I've heard "bias" and "conflict of interest" used as interchangeable synonyms in the same sentence before. I've also seen it often used to refer to partisanship.

Might want to specifically defuse those two preconceptions before any sort of course on biases can be taught.

I actually don't think that game theory helps with winning friends. It's useful to prevent other people from bullying yourself but it doesn't make people like you.

Game Theory per-se won't help with winning friends, but it does wonders at helping one analyze and plan strategies about political landscapes in the general sense, including the tribal and clique networks of highschool in the specific.

Dealing with negative shenanigans is definitely its primary strongpoint, but that in itself can be counted as removing obstacles or negative influences on winning friends. Which, in my interpretation, is equivalent to pouncing on those opportunity costs and making a profit.

Problem is, most high school denizens don't have the slightest idea what a "serious attempt to learn social skills" even remotely looks like, let alone know how to go about it.

Hindsight says studying politics, monkey tribes, evpsych and game theory together with occasional experimentation outside of the main / high school community are probably the better way to go if you're not socially gifted but at least moderately smart.

However, my first thoughts about politics and monkeys in high school were most definitely not "Yay better ways to make people help me!". And I wasn't aware at all that I didn't even know about the existence of the field of game theory, and only peripherally aware that some evolution research might touch on psychological and social issues.

None of which is intended as a counterargument, mind you. It's just that dropping "learn social skills" without something to support it, preferably a whole coursework guide including the above material, seems to me like it would only do more harm than good by way of wasting the student's time they could spend studying other, easier things, while they'd learn good skills more easily later once they became more aware of things. Or, at least, that's what seems to me to be happening most often.

I think if it comes naturally, widespread popularity is an incredibly helpful quality, and a very important one to nurture.

Is it? I think "popularity" is being conflated with "influence".

I wasn't popular at all with high school. I was the guy you suddenly want to be very friendly with and then stay far far away from for a few weeks when he started dropping names and pointed hints. And I was also the guy whom people came to tell what they saw in corridor E-2 so they could work in some good will or hopefully even make me owe them a few favors.

And all without the disadvantages of being publicly visible! Like having to maintain appearances to a much higher standards! Or the whole community turning against you once you cross one of its many invisible lines of unacceptability!

(note: The above examples were not the widespread thing I've portrayed them to be, but rather rare and isolated cases I've fished out as salient images. Still, I find the advantages I enjoyed much better than outright "popularity".)

And the rest of being rational is making sure that the future likelihood of making the same kind of mistake is as low as possible!

You can't just start from the assumption that society would be more rational if rationality was taught at school. You'd also need evidence that rationality can be taught to a lot of average people. I don't think such evidence exists. Whatever taken out from the curriculum might be replaced by something completely ineffective.

Can't specific rationality techniques be effectively taught to a large amount of average people, though? I vaguely recall that there might be some examples of that in studies where the researchers taught participants a trick or two before submitting them a test of some sort, but my ability to recall specific examples is almost geometrically inverse to gwern's, so that certainly takes out of my point.

He is a rationalist (...)

He had rationalised (...)

(...) despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected (...)

So uh, let's run down the checklist...

[ X ] Proclaims rationality and keeps it as part of their identity.
[ X ] Underdog / against-society / revolution mentality.
[ X ] Fails to credit or fairly evaluate accepted wisdom.
[ ] Fails to produce results and is not "successful" in practice.
[ X ] Argues for bottom-lines.
[ X ] Rationalizes past beliefs.
[ X ] Fails to update when run over by a train of overwhelming critical evidence.

Well, at least, there's that, huh? From all evidence, they do seem to at least succeed in making money and stuff. And hold together a relationship somehow. Oh wait, after reading original link, looks like even that might not actually be working!

A lot of the role of managers seems to be best explained as ape behavior, not agent behavior.

Localized context warning needed missing here.

There's also other warnings that need to be thrown in:
People who only care about the social-ape aspects are more likely to seek the position. People in general do social-ape stuff, at every level, not just manager level, with the aforementioned selection effect only increasing the apparent ratio. On top of that, instances of social-ape behavior are more salient and, usually, more narratively impactful, both because of how "special" they seem and because the human brain is fine-tuned to pick up on them.

Another unstudied aspect, which I suspect is significant but don't have much solid evidence about, is that IMO good exec and managerial types seem to snatch up and keep all the "decent" non-ape managers, which would make all the remaining ape dregs look even more predominant in the places that don't have those snatchers.

But anyway, if you model the "team" as an independent unit acting "against" outside forces or "other tribes" which exert social-ape-type pressures and requirements on the Team's "tribe", then the manager's behavior is much more logical in agent terms: One member of the team is sacrificed to "social-ape concerns", a maintenance or upkeep cost to pay of sorts, for the rest of the team to do useful and productive things without having the entire group's productivity smashed to bits by external social-ape pressures.

I find that in relatively-sane (i.e. no VPs coming to look over the shoulder of individual employees or poring over Internet logs and demanding answers and justifications for every little thing) environments with above-average managers, this is usually the case.