Common sense is frequently wrong and is usually invoked by people who won’t there beliefs to be taken as fact without needing to provide support

Correct.

Citation needed

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=ft8c60...

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.

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?

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...

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

They contribute more visibly.

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.

Your intuition may be wrong. I know plenty of 80's gifted kids who are burnt out, unemployed, or just coasting through life.

being gifted is just the start. next you need to get inspired.

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.

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 dumbasses" waste their time, inherited fortunes and other persons' time.

indeed, you need to be gifted first

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.

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.

+1 in fact it's hard to think of a statement that's less in need of a citation.

> 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.

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".