Knowledge is great: I suspect we can agree there. Sadly, though, we can't guarantee ourselves infinite time in which to learn everything eventually, and in the meantime, there are plenty of situations where having irrelevant knowledge instead of more instrumentally useful knowledge can be decidedly suboptimal. Therefore, there's good reason to work out what facts we'll need to deploy and give special priority to learning those facts. There's nothing intrinsically more interesting or valuable about the knowledge that the capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. than there is about the knowledge that the capital of Bali is Denpasar, but unless you live or spend a lot of time in Indonesia, the latter knowledge will be less likely to come up.
It seems the same is true of procedural knowledge (with the quirk that it's easier to deliberately put yourself in situations where you use whatever procedural knowledge you have than it is to arrange to need to know the capital of Bali.) If your procedural knowledge is useful, and also difficult to obtain or unpopular to practice or both, you might even turn it into a career (or save money that you would have spent hiring people who have).
Rationality is sort of the ur-procedure, but after a certain point - the point where you're no longer buying into supernaturalist superstition, begging for a Darwin Award, or falling for cheap scams - its marginal practical value diminishes. Practicing rationality as an art is fun and there's some chance it'll yield a high return, but evolution (genetic and memetic) didn't do that bad of a job on us: we enter adulthood with an arsenal of heuristics that are mostly good enough. A little patching of the worst leaks, some bailing of bilge that got in early on, and you have a serviceable brain-yacht. (Sound of metaphor straining.)
So when you want to spend time on learning or honing a skill, it makes sense to choose skills with a high return on investment, be it in terms of fun, resources, the goodwill of others, insurance against emergency, or other valuable results. Note that if you learned a skill, used it to learn a non-customized fact, and do not anticipate using the skill again, it's not the skill that was useful; the skill was just a sine qua non for the useful fact, and others don't have to duplicate the research process to benefit. A skill that yielded one (or more) customized facts - i.e., facts about yourself, that you can't go on to share straight up with other people - might be a useful skill in this way, however.
For practical daily purposes, what is your most valuable skill (or what most valuable skill are you trying to attain now)? Post it in the comments, along with what makes your skill valuable, tips for picking it up, and what made you first investigate it.
Considering that we aren't designed to be consistently happy, I have a Buddhist perspective that the best way to be happy is to want less, rather than achieve more. It might be called "letting go". This applies to things who's only or primary function is to make you happy, as opposed to making others happy or allowing you to survive to experience more happiness. E.g. rather than fall into the cycle of getting and being dissatisfied with larger and larger houses, to learn to be completely content with the house you already have. Said another way, it's a self-modification of one's emotions and utility function. One is then free to give up certain things to achieve greater utility elsewhere, altruistically or selfishly, not to mention enjoying both new and old houses quite a bit more.
The ability to do this to a significant degree is one of my most valued skills. In particular, coming to be extremely content with being single provided immense utility, both inside and outside of relationships (comparing my relationships to others). It also really helped me to find relationships. Note: as I've experienced this, it does NOT require that you cease the pursuit of something, just that you become very content with failing to achieve it. Being in a nice relationship might be preferable, but doesn't have to stop the lack of one from being a great time.
Achieving this skill to the extent I did took a long time, including a lot of struggling and complication. For those interested, particularly useful were music (able to add beauty to all manner of things with the right perspective) and general practice with enjoying subpar outcomes.
Focusing on existential risk I get to enjoy this less than I used to. By so affecting mine and others' ability to achieve future utility, the avoidance of such a disaster is far more valuable than being content with failure. Shucks.
Also coming from the Bayesian Buddhist perspective, I often think the same. The problem is that even without existential risks, there's still death and disease and destruction. Before I knew of existential risks I was quite keen on destroying death. A life of quiet and content contemplation sounds nice, but perhaps the key is... (read more)