[btilly]

The problem here is that the specific statement in question is hard to come up with a citation for, but rests on a chain of reasoning for well-known statements that do have a lot of evidence.

And so "citation needed" is just a way to avoid trying to think.

One of the many chains of reasoning that apply here are:

1. Success in business, science and technology are all strongly associated with intelligence. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...

2. Intelligence tends to be relatively stable. https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21726

Therefore intelligent children contribute an inordinate amount to advances in business, science and technology.

The next piece is not just how smart we are, but what we are interested in and how well prepared we are. There https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-crit... shows that there is evidence to believe that adolescence is a critical period - developing and supporting interests in that period will lead to lifelong improvement.

And therefore we have good reason to believe that appropriate interventions in that age range really should have an outsized contribution to advancements down the road.

Of course people who don't want to think can always ask, "Has there been a high quality longitudinal study demonstrating that adolescent interventions can result in an outsized impact on contributions to society later?" And, of course, there haven't. But even if they had, of necessity they would have happened long enough ago that enough has changed that the argument could come back, "The world has changed. Do we have reason to believe that this could work today?"

And so if you want to think, the conclusion really is obviously reasonable. If you don't want to think, the quality of the evidence is such that nobody can prove it to you.

On a question like that, how SHOULD we respond to a lazy "citation needed" demand?

[spicebox]

There’s also plenty of evidence that improving educational outcomes for low performing students has an outsized impact. “Decreasing the number of high school dropouts by half would nationally produce $45 billion per year in net economic benefit to society … Improved education and more stable employment greatly increase tax revenue, such as a return of at least 7 dollars for every dollar invested in pre-kindergarten education … National savings in public health costs would exceed $40 billion if every high school dropout in just a single year would graduate”. [1] These show pretty clear economic benefits to improving outcomes for the average student.

But the bigger issue is framing with as a “struggling vs gifted” problem. Where we have to choose between supporting gifted students or helping struggling students. It isn’t, education is one of the few areas where there is a “free lunch”. Every dollar invested in education results in more than one dollar in return. We can easily find both of these things, the real question isn’t which we should fund, but why we aren’t funding both.

[1] https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...

[btilly]

I agree that it is more of an "and" than an "or".

However I think that simply dumping money into education as it is is more likely to produce bad results than good ones. That's because the current education system is driven more by ideology than pseudoscience than by anything resembling an effective methodology. Given the "citation needed" atmosphere, I'll offer https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm as an argument. We have lots of changes being made educationally which are promised to produce better results over time. And, time and again, they don't. As Feynman said, the planes aren't landing.

But if we can invest, I also question the promised savings in the article. It does not distinguish between increase in income due to having the characteristics that help one get a degree, versus increase in income due to what is taught in a degree. This can be a very large difference. If you have a subscription to The Economist, read https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-firs... for how much college rankings and benefits change when you try to measure universities by estimates of value added.

That isn't to say that there is a better figure available for education. But it does not speak well to their intellectual integrity that they failed to point out this major shortcoming in their own data.

[bluecalm]

The paper you linked is based on reasoning like: "high school dropouts are way more likely to be unemployed therefore if we reduce rates of people dropping out of high school there will be more employed ones".

That's also a problem with "citation needed" argument - people who are in position to publish papers are often motivated politically or just bad at thinking and logic.

[srcnkcl]

ah yes scientists, people known to be bad at logic and thinking... I guess you meant policy makers or people who implements those but whatever, what i know right...

[bluecalm]

I just quoted an obvious reasoning error from the paper man.