Yes. You need to wrap select() in its own parenthisis, THEN wrap that in tostring() -- or whatever function you are calling -- if you want to JUST return the 2nd argument of GetWorldStateUIInfo().
Code:
tostring( ( select(2, GetWorldStateUIInfo(3)) ) )
There really is no downside to using the "local _, state = GetWorldStateUIInfo(3)" approach, especially when you are only one argument deep into the function. It is faster, and you can just make "_" local in your file if your are worried about global leaks (though that was fixed).