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buybuydandavis comments on Social intelligence, education, & the workplace - Less Wrong
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Bad economics. You should invest where the marginal utility of each dollar is highest, which is especially unlikely for the children of the wealthy, who will usually already have great amounts on investment made in their future, such that the marginal utility of the next dollar is extremely low.
You don't invest in the likely most successful, you invest where your dollar gives you the most bang for the buck.
I agree with that.
Better to promote creating value over successfully accumulating value.
The Vikings may have been very successful at marauding and successfully collecting value, but even the Vikings, and perhaps especially the Vikings, would want others to get better at producing value for them to pillage.
A predator can be quite successful, but I'd rather support the creators, and even predators have an interest in that.
In the context of state educational initiatives, the investment per student in a gifted+talented program will be the same for every student. So "marginal utility" would be the same as "improved outcome". This means you would like to predict success with or without intervention, and choose kids with the largest difference.
Regardless, the real question here is why you would ever choose "career success" as your metric for a publicly-funded educational program. The assumptions that you can make all kids more successful at the same time, and that this will be good for society, are both dubious.
However, you're assuming that education is viewed as an investment. This isn't necessarily the case. I haven't got the article here, but IIRC McClelland said something to the effect that it would be more fair to single out high-IQ students as kids not to spend money on.
That's it. I think it's reasonable to expect that poor children who have had little resources spent on them would see a larger increase in performance that wealthy students who have already received a lot of resource on them.
True. The purpose may be to indoctrinate their minds, to crush souls, or to destroy futures. More likely the purpose of the educational bureaucracy is to enrich itself with an indifference to rival Cthulu and Clippy toward the harm they cause beyond that goal.
But you asked:
Not being a moral objectivist, I didn't have a true morality to refer to, but I do have my own, so I provided an answer according to my own.
Even more "fair" to single out smart kids to surgically regress to the mean, if the metric of fairness is equality. That's the problem with equality merchants - destroying value is probably the easiest way to achieve equality.