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MixedNuts comments on Teachable Rationality Skills - Less Wrong
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Skill: Being strategic. I.e., life-consequentialism, where you actually do things based on their expected future consequences, as opposed to drifting into a PhD program because your friends are doing it.
Exercise materials: We either need to develop efficient probes for getting people to list out major life choices that they could actually remake (are under serious reconsideration) or we need to develop hypothetical life stories and policy decisions to use in exercises.
Subskill: Unbundling; optimize separate things separately.
Example 1: Optimize fuzzies and utilons separately.
Example 2: Optimize grades and learning separately (instead of just optimizing grades, or haphazardly optimizing both at the same time).
5SL: Notice when you're optimizing two things at once. (Maybe because you (a) have a sense of awkwardness or of not getting enough done, and when you list out the desirable consequences, there's more than one?) Then, find two different things you can do which optimizes each one individually and without worrying about the other one.
Yet I've done better doing the opposite. When faced with incompatible courses of action that optimize different things, look for a third alternative that gets both. The choice doesn't have to be hard - even if the optimizing targets are "save the world" and "talk to cool people", frustration with the obviously right choice triggers a search for a third alternative as well.
I'd conclude that the most important skill is to stop, notice you're confused, and work out that it's because you're trying to optimize two goals. Whether you then optimize them separately, or find a third alternative, you'll probably do better than if you conflate "grades = learning" or "utilons = fuzzies" and try to optimize that non-existent conflation.