It seems someone should link up "Why and How to Debate Charitably." I can't find a copy of the original because the author has taken it down. Here is a discussion of it on LW.. Here are my bulleted summary quotes. ADDED: Original essay I've just learned, and am very saddened to hear, that the author, Chris, committed suicide some time ago.

This is related, but not the research talked about. The Terman Project apparently found that the very highest IQ cohort had many more patents than the lower cohorts, but this did not show up as massively increased lifetime income.

Compare the bottom right IQ graph with SMPY results which show the impact of ability (SAT-M measured before age 13) on publication and patent rates. Ability in the SMPY graph varies between 99th and 99.99th percentile in quintiles Q1-Q5. The variation in IQ between the bottom and top deciles of the Terman study covers a similar range. The Terman super-smarties (i.e., +4 SD) only earned slightly more (say, 15-20% over a lifetime) than the ordinary smarties (i.e., +2.5 SD), but the probability of earning a patent (SMPY) went up by about 4x over the corresponding ability range.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/04/earnings-effects-of-personality.html

Unless we want to assume those 4x extra patents were extremely worthless, or that the less smart groups were generating positive externalities in some other mechanism, this would seem to imply that the smartest were not capturing anywhere near the value they were creating - and hence were generating significant positive externalities.

EDIT: Jones 2011 argues much the same thing - economic returns to IQ are so low because so much of it is being lost to positive externalities.

Excusemewhat, the community, as in LW? We're a cryonics advocacy group now?

Convincing Dawkins would be a great strategy for promoting cryonics... who else should the community focus on convincing?

Friends and family. They are the ones I care about most. (And, most likely, those that others in the community care about most too. At least the friends part. Family is less certain but more significant.)

Dawkins is a very high-quality thinker, as his scientific writings reveal. The fact that he has also published "elementary" rationalist material in no way takes away from this.

He's way, way far above the level represented by the participants in his namesake forum.

(I'd give even odds that EY could persuade him to sign up for cryonics in an hour or less.)

broken link on "usually correlate"?

Project Follow Through, the study most frequently cited as proving the benefits of Direct Instruction is far from perfect. Neither classrooms nor schools, were randomly assigned to curricula. Its not clear how students ended up in treatment vs. comparison groups but it probably happened differently in different communities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Follow_Through#Analytical_methods for a bunch of info and more references.

Claims that the extent to which will power is exhaustible depends on one's belief about it's exhaustibility: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014144318.htm

a meta-analysis of 15 studies

As a statistical aside, I see no strong reason to believe a meta-analysis should be any more convincing than a single, large, well-designed study. In fact, by mixing the results of rigorous studies in with the unrigorous ones, you're probably just diluting the signal to noise ratio.