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Video games can help boost children’s intelligence
- gwern 5y agoNo, it doesn't. This has been done many times in randomized experiments and it doesn't. And it's easy to see what the authors did wrong: they are using a confounded-to-hell sample > They found that the children who spent an above-average time playing video games increased their intelligence more than the average, while TV watching or social media had neither a positive nor a negative effect. And the reason they have convinced themselves that their effect is not the massive levels of confounding is that, among other things, they used a weak polygenic score to measure a tiny fraction of genetic contribution to intelligence, and then declared they "controlled for genetics". Heritability of intelligence is >50%. Using a PGS predicting 7% does not justify claims like "while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status", because you have still not accounted for >43% of variance from genes. And then there's all the rest of intelligence variance... Yet another study dead on arrival and in need of no more rebuttal than a link to https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...