Can useful reasoning become a competitive sport?

I've been thinking about a project idea that feels either genuinely interesting or like a very elegant mistake, and I'm currently trying to figure out which. I'm posting at an early stage deliberately - I'm not trying to launch something, I'm trying to find out if it's worth developing at all.

The idea: design a new kind of competition built around judgment, estimation, strategic reasoning, negotiation, and decision-making under uncertainty. Not a forecasting tournament, not a board game event, not a rationality workshop - something more like a multi-event mind-sport, but aimed at a different skill cluster than any of those.

The part that feels important, and that I want to flag upfront: it would have to work as a competition first. If the format doesn't produce something genuinely fun and legible to people who don't already care about rationality, then it's just rationality exercises with a leaderboard, and that's not interesting. The appeal I'm imagining depends on attracting people from outside the usual EA/LW/forecasting bubble - people from board games, puzzle competitions, strategy games, mind sports. That only happens if the competition is good on its own terms.

We already have things that measure parts of this space:

• forecasting platforms
• chess/poker/backgammon/other strategic games
• board games/mind sports
• puzzle competitions
• informal status hierarchies around “good judgment”

Each captures something real, but none combines them into a single competitive format oriented around real-world epistemic judgment. That gap is what I'm interested in.

The version in my head would mix existing and new event types - things like:

• forecasting or pastcasting
• Fermi estimation
• bargaining/negotiation games
• information search games
• decision-making under uncertainty
• inference/deduction/codebreaking
• market or auction formats
• something around causal or scientific reasoning

To make this concrete: imagine a Fermi estimation round where teams are given a novel estimation problem, must show their reasoning publicly, and are scored both on accuracy and on calibration across a series of problems. No specialized knowledge required - just structured thinking under time pressure. That's the kind of event I have in mind: something that's immediately legible to a newcomer, competitive enough to be tense, and that rewards a real skill.

The optimistic version is that a format like this could attract a broader crowd than current forecasting platforms, produce a useful signal about judgment that isn't identical to what existing tools already give us, and maybe serve as a talent funnel for people who reason well but don't currently show up in forecasting or EA-adjacent spaces.

The pessimistic version:

• it's too vague to be fun
• it produces bad or ungameable signal
• it attracts the wrong people
• it's just "forecasting plus vibes"
• it's too hard to score fairly - judging forecasting accuracy is already hard; judging negotiation or causal reasoning in a way that feels legitimate to participants is genuinely unsolved, and might be a dealbreaker

That last one is probably the failure mode I'm most uncertain about.

So: is this worth developing further?

I'd love reactions from people with experience in forecasting, mind sports, board game tournaments, game design, talent funnels, or community infrastructure. In particular:

• Is there a version of this that's genuinely new, or does it collapse into something that already exists?
• Which event types seem most promising - and which are scoring nightmares?
• What's the most likely way this fails?

My main interest is whether something like this could become a useful piece of lightweight infrastructure: a way to attract and identify people with unusually strong fit for forecasting, strategic reasoning, evaluative judgment, or adjacent work.

I've put up a small Manifund grant to support a short pre-design phase - basically: talk to people with relevant experience, prototype one or two event formats, and figure out whether the scoring problems are tractable. If you think this is confused, I'd genuinely find that useful to hear too. That's roughly where I am.