Study: Ritalin Works, But School Isn't Worth Paying Attention To

Reads the Pelham et al Concerta/summer-camp study against the media 'medication has no impact on learning' spin. The real finding: stimulants improve attention (faster math, fewer rule violations, slightly better tests) but there is no course x condition interaction -- paying more attention did not make the kids learn more. Scott turns this into a genuine puzzle (why doesn't attention convert to learning?) and speculates via his old 'Why Do Test Scores Plateau' surgeon-residency post and a wilder analogy to AI scaling laws (parameters=intelligence, data=exposure, compute=review), concluding the students must be bottlenecked on some non-attention resource.

Quality 66 · Strong. Strong (low): a clean bit of study-debunking plus a real conceptual puzzle, but the payoff is explicitly 'irresponsibly speculative' scaling-law analogizing rather than a settled contribution; solidly mid-Strong.

Claude’s paradigm shift 48 · Moderate. Moderate: the attention-does-not-equal-learning reframe and the human-scaling-laws analogy are fresh angles but heavily flagged as speculation building on his own prior post.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor/within-blog: a study writeup with practical ADHD-medication relevance but no material footprint of its own.