Business, and the many subfields thereof.

I've been hanging around LW for a number of years now, and only recently have begun learning anything about business. I've often been struck at how relevant much of what we cover is to "the art of human rationality." The following topics or oft-repeated themes are potential gold mines:

• marketing (both the analytical and the strategic sides)
• sales
• finance (a wealth--ha!--of material on value measurement, risk/uncertainty/probability, discount rates, and prediction)
• cross-cultural communication
• habituation and effective training methodology
• human resources
• time management
• project management
• motivation and morale
• group dynamics
• conflict management
• communication styles
• goal definition
• measurement of outcomes
• effective means of keeping accountable to goals
• the importance of admitting mistakes early (stubbornness can pay off, but it's usually veeeeery costly)
• the importance of learning from mistakes--yours and others'
• the importance of continuous incremental improvement (e.g., the role of Six Sigma at GE and Motorola)

Business scholarly literature includes theoretical articles and case studies. The theoretical articles are often trivial or ill founded. But the case studies are very valuable for me--I naturally err on the side of excessive abstraction. Like fiction, case studies provide the reader with vicarious experience from which s/he can learn--but of course the events in the case study are real and nothing is obscured or exaggerated for the sake of entertainment.

A great strength of business literature is its clarity. Perhaps because the audience is assumed to be exceptionally impatient and busy, most articles are neatly paragraphed, feature helpful graphics, and have the business equivalent of "tl;dr" all over the place.

Another reason LWers might be interested in business is, of course, that business success leads to more wealth, which enables more philanthropy.

Edited: fixed a word and added a bullet