Good point and thanks for the tip.

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?

I interestingly misinterpreted this to mean that it was an education program that taught only what could not be trivially Googled. This struck me as a plausible first pass for what should be left untaught.

A ridiculous munchkin idea which has long been floating around this community is increasingly looking less ridiculous: transcranial direct current stimulation is shown to improve mental arithmetic and rote learning of things like times tables with differences significant even 6 months after training. Original paper.

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?)

Only the cruise control link is an actual comparison of automation+overseer versus just humans. The rest given are examples of automation+overseer failing but there are of course examples of just humans failing just as badly. Is there any further evidence of this phenomenon? In particular, is there evidence that the total success rate decreases as the success rate of the automation increases?

Reminding and updating people about a useful tool (that also happens to build community) seems like a great use of Discussion.

Here's an example of the 'opposite' - a case of unjustifiable correct optimism:

Columbus knew the Earth was round but should also have known the radius of the Earth and size of Eurasia well enough to know that the voyage East to Asia was simply impossible with the ships and supplies he went with. It seems to have turned out OK for him, though.

This is probably not a very useful example and I wouldn't be surprised to see that there were plenty more of these examples.

I posted the following in a quotes page a few months back. I don't know how justifiable these were, and these are only questionably pessimism, but there may be some interesting examples in this. In particular, my light knowledge of the subject suggests that there really were extremely compelling reasons to disregard Feynman's formulation of QED for many years after it was first introduced.

It is interesting to note that Bohr was an outspoken critic of Einstein's light quantum (prior to 1924), that he mercilessly denounced Schrodinger's equation, discouraged Dirac's work on the relativist electron theory (telling him, incorrectly, that Klein and Gordon had already succeeded), opposed Pauli's introduction of the neutrino, ridiculed Yukawa's theory of the meson, and disparaged Feynman's approach to quantum electrodynamics.

[Footnote to: "This was a most disturbing result. Niels Bohr (not for the first time) was ready to abandon the law of conservation of energy". The disturbing result refers to the observations of electron energies in beta-decay prior to hypothesizing the existence of neutrinos.]

-David Griffiths, Introduction to Elementary Particles, 2008 page 24

Thanks. That made me revise my opinion of 'this obviously doens't apply to me, I Google everything always' to something closer to baseline. I've always seen myself as someone who bothers to Google it while everyone else just sits around authoritatively misquoting the US constitution (or whatever), but I'm pretty sure you or someone else here has 'Googled it' for me in at least once before.