Most transferable skills?

Figuring out who the cool people are. (Similarly, figuring out what the cool ideas are.) Being able to identify cool people has made my life significantly more awesome than it otherwise would have been, and led me to learn skills like guitar, chess, hiking, rationality subskills and so on that I wouldn't have bothered to or been able to develop on my own. It made high school an amazing experience. It got me laid by hot chicks. It led me to lots of good music. It lets me easily distinguish between meh philosophers/authors/artists and cool philosophers/authors/artists, so I don't waste time. It also alerts me to the existence of communities like LessWrong and the Singularity Institute and to cool intellectual cultures or academic fields like algorithmic information/probability theory (and thus universal AI) and Bayesian computational cognitive science. It lets me know which AI approaches are going nowhere and which might actually be dangerous. It also allows me to feel justified in ignoring people who don't think I'm cool, since I have a good sense for coolness and I think I'm cool, and if others don't have a good sense for coolness then they probably aren't cool and won't become cool—this obviously isn't a perfect test but it's useful.

It's not necessary to do so, but once you figure out who the cool people are it is very helpful to befriend them or get into correspondence with them. Since the age of 15 or so I've identified the coolest person in my community and then tried to establish a friendship where I'm slightly lower status than them, such that it's easy/natural for them to teach me lots of stuff. (And the coolest people always have cool friends; becoming best friends with the Homecoming King in high school allowed me to meet all kinds of cool people who I otherwise wouldn't have realized were cool. If I were attending university then befriending a really popular (ideally intellectual) person would be one of my top priorities.) I am extremely happy with how well this strategy has worked. Of course, it wouldn't have worked if I didn't have high CHA, but if you can train charisma then training the "recognizing cool people" skill would give you lots of added benefits. I think it's related to general "taste" as in aesthetic taste, so cultivating your sense of aesthetics might also benefit your coolness-recognizing algorithms. I'm also not sure that general aesthetic taste is trainable but I think it is.

Google-fu.

Memory skills and the ability to do quick arithmetic in your head (the two go hand in hand). I would suggest reading some of Dominic O'Brian's books, and then visit the various mnemotechnic forums. Most of the techniques you will find are geared towards memorizing for competitions, but with slight adjustments they can be used anywhere.

It seems a little silly at first, but it has probably been the biggest return on investment I have ever made. I started practicing these techniques last summer, and when school started I used them (Method of Loci especially - basically you just imagine a spatial location you know well and place images representing the things you want to memorize at unique points in your spatial journey) to memorize as much as I could, using spaced repetition software (mentioned somewhere else on this thread) to lock the most important things in.

Now, instead of writing down copious amounts of notes in class and not understanding a single thing, I just sit, listen, and memorize. I'll also write down broad labels for things I need to make sure I remember (i.e if we are talking about "normal subgroups", I will write down "normal subgroups", but memorize the rest. This is just to have a hook to the topic so I can look it up later if I don't remember something). By focusing on the images I am creating in my head, I've noticed that it even helps me focus more intensely on the topic that the images are referencing. By the time class is over, I can run through the entire lecture as if I was reading a book. This is the best part, really; it's completely flipped my idea of studying on its head. Now I can just sit in the park and think, and it will qualify as studying because I have an entire book in my head with images to play around with.

I've also used it to memorize entire textbooks (not word for word, more like "page for page"). Again, it seems silly and pointless at first, but it really works wonders when you get the hang of it. Instead of belaboring over a topic that you don't understand and then an hour later looking back 10 pages to see the illuminating point, all you have to do is rewind a "walk through your friend's house" or "a drive to the beach". At first it will take 10 times longer to do this than it would to just read the book. Currently, it only takes me about twice as long. I just have to make sure I go back through it in my head later on so I can plant it in my long term memory (spaced repetition is amazing for this).

It takes a hell of a lot of work though, if you want it to be more than a gimmick. And there doesn't seem to be much information for people who want to use it for scholarship rather than for their shopping lists. Even posts I've seen here about the method of loci seem pretty dismissive of its utility, that it doesn't help you understand. I think these claims are somewhat valid, but it's like using Mathematica to solve integrals and then claiming that it doesn't help you understand them. Well, yeah. But you could construct a 3d plot of an integral, and even make it interactive to see how it changes when you change some of the variables. Surely that will help you understand more. It's the same thing for mnemonics. I could memorize a book word for word using these techniques and not understand a single thing; or I could take concepts and ideas from a page, mold a visual representation of them in my head, and make sure that my notion of how the representation acts and looks is congruent with these concepts and ideas. Then as I learn more, I go back and adjust this image for any discrepancies, and also use the image in later scenes when the concept/idea comes up again. Kind of like OOP in your imagination. They don't have to be valid physical models for your concept, only approximations of the idea as you understand it in visual form. It surprised me how illuminating these approximations can be - more than once I have attempted to create a visual image only to get stuck and realize "Ah, that's what I don't understand!".

Even if creating images doesn't help you understand, using this method is still an amazing way to create hooks for stumbling points in your reasoning. It's like having a jumper cable for your mind at all times. For any topic or concept you know you understand but have trouble at certain points, just make an image reminding you of the key elements and place it in your chosen spatial journey. When you need your reasoning, moving through your spatial journey and seeing these images will trigger a domino effect and you'll slide right through with no trouble.

Anyway, sorry for the jumbled wall of text. I'm trying to communicate how fucking useful this has been for me, but it's a little difficult with this kind of personal topic. So even if you find my reasons too subjective, I implore you to really try it. Not with the mindset that it's a stupid little parlor trick, but that it has the possibility to be a huge improvement in how you assimilate knowledge.

Programming is great for writing little scripts for yourself, employment, and improving the quality of your thinking.

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

Self-control is trainable and is applicable to learning and practicing many skills. Small, short and regular training exercises such as writing with your non-dominant hand to write or striving to maintain your posture can be a first step to build it up. (See "Can self-regulatory capacity be increased?" in Heatherton's paper at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thlab/pubs/11_Heatherton_Wagner_TICS15.pdf.)

How to learn. Using an SRS program has radically changed and accelerated the way that I learn. The SuperMemo website has great instructions on how to formulate knowledge in ways that will best facilitate learning. Using an SRS daily is also a good example of developing a good habit and the influence of this small change can spread into almost every facet of your life.

Politics: sensing motivations, power relationships, coalitions, and knowing how to navigate them safely.

Negotiation.

Fermi problems: making a quick order-of-magnitude estimate of a quantity based on rough, but guessable quantities. Not only is this immensely fun, it has many practical applications to quickly rule out unrealistic hypotheses. Solving these in real-life situations (they come up surprisingly often) may also impressive others - your mileage may very, of course.

Dimensional Analysis: either checking the units of a possible answer, or guessing a formula based off the only likely possibility that gives the necessary units. Look at Street Fighting Mathematics section "Dimensions" for some great applications.

Lukeprog discussed a similar idea in Build Small Skills in the Right Order.

Empathy.

A skill I learned during my brief time as a developmental therapy tech that has transferred well to my current technical support job: the Crisis Cycle from the Mandt system.

Here are the seven phases and responses that therapy techs are trained to take:

• Baseline - Personal Best / Keep Doing What You’re Doing
• Stimulation or Trigger - Transitional Behavior / Removal Of or From Stress and Stimuli
• Escalation - Incident / Offering Options, then Setting Limits
• Crisis – Different for Everyone / Least Amount of Interaction Necessary
• De-Escalation – Cautious Assessment / Structured Cooling-Off
• Stabilization - Processing / Active Listening
• Post-Crisis - Recovery / Observation and Support

The same basic tactics work on people who do not have developmental disabilities.

I would also value pointers to where/how these skills can be trained.

How to communicate effectively, in both directions (writing/speaking and reading/listening). It's mostly groups, not individuals that accomplish worthwhile things, and if you can't work well with the right groups (and convince them to work with you), then whatever other skills you have will most likely go to waste.

math; programming; computer user skills in general; any money-making skills (indirectly)

Learning how to practice. I'm going through some rather rigorous hands-on training where more than half of the students end up failing out. It distresses me to see everyone wasting a full hour running an entire problem when the particular action they actually need help on takes 10 minutes, tops. Practicing efficiently is one of the best things my father taught me. Graduate+ level musicians are bound to have great tips for this. Of course, effective studying is in many ways similar, but it seems more intuitive. That is, no one could possibly be stupid enough to study for a literature exam by sitting down reading the book cover to cover several times.

A bit meta: I realized I had assumed a meaning of "transferable skill" that differed from the one you described in the body of your post (and I had made a comment based on that bad assumption and deleted it). A "transferable skill" would be one that, once you learn, can be easily transferred to others (or so I had assumed).

I think the term you're looking for is "meta-skills" -- skills at improving skills, and what you're asking for here are the most productive/useful/best meta-skills.

Sorry, just a terminology issue, but I think that would be a better search term.

Decisionmaking FTW

Why are you looking for additional examples? I think it's a good question, but clarifying why you're asking it may lead to better answers. If you're looking to learn transferable skills yourself, then our suggestions can be more targeted. Or if you're looking to make a list of a general audience, then our suggestions can be more general.

To give a very general example: basic mathematics is so transparently essential. Intermediate and higher level math can also be extremely helpful, depending on what problems/activities you're tackling.

Based on personal experience: dynamic balance acquired in one sport is transferrable to seemingly different sports, in the sense that it makes learning much faster through better feedback.

As a bit of an offshoot from the people who say math, I'd offer that the transferable skill they're thinking about is how to track the similarities and differences between things. So basically how to make good metaphors.

One idea is to try to become an expert in improving yourself in general. Read up on learning, practicing, getting things done, etc.

-How to use basic hand tools efficiently and correctly (wrenches, soldering iron, etc.)

-Bayesian inference

I'd nominate the standard high school + college math curriculum (algebra and geometry up through the first two semesters of college calculus; multivariable calculus and differential equations are less general). It forms the basis for a lot of science and engineering; one way you know that you really understand something is when you can reduce it to math.

Anything that I've mastered seems to instantly become an easily-transferrable skill.

Being able to follow and construct mathematical proofs. Basic statistics and probability.

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