives you some idea of why I don't think it's fair to dismiss archery as suboptimal.
Given that the whole thread is about ways a rationalist can spend money to improve his life, if archery isn't a good use of your time buying a bow probably isn't good use of your money either.
To the extend that I have used strong words to dismiss archery as suboptimal it's because I dislike the idea of people recommending activities like archery, sailing or go-kart racing without any thought about secondary benefits.
I do think it makes sense to think seriously how about one spends his time. I think I get around 8 separate benefits from dancing.
Fun
Physical Confidence with women. It both provides heavy reaction therapy and an enviroment where it's socially expected that the men leads the woman.
Physical exercise that improves body coordination. I think that leads to more expressiveness in my body language in tasks such as public speaking.
It's a general sport and fits the recommendation that one should do sport to be healthy.
It trains sensitivity of perception what happens physically inside other people.
Practical understand about human physiology that I can't get from a physiology testbook. A limit space to experiment and check theories.
I'm in an enviroment with woman that are potential romantic partners.
I learn to listen to music on a deeper level (but compared to the other points that's not really useful in other stuff I do)
That doesn't mean that I think everyone should take up Salsa. I don't even argue that it's the perfect dance but I do think I have much better reasons for it than were provided here for taking up archery.
I don't care for the semantics.
Even if it does grow some muscles, it doesn't grow them symmetrically. Good muscle training should train both sides evenly. Having uneven muscles distribution isn't good.
For certain people the former might be more fun (and for other people it might be the other way around).
Do you think that's genetic? I think its mostly learned behavior. If you hit a state of flow both will feel fun.
I don't know; I'd guess it's both. Why are you asking?
Sounds like the fallacy of grey / a fully general counterargument against ever enjoying one pastime more than another other than for its practical benefits. I mean, if you hit a state of flow cleaning toilets will feel fun, too, but for certain people it's easier to hit a state of flow with certain activities than with others.
That basically means that you don't take up hobbies that need a few months of learning before you are able to hit flow.
I think the average level of fun that a person who's into the hobby for a bit is more important than the level of fun you have when you start a hobby.
I also have control over what I feel. To me it seems much easier to simply choose to enjoy an activity by having control over my own state of mind than to sample a large number of hobbies, hoping that I accidentally find one that's fun.
I admit that the way I gained the belief that I'm in control was highly manipulative NLP but it's now real for me. I guess it's like the issue of believing in ego depletion. (Make a mental note to find someone sooner or later to remove my belief in ego depletion)
I'm not sure I understand this reply -- these two paragraphs appear to contradict each other.
Also, it seems orthogonal to what I said. How long it takes before the average person is able to enjoy X and how much people vary in how much they'll eventually enjoy X sound like different questions to me.
How do you decide whether archery is fun for you?You could use the first lesson of archery to make the decision. You could make that decision after a month. I don't think either of those tell you how much you will enjoy it after a year.
To the extend that you can't predict how you will feel after a year you can look at what the average person who takes it for a year feels. That means you don't get to base your decision on how different people enjoy different hobbies.
So what? If in a year's time I no longer find archery fun, I'll still be allowed to stop doing it. And in any event it's none of your freakin' business.
(I don't actually do archery in real life BTW, though I do have a few hobbies that don't build muscle, fluent body movement or produce a high heart rate that helps the heart, such as for example commenting on Less Wrong.)
If we have a discussion about the value of engaging in activities and spending money for it, why is it not my business to discuss that value?
Tapping out. (EDIT: I didn't downvote.)
Well, okay, so you're a highly unusual individual and on the basis of this, you're arguing about the advisability of various things for other people... Your advice kind of boils down to "become like me", doesn't it? Which, of course, is a whole other issue.
What's wrong with that? First, I have no good evidence that I would, after a couple of months, be able to hit flow with it. Second, I can't and am unwilling to take arbitrary hits to my well-being even for restricted periods of time by engaging for a hobby that makes me miserable for the first couple of months. (Sounds a bit exaggerated, to be sure, but it was exactly what I thought when I read your salsa example somewhere else in the comments here.)
No. My advice is to look at the various possible usages of your time and rationally access which benefits they provide. To the extend that challenge is "please become more like me" I find it surprising that someone raising that objection against myself at lesswrong. Maybe I take some ideas about rationality too seriously?
I don't do martial arts classes (for complicated reasons that don't generalize well to the general population). I don't to improv comedy classes yet you will find that I recommend both of those activities because I consider them high value.
If you aren't a person who's good at telling jokes your first improv comedy classes might not be very funny for you. They might be highly challenging. If you take that to conclude that improv comedy classes are the wrong thing for you, then I think you are missing an experience that will bring you forward.
Well, your whole argument seemed to me to be: certain hobbies have various benefits, so you should change yourself to be able to engage in them to reap those benefits. That struck me as a bit far-reaching, hence the "whole other issue" remark.
When I took up Salsa it was exactly for the reasons I use here to advocate it. At the time I was an unfit person who wasn't having much social contact spending most of the time in front of the computer.
I think doing something that changed me was the point. I'm not the person who took up Salsa because a girl needed a dance partner and dragged me along. I did make the decision to take it up after rational analysis and I think in retrospect it was the right decision for myself at that time.
I think the whole idea of rationality is that you should change yourself to engage in behavior that makes you more likely to win. If you don't think that's what rationality is about, than what is?
I'm not saying (or thinking) that your decision to take up Salsa wasn't perfectly rational. What I do think is my decision not to do such a thing is also perfectly rational, which is probably why I had a negative emotional reaction to your very... vehement advocacy. In the case of archery, the structure of the discussion I gathered is: you said it was much inferior in health benefits to other activities - somebody brought up that it was simply fun - and you replied essentially that, well, then you should learn to find better things fun! That struck me as somewhat bizarre, because you were so forcefully condemning hobbies that were not optimal according to your metric without taking into account that other people may have other metrics and/or be constrained by various circumstances.
At this point, it's become pretty clear to me that the reason I voiced this objection was that I perceived you as arguing so vehemently that I felt essentially I was being told that I'm irrational because I like the wrong things.
Still, you cannot just learn at will to find arbitrary things fun. So what's your point?
Actually, I can if I put effort into it. Especially if the activity has a purpose for myself.
But even if you can't, you won't know how an activity will feel after a year by taking a lesson in it. My first month of dancing Salsa was horrible. In the Salsa community the first months for males get called "beginner's hell". If you only engage in hobbies that are fun the first time in which you engage them I don't think you optimize happiness and more importantly you probably won't engage in activities that challenge your weak area's in a way that makes you improve on a more general level.