Although my 8-year-old son likes his teacher, he is frequently bored at school.  He attends a high quality suburban public school in the United States.  He has a lot of traits in common with LessWrong readers, and we would like advice for what he can do to counter his boredom.  Many of you must have found grade school more or less tedious.  What were your coping strategies?

The following is a summary of the short article The Avenger Ignored by Charles Sanders, published in Military History Magazine.

French Intelligence bought what turned out to be partial German military plans for WWI around a decade before the outbreak of the war.  The plans detailed a German invasion of Belgium for the obvious purpose of then attacking France from the North.  French intelligence compared map to territory finding that the plans explained much German construction which until then had seemed “random and unthreatening”.   Many in the French high command came to correctly believe in the plans’ authenticity and by 1907 French military strategy reflected this.

In 1913 many in the French military wanted to take an offensive posture with respect to the German threat.  This posture would be more justified if Germany intended to directly attack France rather than go via Belgium.  Therefore, French military officer Lt. Col. Edmond Buat falsely claimed to have found a copy of a German military document “under his seat during a train trip in Germany” that showed this.  This imaginary document purportedly outlined a direct German attack on France that would largely ignore Belgium.

Buat described but never showed the document to anyone.  His hoax was still believed and France based its military deployment on the imaginary document, to disastrous effects.  When the French military command received reports of an actual gigantic German attack on Belgium (consistent with the real military plans French Intelligence bought a decade ago) an important French General telephoned French commanders to say “reports on German forces in Belgium are greatly exaggerated.  There is no cause for alarm.”  France went ahead and executed its existing military strategy “as if the massive, deadly threat now clearly sweeping down from the north did not exist.”

In 1915 Buat admitted his deception, but this didn't stop him from going on to hold “numerous important assignments in the postwar army.”

I found The Avenger Ignored article through a History According to Bob Podcast.

Here is a presentation on the map and territory I'm planning on giving to my game theory class.

It's based on Liron's You Are A Brain post.

Any suggestions for improvements?

Modafinil is now being covered by at least one insurance company in Massachusetts under which it costs less than $1 for a 200 MG pill.  I predict a huge college black-market trade in the drug.

A Ph.D student in neuroscience shot at least 50 people at a showing of the new Batman movie.  He also appears to have released some kind of gas from a canister.  Because of his educational background this person almost certainly knows a lot about molecular biology.  How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?

Edit:  I'm not claiming that this event should cause a fully informed person to update on anything.  Rather I was hoping that readers of this blog with strong life-science backgrounds could provide information that would help me and other interested readers assess the probability of future risks.  Since this blog often deals with catastrophic risks and the social harms of irrationality and given that the events I described will likely dominate the U.S. news media for a few days I thought my question worth asking.  Given the post's Karma rating (currently -4), however, I will update my beliefs about what constitutes an appropriate discussion post.

I’m currently writing a book called Singularity Rising:  Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer and More Dangerous World.  The book will be published in about a year by BenBella Books.  This will be my third published book.

I’m thinking about also making a singularity comic book. My agent thinks the idea might work.  Unfortunately my artistic abilities are well in the bottom half of mankind so I'm looking for a collaborator who would do the art.  If you are interested please send samples or links to art you have created here:

EconomicProf@Gmail.com

If you know of someone who might be appropriate please email me (or leave below) his name, email address and if possible links to his artwork.

You can find out more about me here:

 www.JamesDMiller.org  

And One Last Thing: Digital immortality is an app that probably wouldn't have interested Steve Jobs

Excerpt:

Jobs made it clear that he did not welcome death, but also that life could be more interesting knowing that death would be coming.

One wonders, then, with what mixed feelings he viewed his Silicon Valley compatriots who've been seeking ways to make sure, at least for themselves, death never comes. No doubt they are being perfectly reasonable. When wealthy enough to satisfy every material appetite many times over, it make sense to try to prolong those appetites indefinitely through cryogenics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

This would not have been Jobs's interest in the subject. He likely would have been more intrigued by the specific claim, advanced by inventor Ray Kurzweil and other advocates of "technological singularity," that soon our individualities will be able to live eternally through digital electronics.

What kind of device should our consciousness occupy? Should it have a 4-inch screen or a 9-inch screen? Should it fit in a pocket or backpack? Should it have Bluetooth? Where should our essence primarily reside, in the cloud or in device memory? How much battery life would the user want?

And who is the user?

Hmmm. Jobs looked at technology from the perspective of the user, who wanted an object both beautiful and beautifully functional. If the user is our "survivors"—i.e., our loved ones who still exist in physical form—he might conclude that the most important feature such a device could have is an off-switch—a permanent one.

Freddie Mac, a mega-mortgage company, is offering "2-3 internships for recent college graduates on the autism spectrum with backgrounds in statistics, mathematics, economics, computer science or information technology" in D.C.

Given the job market, the demographics of LW and the difficulty many autistics have finding employment I thought this worth posting.

I wrote an article for h+ predicting that the rapid fall in the cost of gene sequencing will allow U.S. voters to learn much about presidential candidates' DNA.  The candidates won't be able to stop this because:

humans shed so much DNA that unless a politician lived in a plastic bubble he couldn’t shield his DNA from prying eyes. Politicians will probably pass laws making it a crime to involuntarily disclose a politician’s genetic traits. But since it would take only one person to leak the information onto the Internet, and given that any serious candidate for President will have many enemies, candidates’ genomes will undoubtedly become public.

DNA analysis has a decent chance of reducing political bias by providing objective information about candidates.  If, for example, 70% of the variation in human intelligence is determined by identified genes then DNA analysis would reduce disagreements among informed voters over a candidate's intelligence.  

Imagine that you know there is a strong correlation between X and Y.  Statistically competent scholars have extensively examined the causal relationship between X and Y and have failed to find a significant causal relationship and have failed to rule out the possibility that there is a significant causal relationship.  

Would it be reasonable for you to claim that the causal relationship between X and Y probably isn't too strong or it would have shown up clearly on statistical analysis?  At the very least, should learning of the negative results of the scholars cause you to decrease your estimate of the causal relationship between X and Y?