I recall plenty of studies showing effects of most programs do wear off. The problem is many studies (I'm not commenting on the particular paper you cited) have employed no control group selected on exactly the same basis as the experimental group.
I work for Qualcomm, which in the 1990s was told by many professors and competitors that its cellular phone technology was impossible, even by some that it violated the laws of physics. I examined these claims of error and thought they were ludicrous. Since that time, Qualcomm has quintupled its market cap and has over 50% market share in smartphone chip markets.
It is easy to build something wrong. I can "prove" all sorts of technical ideas are without merit by implementing them inefficiently, incorrectly. I can hire you a guy to tune your ferrari for you, and then go out and beat you on the track in my volkswagen. It doesn't prove ferarris are crap.
From a production standpoint, if you have 20 failed attempts and 2 that succeed, that PROVES the thing can be done. If a lot of people have build early education programs which attempted to abstract out a few features of early education that would matter, and they have failed, but two or three have succeeded, it does not mean the preponderance of the evidence is that early education is useless, it means that most people do it wrong.
If nearly everyone fails at producing a social result and one or two studies do produce it, seems much more likely the one or two studies are wrong about producing the result. Especially if it hasn't been replicated. This is ignoring that the incentives for academics are far from balanced and that the social scientist in question are very likely to have written the bottom line first just because of their ideological demographics.
Related to: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity, Does My Vote Matter?
And voting adds legitimacy to it.
Thank you.
#annoyedbymotivatedcognition