Frankly, I think moderate statistical literacy (being able to reasonably evaluate statistics and charts you see in the news, or know your approximate risk of facing a given common medical or criminal problem) and the ability to correctly apply arithmetic to your budget give overwhelmingly more rationality-for-effort than any other type of math.
Having the math to manage a budget and not be bamboozled by media or advertising radically improves your life.
After that I think having an intuitive sense of the way statistical quantities tend to result from highly confounded factors can really give deeper insights into all sorts of economic and sociological results. Statistical methods of clustering or factor analysis are a concrete way to look at this.
I have started to put together a sort of curriculum for learning the subjects that lend themselves to rationality. It includes things like experimental methodology and cognitive psychology (obviously), along with "support disciplines" like computer science and economics. I think (though maybe I'm wrong) that mathematics is one of the most important things to understand.
Eliezer said in the simple math of everything:
I want to have access to outlook-changing insights. So, what math do I need to know? What are the generally applicable mathematical principles that are most worth learning? The above quote seems to indicate at least calculus, and everyone is a fan of Bayesian statistics (which I know little about).
Secondarily, what are some of the most important of that "drop-dead basic fundamental embarrassingly simple mathematics" from different fields? What fields are mathematically based, other than physics and evolutionary biology, and economics?
What is the most important math for an educated person to be familiar with?
As someone who took an honors calculus class in high school, liked it, and did alright in the class, but who has probably forgotten most of it by now and needs to relearn it, how should I go about learning that math?