1. Find a job that you can do remotely. Camming, tutoring, and hypnosis are low-barrier jobs that fit the bill, but if you have the skills you can do things like consulting or programming.
2. Move to a country a low cost of living and/or low income tax. Costa Rica has a flat tax of 15% on self-employed workers, and a fairly liberal visa policy for people who work via the Internet. EU citizens should consider Bulgaria, which has a 10% flat tax on self-employed residents and about 1/3 the cost of living as the UK.
3. Save money!

I then tried using it to destroy my sense of humour (partly because I thought this might boost productivity, by generally making actions' dopamine rewards match their actual usefulness). This seemed to actually work well; I now experience humour-type amusement 20%-50% as often as I did two months ago.

and I thought LW was against spock-rationality

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 listpercapita) 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?)

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 ?

Do it morally

Trust me, this will be the least of your worries.

1. Get a bunch of capital.

2. Go to a poor country (specifically, a country where food and buildings are cheap).

3. Build a great big school.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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).

8. Profit!

This is feasible because the biggest resource is still human cognitive resources. I'd bet that poor countries have untapped smart brains.

LASIK surgery is now pretty cheap, and depending on how much you spend on new glasses, optometrist appointments, contact lenses etc., it might actually pay for itself eventually. It should also save you time and effort, and might make you look better.

I can be corrected to better than 20/20 with glasses. Would LASIK allow me to achieve the same level?

I have a horrible thought.

Most (legally acquired) debts are dischargeable in bankruptcy. That puts a floor on the amount of money one can lose. If your net worth is "almost nothing" and you can find suckers, er, I mean, organizations with loose standards that are willing to lend you money, then the expected utility of risky bets changes in a way that favors you - because going bankrupt while owing $10,000 isn't much different than going bankrupt while owing $500,000. Of course, going bankrupt is still pretty bad either way, but the upside of winning a risky, highly leveraged bet can also be correspondingly large...

Personally, I don't think this is a good idea and is probably unethical anyway, but it is the kind of crazy thing a certain kind of munchkin would do...

A PhD is only as good as the reputation of your advisor. If everybody knows your advisor then you won't have a problem finding a job in academia.

I would amend this to be "if everybody knows your advisor you'll have FEWER problems finding a job in academia." Some fields are very, very crowded (theoretical physics, for instance). For a very brief time, I was in a small team at a consulting company where 3 out of the 4 of us had done a science phd under a Nobel winner, and still ended up making major career transitions after half a decade of postdocs. Science is crowded, the more basic the research the more crowded the field. To first order, no one gets a job. If you are under a famous advisor you might move your odds up to 1/10 or 1/5 or something like that.

Let your body occupy little space in order to feel less confident and signal lack of status, thus compensating for typical but unfortunate human tendencies to think much more highly of their opinions than is actually justifiable and to prop up ubiquitous and costly signaling games. Harness the power of negative thinking!