8 ms·

"gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future" Citation needed.

by lexandstuff 3y ago

LargeTomato 3y ago
I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here.
- spicebox 3y ago
  Common sense is frequently wrong and is usually invoked by people who want their beliefs to be taken as fact without needing to provide support
  - bluepod4 3y ago
    Correct.
  - georgeashworth 3y ago
    Citation needed
    - spicebox 3y ago
      Touché - “Science has widely come to be understood as a systematic assault on common sense. Common sense said the world was flat; science showed this to be false. Common sense said the sun and the moon were the same size; science showed this to be wrong. Common sense said the Earth was the center of the universe; science showed this to be false. Common sense said matter was solid; science has shown this to be false” https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c6009k3&chunk.id=d0e1167&toc.id=&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c60...
      - HideousKojima 3y ago
        Citation needed that those things were, in fact, common sense. The earth being the center of the universe comes from ancient philosophers, not commoners (there's a reason the geocentric model is also called the Ptolemaic model). Those same philosophers also usually said the earth was round, not flat.
  - btilly 3y ago
    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-psychologist-weighs-in.html 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 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-critical-period-for-brain-development/ 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 3y ago
      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/BestInvestment_Full_Report_6.27.11.pdf https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    You can take a look at the average intelligence of current research and business leaders and conclude that on average, they contribute more visibly. That doesn’t mean the cook in their kitchen, that frees up their mind to think about all that useful stuff isn’t just as necessary.
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      Your observation that they contribute more visibly is maybe the most important part. If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Your intuition may be wrong. I know plenty of 80's gifted kids who are burnt out, unemployed, or just coasting through life.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    that doesn't refute that the progress that we've made has come from gifted kids. Not all the gifted salmon make it to swim all the way back up the stream.
  - woleium 3y ago
    being gifted is just the start. next you need to get inspired.
    - hgomersall 3y ago
      I'm minded to think that most education should be focused on the inspiration part. Give the kids intrinsic motivation and the tools to learn.
    - giardini 3y ago
      I'd rather be a member of a group of uninspired smart people than of a group of inspired dummies. - (signed)Tired of watching "inspired dummies" waste their time, other persons' time and their inherited fortunes.
      - woleium 3y ago
        indeed, you need to be gifted first
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    Isn't that then wasted talent? AIUI, upthread comments were about putting more resources into the gifted children precisely because we don't want to waste their talent.
- injb 3y ago
  +1 in fact it's hard to think of a statement that's less in need of a citation.
- jjav 3y ago
  > I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here. I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university. Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers. The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.
  - pedrosorio 3y ago
    The original statement: > "gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future" didn't say anything about gifted kids being far more likely to be "wildly successful with mansions and all that" or "starting many businesses, hustling and selling". It read "contribute significantly to our future".
throw9away6 3y ago
We live in a winner takes all society in the USA. So if only the cream of the crop is allowed to contribute it’s where you want to put your resources.
- uoaei 3y ago
  "We should institutionalize and normalize the inequities that are already present rather than working to reduce them" is a bad idea.
  - bt4u 3y ago
    [dead]
- lexandstuff 3y ago
  I disagree with you. The people that run society are the train drivers, the nurses, the local council staff, the garage handlers, etc. I'm sure some were considered "gifted" in school, but by definition, most likely not. It's those people who I want us to invest the most in. On the other hand, so what if a kid can solve a few maths problems faster than some other kid?
  - zinodaur 3y ago
    I get what you are saying - but school is such a wonderful opportunity to expand your mind and find things to care about. If some kid is all juiced up and excited about something, its tragic for the school to stamp that out through neglect and busywork. IDK how we could build an education system that supports kids in excelling while not degenerating in to a caste system
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      you are talking like kids are excelling or not. Some are great at maths and shit at other classes and vice-versa.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
klabb3 3y ago
In a way, yes, citation is needed for the claim. But citation is not needed for policy. Predicting individual's "value" to society and granting/restricting opportunity based on that is not only hell of a slippery slope, but absolutely anti-thetical to democratic civilization. It's quite literally what both the fascists and the nazis did deliberately. Every society has both codified and unofficial deviations from the principle of "equal opportunity". For instance, insurance providers that are allowed to discriminate based on age, among other factors. But giving up on the principle explicitly is a different beast.
giardini 3y ago
Try this: Google "IQ AS A PREDICTOR OF SUCCESS"
- hirvi74 3y ago
  Depends on how one defines success. It seems to me that the correlations for IQ are not too high for many of what people might call "success." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_correlations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...

"gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future" Citation needed.

LargeTomato 3y ago

I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here.

spicebox 3y ago
Common sense is frequently wrong and is usually invoked by people who want their beliefs to be taken as fact without needing to provide support
- bluepod4 3y ago
  Correct.
- georgeashworth 3y ago
  Citation needed
  - spicebox 3y ago
    Touché - “Science has widely come to be understood as a systematic assault on common sense. Common sense said the world was flat; science showed this to be false. Common sense said the sun and the moon were the same size; science showed this to be wrong. Common sense said the Earth was the center of the universe; science showed this to be false. Common sense said matter was solid; science has shown this to be false” https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c6009k3&chunk.id=d0e1167&toc.id=&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c60...
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      Citation needed that those things were, in fact, common sense. The earth being the center of the universe comes from ancient philosophers, not commoners (there's a reason the geocentric model is also called the Ptolemaic model). Those same philosophers also usually said the earth was round, not flat.
- btilly 3y ago
  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-psychologist-weighs-in.html 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 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-critical-period-for-brain-development/ 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 3y ago
    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/BestInvestment_Full_Report_6.27.11.pdf https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...
- Aeolun 3y ago
  You can take a look at the average intelligence of current research and business leaders and conclude that on average, they contribute more visibly. That doesn’t mean the cook in their kitchen, that frees up their mind to think about all that useful stuff isn’t just as necessary.
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    Your observation that they contribute more visibly is maybe the most important part. If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.
icedchai 3y ago
Your intuition may be wrong. I know plenty of 80's gifted kids who are burnt out, unemployed, or just coasting through life.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  that doesn't refute that the progress that we've made has come from gifted kids. Not all the gifted salmon make it to swim all the way back up the stream.
- woleium 3y ago
  being gifted is just the start. next you need to get inspired.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    I'm minded to think that most education should be focused on the inspiration part. Give the kids intrinsic motivation and the tools to learn.
  - giardini 3y ago
    I'd rather be a member of a group of uninspired smart people than of a group of inspired dummies. - (signed)Tired of watching "inspired dummies" waste their time, other persons' time and their inherited fortunes.
    - woleium 3y ago
      indeed, you need to be gifted first
- lelanthran 3y ago
  Isn't that then wasted talent? AIUI, upthread comments were about putting more resources into the gifted children precisely because we don't want to waste their talent.
injb 3y ago
+1 in fact it's hard to think of a statement that's less in need of a citation.
jjav 3y ago
> I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here. I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university. Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers. The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.
- pedrosorio 3y ago
  The original statement: > "gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future" didn't say anything about gifted kids being far more likely to be "wildly successful with mansions and all that" or "starting many businesses, hustling and selling". It read "contribute significantly to our future".

throw9away6 3y ago

We live in a winner takes all society in the USA. So if only the cream of the crop is allowed to contribute it’s where you want to put your resources.

uoaei 3y ago
"We should institutionalize and normalize the inequities that are already present rather than working to reduce them" is a bad idea.
- bt4u 3y ago
  [dead]
lexandstuff 3y ago
I disagree with you. The people that run society are the train drivers, the nurses, the local council staff, the garage handlers, etc. I'm sure some were considered "gifted" in school, but by definition, most likely not. It's those people who I want us to invest the most in. On the other hand, so what if a kid can solve a few maths problems faster than some other kid?
- zinodaur 3y ago
  I get what you are saying - but school is such a wonderful opportunity to expand your mind and find things to care about. If some kid is all juiced up and excited about something, its tragic for the school to stamp that out through neglect and busywork. IDK how we could build an education system that supports kids in excelling while not degenerating in to a caste system
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    you are talking like kids are excelling or not. Some are great at maths and shit at other classes and vice-versa.
- rowanG077 3y ago

klabb3 3y ago

In a way, yes, citation is needed for the claim. But citation is not needed for policy. Predicting individual's "value" to society and granting/restricting opportunity based on that is not only hell of a slippery slope, but absolutely anti-thetical to democratic civilization. It's quite literally what both the fascists and the nazis did deliberately. Every society has both codified and unofficial deviations from the principle of "equal opportunity". For instance, insurance providers that are allowed to discriminate based on age, among other factors. But giving up on the principle explicitly is a different beast.

giardini 3y ago

Try this: Google "IQ AS A PREDICTOR OF SUCCESS"

hirvi74 3y ago
Depends on how one defines success. It seems to me that the correlations for IQ are not too high for many of what people might call "success." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_correlations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...