Go to a poor country (specifically, a country where food and buildings are cheap).
Build a great big school.
Offer the following deal to parents of gifted children: they send their children to you, and you’ll educate them for free, for ten years. At the end of ten years, the newly educated young adults either go to college, get a job, or be a bum. If at any point they do start working, you get (say) 10% of their income for 10 years.
Do it smartly: Skimp on “humanities”; no ancient literature for these kids. Reading, writing, math, science, programming. Get them ready for future jobs by giving them deep, versatile, malleable skills.
Do it cheaply: Use technology as efficiently as possible, so you don’t have to pay for too many instructors. A campus wide internet connection and a $100 netbook per kid should get most of the possible value; maybe have some real computers for the programmers. Obviously you still need some instructors.
Do it morally (this might rule it out completely, since you are kind of creating indentured servants, and also because you are sucking cognitive resources from that area).
Profit!
This is feasible because the biggest resource is still human cognitive resources. I’d bet that poor countries have untapped smart brains.
Step 1 isn’t getting the money. Step 1 is getting trustworthy people together.
Here’s what happens to your program. You get someone to administer “gifted” tests. All their friends and family are suddenly “gifted”. They cheat or bribe their way into staying in the program. They then take the “education” they got and go work somewhere with your impressive-looking credentials.
Then your reputation tanks as employers find out that you’re yet another foreign school which churns out impressive-looking credentials that do not reliably signal ability.
Note that my second paragraph is a big big part of why some schools and countries have a much easier time getting employed in the US than others.
Very feasible but lots of work. I wouldn’t invest in someone starting such a venture unless they had demonstrated the ability to make money by working hard as an independent business owner in the past, but I’d be happy to invest in and advise such a venture if it was run by the right kind of person.
Right, let’s get started. Ten years sounds like a nice round number, but is it optimal? To answer that first we need to consider what age children to admit. We want them young enough to become fluent in English quickly; all the high paying jobs are in English speaking countries, barring Asia—should we consider teaching Chinese as well? Maybe, but let’s think about that later. To ensure they still have a wide range of pronounceable phonemes, they should be younger than seven. The younger the better, though, and we don’t want them to learn wrong things we’ll have to reteach, so before schooling age: at the maximum, five. Should we go younger, though?
Well, what do children learn from their families? Affection might be one, assuming they’re from an affectionate family. If they live in a culture where many children are the norm, then they may learn responsibility as well. They may also learn abuse, if that’s their family culture. Perhaps they’ll gain life experience? I’m not confident about that. Well, if we go younger, then how young? Pre-bowel control training? Certainly not pre-solid foods; breast-feeding will contribute to their IQ. Children learn from anything and everything pre-four or so—this could be an advantage for language learning but also a waste of resources if they’ll be learning in their home environments anyway. I want to move on, so let’s settle on 3~5 for now.
How long to teach them for? Assuming efficient teaching and excellent recall of learnt material, from three to thirteen may be enough, but we have puberty to consider. Should we keep them in an environment with similarly aged children? I don’t think that’s the right question, as it assumes similarly aged children are naturally nasty to each other around puberty. This gets into teaching structure, but assuming curriculum can be ability gated rather than age gated, children of different ages will all work together; I don’t imagine an age gap of greater than three years, though, considering they should all be gifted—responsibility may not be an effect.*
Oh! In the absence of parents, the younger children might need emotional support. Older children can provide that! The school structure could accommodate this by rooming older children with younger children, or just naturally bringing them together for activities. The first generation will need adult role models in order to jumpstart the cycle.
The school should have a library—humanities will be included for pleasure reading. To promote easy bonding via shared interests, publicly listed clubs will be encouraged to the exclusion of the formation of cliques. An older child rearing younger child social dynamic may contribute to this atmosphere.
A caveat: beware the ‘utopian society’ experimental villages. We should look at cultures that have the desired values already, and use them as foundations.
* That was a bit of a tangent—sorry about that. So, if they won’t tear each other apart emotionally during puberty, should we still keep them? Teens started working when in their low teens in the past, but whether they can handle a present day adult job I’m unsure. Oh, right, I’ve been presuming we’ll teach them everything they’d learn at university plus possibly more. Social experiences must be included in that, so maybe they should stay on—if only just to work on original projects.
We could use some parents of the children for security—but must not allow them access to the kids as they are unnecessary confounds. I’m thinking of a large gated complex hundreds of acres in circumference for physical activities and to diminish any feeling of being trapped. I’m thinking a country without an armed militia, militant group, or bothersome government would be ideal. Eurasia might have some candidates, but I’m not sure how fertile the land is, and Russia and China have bothersome governments. South America, perhaps? Is there a governmentally stable African country with fertile, undeveloped land? PR of Congo comes to mind, but I don’t know much about their government’s politics.
That’s enough for now—if I come back to this, I’ll write below the line.
This. I’ve been known to say that if I were a billionaire, my third priority would be building a ridiculous castle and living out my days as an eccentric headmaster.
This belies the more down-to-Earth intention that if, after looking into it in more detail, FAI and life extension both seem like they’ll be insufficient in my lifetime to prevent biological death (even if not information theoretic death), investing in injecting sanity (even if concentrated in a fewworld-beaters) into the world would be a likely next priority. (Cf. MIRI, CFAR.) So I’m definitely interested in the idea of rational!Academy.
One obvious difficulty in educating children for free and then expecting them to pay you back after they become educated is that, most places, minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts. So the kid graduates, gets a great job (in a country that won’t recognize the contract), and says, “I never agreed to pay you 10% of my salary, so I’m keeping it.”
Depending on your country, even adults can’t under a fair number of conditions. Having very unequal bargaining positions, for instance, violates the idea of freedom of contract—which will render it unenforceable in some places. I think it’s called undue influence.
This kind of a plan sounds great, but is IMO close to untenable in the real world.
Build a great big school.
Out of what ? Sure, you can build the building itself. But you also need (among other things) electric power, a reliable food supply, clean water, medical care, computers, plus a ton of muscle to protect you from people who will want to take all of the previously mentioned stuff. Poor countries have none of that. Well, they might have some muscle, but reliable security is tough to buy.
Offer the following deal to parents of gifted children: they send their children to you, and you’ll educate them for free, for ten years
You will be overwhelmed with offers in a matter of days. How do you decide which children are gifted ?
If at any point they do start working, you get (say) 10% of their income for 10 years.
How will you enforce that ? Actually, before you can enforce anything, where will your graduates find work ?
Obviously you still need some instructors.
Where will you get them ? Do your kids speak English ? Do your instructors ?
I wonder if #4 could be (sort-of) implemented as a very long-term loan? College loans in the US can have a lot of those features, they’re just not income-adjusted.
Another way to profit from this is spreading ideas to the students—when someone spends 10 years in a boarding school, they’re going to be very influenced by what other people in the school think. It would be really dark-artsy to go all-out in indoctrinating the students into your values, but they’re bound to absorb some things from their teachers unless you intentionally try to prevent it.
I think one of the difficult things would be identifying the gifted children. You might a lot of parents applying “just in case”, and it would be a balance between that and missing a lot of gifted children because they didn’t know about the program or couldn’t pass a barrier like an application fee. And if you’re recruiting from extremely poor populations, you’ll want to take children in as young as possible so they don’t spend too long on an insufficient diet, so you might have to find an intelligence test/filter that works for children who can’t read yet.
Overall, I like this idea very much. It could make for interesting meta-charity, too.
I recommend teaching nonsense. A little bit of science fiction, mythology, and an introduction to the world’s multifaceted culture (the Internet helps, but not nearly as much as people seem to imagine) may result in more creativity and attention to lessons children in poor countries would find boring. Yes, we want useful people, but a great part of that is creating a free, strong human being, not a clever machine or a rebel.
One benefit that I am aware of is in one’s thinking. Gods and heroes are at times still targets to aim for. Fresh new ideas spring from the dust of the old. Superstition examined is, with the right teacher, superstition avoided. The teaching of many different points of view helps understand other people’s values. Illustrating a difficult problem with a myth or two assisted me in mathematics and in examining how I view right and wrong (my current obsession with diversity could be blamed on the sheer variety of myths I absorbed).
The second benefit, and one may consistently find even in the absence of good teachers and a clear goal is that it simply provides a much-needed break in between lessons useful for work.
Quick cost analysis: Assuming they get good programming jobs, you’d be getting at most, say, 10000 USD per year per kid or $100,000 USD per kid. A country low on this list_per_capita) has a GDP of under 5000 USD. Assuming you want decent facilities and educators, you’ll need, say, 3 times the GDP per student per year. If you’re giving them 10 years of education, that’s $150,000 in cost. This doesn’t work out even assuming a 100% success rate in getting them very high-end jobs. If you go for a very, very cheap place you might be able to get that to, say, $5000 a year in expenses per kid which works out if you get good success rates.
So this gives some obvious ways to get this to work:
You need to go for really as cheap a country as you can find and take full advantage of tech to reduce costs
More than 10% for 10 years might be necessary.
Alternative sources for funding—alumni donations are the current system most places use but would be weird to have on top of mandatory payments
Don’t educate them for 10 years or only do part-time education for some of it. (Can you give them the netbooks and have them study on their own for half the year while they live with their family?)
I hope you realized I meant that GDP per capita. Assuming you did and still think it’s high, here’s a more detailed estimate:
Let’s arbitrarily pick the 10th country from bottom of the GDP per capita list by CIA Factbook: Niger. Now we can make some more concrete statements. On average Niger women have 7 children and presumably raise them on 2*GDP per capita income. This gives 0.28 of the GDP on raising a child. (Infant and childhood death rates seem to be negligible for this calculation, perhaps increasing average spending by 10% when assuming they make it to age 15.) So assuming a high quality education takes three times as much as the typical education/child raising of the time we’d get about 1 GDP per child per year.
Niger happens to also have the highest birth rate in the world. Picking the country above it on the list, Afghanistan, gives a birth rate of 5 children/woman and would give us about 1.2 GDP per child per year. In any case, my 3 GDP estimate looks rather high here, but on the other hand so was my estimate that all* the children so taught would go on to work at Google-equivalent pay scales. I might then round my guess to 1.5 GDP per child per year when including extra costs like PR or administering tests to see who to admit that are done on more children than are educated.
If you think that’s still rather high, then you probably disagree with my estimate that such a program would want to spend three times as much money on education and child raising as is standard in the given country.
Aside: how do you make links here that include parentheses in them?
Education in a poor country may be highly regulated. You may need to bribe government officials all the time just to be allowed to teach anyone there. (Corruption may be one of the reasons why the country is so poor.)
If the country is poor, your former students will get very low salaries, if they decide to stay in their country. Ten percent of their income may be just enough to cover the costs of education, not enough to make a profit.
In the worst case (most poor countries), you can expect many of your students getting killed in some civil war or dying from medical problems, and maybe even you will be accused of witchcraft and burned.
Are you planning to teach all subjects alone? In a very poor country, you might have a problem to find sufficiently smart teachers.
Seth Robert’s idea of putting a noseclip on your nose while you it to lose weight is ridiculous to most people. It’s not ridiculous because there are practical problems with putting noseclips on your nose.
It ridiculous because normal people just don’t put noseclips on their noses when they eat. If there are practical problems with implementing your idea why should a munchkin do them?
I don’t think that’s supposed to literally mean to post ideas that are ridiculous, but rather to post ideas that are not the sort of thing one normally thinks about.
Do it smartly: Skimp on “humanities”; no ancient literature for these kids. Reading, writing, math, science, programming. Get them ready for future jobs by giving them deep, versatile, malleable skills.
What future jobs? Who needs a programmer or a physicist in the middle of nowhere?
Get a bunch of capital.
Go to a poor country (specifically, a country where food and buildings are cheap).
Build a great big school.
Offer the following deal to parents of gifted children: they send their children to you, and you’ll educate them for free, for ten years. At the end of ten years, the newly educated young adults either go to college, get a job, or be a bum. If at any point they do start working, you get (say) 10% of their income for 10 years.
Do it smartly: Skimp on “humanities”; no ancient literature for these kids. Reading, writing, math, science, programming. Get them ready for future jobs by giving them deep, versatile, malleable skills.
Do it cheaply: Use technology as efficiently as possible, so you don’t have to pay for too many instructors. A campus wide internet connection and a $100 netbook per kid should get most of the possible value; maybe have some real computers for the programmers. Obviously you still need some instructors.
Do it morally (this might rule it out completely, since you are kind of creating indentured servants, and also because you are sucking cognitive resources from that area).
Profit!
This is feasible because the biggest resource is still human cognitive resources. I’d bet that poor countries have untapped smart brains.
Step 1 isn’t getting the money. Step 1 is getting trustworthy people together.
Here’s what happens to your program. You get someone to administer “gifted” tests. All their friends and family are suddenly “gifted”. They cheat or bribe their way into staying in the program. They then take the “education” they got and go work somewhere with your impressive-looking credentials.
Then your reputation tanks as employers find out that you’re yet another foreign school which churns out impressive-looking credentials that do not reliably signal ability.
Note that my second paragraph is a big big part of why some schools and countries have a much easier time getting employed in the US than others.
Very feasible but lots of work. I wouldn’t invest in someone starting such a venture unless they had demonstrated the ability to make money by working hard as an independent business owner in the past, but I’d be happy to invest in and advise such a venture if it was run by the right kind of person.
Right, let’s get started. Ten years sounds like a nice round number, but is it optimal? To answer that first we need to consider what age children to admit. We want them young enough to become fluent in English quickly; all the high paying jobs are in English speaking countries, barring Asia—should we consider teaching Chinese as well? Maybe, but let’s think about that later.
To ensure they still have a wide range of pronounceable phonemes, they should be younger than seven. The younger the better, though, and we don’t want them to learn wrong things we’ll have to reteach, so before schooling age: at the maximum, five. Should we go younger, though?
Well, what do children learn from their families? Affection might be one, assuming they’re from an affectionate family. If they live in a culture where many children are the norm, then they may learn responsibility as well. They may also learn abuse, if that’s their family culture. Perhaps they’ll gain life experience? I’m not confident about that.
Well, if we go younger, then how young? Pre-bowel control training? Certainly not pre-solid foods; breast-feeding will contribute to their IQ. Children learn from anything and everything pre-four or so—this could be an advantage for language learning but also a waste of resources if they’ll be learning in their home environments anyway. I want to move on, so let’s settle on 3~5 for now.
How long to teach them for? Assuming efficient teaching and excellent recall of learnt material, from three to thirteen may be enough, but we have puberty to consider. Should we keep them in an environment with similarly aged children? I don’t think that’s the right question, as it assumes similarly aged children are naturally nasty to each other around puberty. This gets into teaching structure, but assuming curriculum can be ability gated rather than age gated, children of different ages will all work together; I don’t imagine an age gap of greater than three years, though, considering they should all be gifted—responsibility may not be an effect.*
Oh! In the absence of parents, the younger children might need emotional support. Older children can provide that! The school structure could accommodate this by rooming older children with younger children, or just naturally bringing them together for activities. The first generation will need adult role models in order to jumpstart the cycle.
The school should have a library—humanities will be included for pleasure reading. To promote easy bonding via shared interests, publicly listed clubs will be encouraged to the exclusion of the formation of cliques. An older child rearing younger child social dynamic may contribute to this atmosphere.
A caveat: beware the ‘utopian society’ experimental villages. We should look at cultures that have the desired values already, and use them as foundations.
* That was a bit of a tangent—sorry about that. So, if they won’t tear each other apart emotionally during puberty, should we still keep them? Teens started working when in their low teens in the past, but whether they can handle a present day adult job I’m unsure. Oh, right, I’ve been presuming we’ll teach them everything they’d learn at university plus possibly more. Social experiences must be included in that, so maybe they should stay on—if only just to work on original projects.
We could use some parents of the children for security—but must not allow them access to the kids as they are unnecessary confounds. I’m thinking of a large gated complex hundreds of acres in circumference for physical activities and to diminish any feeling of being trapped. I’m thinking a country without an armed militia, militant group, or bothersome government would be ideal. Eurasia might have some candidates, but I’m not sure how fertile the land is, and Russia and China have bothersome governments. South America, perhaps? Is there a governmentally stable African country with fertile, undeveloped land? PR of Congo comes to mind, but I don’t know much about their government’s politics.
That’s enough for now—if I come back to this, I’ll write below the line.
Upvoted. This is a quite interesting thought experiment, and maybe even worth a post of its own. I encourage you to write more on this subject.
This. I’ve been known to say that if I were a billionaire, my third priority would be building a ridiculous castle and living out my days as an eccentric headmaster.
This belies the more down-to-Earth intention that if, after looking into it in more detail, FAI and life extension both seem like they’ll be insufficient in my lifetime to prevent biological death (even if not information theoretic death), investing in injecting sanity (even if concentrated in a few world-beaters) into the world would be a likely next priority. (Cf. MIRI, CFAR.) So I’m definitely interested in the idea of rational!Academy.
How do you enforce the 10% salary tithe?
One obvious difficulty in educating children for free and then expecting them to pay you back after they become educated is that, most places, minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts. So the kid graduates, gets a great job (in a country that won’t recognize the contract), and says, “I never agreed to pay you 10% of my salary, so I’m keeping it.”
Depending on your country, even adults can’t under a fair number of conditions. Having very unequal bargaining positions, for instance, violates the idea of freedom of contract—which will render it unenforceable in some places. I think it’s called undue influence.
This kind of a plan sounds great, but is IMO close to untenable in the real world.
Out of what ? Sure, you can build the building itself. But you also need (among other things) electric power, a reliable food supply, clean water, medical care, computers, plus a ton of muscle to protect you from people who will want to take all of the previously mentioned stuff. Poor countries have none of that. Well, they might have some muscle, but reliable security is tough to buy.
You will be overwhelmed with offers in a matter of days. How do you decide which children are gifted ?
How will you enforce that ? Actually, before you can enforce anything, where will your graduates find work ?
Where will you get them ? Do your kids speak English ? Do your instructors ?
Trust me, this will be the least of your worries.
Generalizing about ‘poor countries’ like this annoys me.
I wonder if #4 could be (sort-of) implemented as a very long-term loan? College loans in the US can have a lot of those features, they’re just not income-adjusted.
Another way to profit from this is spreading ideas to the students—when someone spends 10 years in a boarding school, they’re going to be very influenced by what other people in the school think. It would be really dark-artsy to go all-out in indoctrinating the students into your values, but they’re bound to absorb some things from their teachers unless you intentionally try to prevent it.
I think one of the difficult things would be identifying the gifted children. You might a lot of parents applying “just in case”, and it would be a balance between that and missing a lot of gifted children because they didn’t know about the program or couldn’t pass a barrier like an application fee. And if you’re recruiting from extremely poor populations, you’ll want to take children in as young as possible so they don’t spend too long on an insufficient diet, so you might have to find an intelligence test/filter that works for children who can’t read yet.
Overall, I like this idea very much. It could make for interesting meta-charity, too.
I recommend teaching nonsense. A little bit of science fiction, mythology, and an introduction to the world’s multifaceted culture (the Internet helps, but not nearly as much as people seem to imagine) may result in more creativity and attention to lessons children in poor countries would find boring. Yes, we want useful people, but a great part of that is creating a free, strong human being, not a clever machine or a rebel.
Lol why mythology?
One benefit that I am aware of is in one’s thinking. Gods and heroes are at times still targets to aim for. Fresh new ideas spring from the dust of the old. Superstition examined is, with the right teacher, superstition avoided. The teaching of many different points of view helps understand other people’s values. Illustrating a difficult problem with a myth or two assisted me in mathematics and in examining how I view right and wrong (my current obsession with diversity could be blamed on the sheer variety of myths I absorbed).
The second benefit, and one may consistently find even in the absence of good teachers and a clear goal is that it simply provides a much-needed break in between lessons useful for work.
Quick cost analysis: Assuming they get good programming jobs, you’d be getting at most, say, 10000 USD per year per kid or $100,000 USD per kid. A country low on this list_per_capita) has a GDP of under 5000 USD. Assuming you want decent facilities and educators, you’ll need, say, 3 times the GDP per student per year. If you’re giving them 10 years of education, that’s $150,000 in cost. This doesn’t work out even assuming a 100% success rate in getting them very high-end jobs. If you go for a very, very cheap place you might be able to get that to, say, $5000 a year in expenses per kid which works out if you get good success rates.
So this gives some obvious ways to get this to work:
You need to go for really as cheap a country as you can find and take full advantage of tech to reduce costs
More than 10% for 10 years might be necessary.
Alternative sources for funding—alumni donations are the current system most places use but would be weird to have on top of mandatory payments
Don’t educate them for 10 years or only do part-time education for some of it. (Can you give them the netbooks and have them study on their own for half the year while they live with their family?)
3x GDP/student/year? That’s an absurdly high estimate.
I hope you realized I meant that GDP per capita. Assuming you did and still think it’s high, here’s a more detailed estimate:
Let’s arbitrarily pick the 10th country from bottom of the GDP per capita list by CIA Factbook: Niger. Now we can make some more concrete statements. On average Niger women have 7 children and presumably raise them on 2*GDP per capita income. This gives 0.28 of the GDP on raising a child. (Infant and childhood death rates seem to be negligible for this calculation, perhaps increasing average spending by 10% when assuming they make it to age 15.) So assuming a high quality education takes three times as much as the typical education/child raising of the time we’d get about 1 GDP per child per year.
Niger happens to also have the highest birth rate in the world. Picking the country above it on the list, Afghanistan, gives a birth rate of 5 children/woman and would give us about 1.2 GDP per child per year. In any case, my 3 GDP estimate looks rather high here, but on the other hand so was my estimate that all* the children so taught would go on to work at Google-equivalent pay scales. I might then round my guess to 1.5 GDP per child per year when including extra costs like PR or administering tests to see who to admit that are done on more children than are educated.
If you think that’s still rather high, then you probably disagree with my estimate that such a program would want to spend three times as much money on education and child raising as is standard in the given country.
Aside: how do you make links here that include parentheses in them?
LW wiki > Comment formatting > Common problems > Links
AFAIK, “per capita” means ‘divided by the whole population’, not just the adult one. (Am I missing something?)
[Like this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita)(28and29being the ASCII values for(and)respectively in hexadecimal).Good point and thanks for the tip.
Possible problems:
Education in a poor country may be highly regulated. You may need to bribe government officials all the time just to be allowed to teach anyone there. (Corruption may be one of the reasons why the country is so poor.)
If the country is poor, your former students will get very low salaries, if they decide to stay in their country. Ten percent of their income may be just enough to cover the costs of education, not enough to make a profit.
In the worst case (most poor countries), you can expect many of your students getting killed in some civil war or dying from medical problems, and maybe even you will be accused of witchcraft and burned.
Are you planning to teach all subjects alone? In a very poor country, you might have a problem to find sufficiently smart teachers.
All fair points, to which there might be workarounds… but the title of the post is “Post Ridiculous Munchkin Ideas”.
Seth Robert’s idea of putting a noseclip on your nose while you it to lose weight is ridiculous to most people. It’s not ridiculous because there are practical problems with putting noseclips on your nose.
It ridiculous because normal people just don’t put noseclips on their noses when they eat. If there are practical problems with implementing your idea why should a munchkin do them?
I don’t think that’s supposed to literally mean to post ideas that are ridiculous, but rather to post ideas that are not the sort of thing one normally thinks about.
Would work for an apprenticeship program. Not so sure about a school; too much overhead.
What future jobs? Who needs a programmer or a physicist in the middle of nowhere?