Nobody special, nor any desire to be. Just sharing my ideas when I appear to know better than the person I’m responding to, or when I believe I have something interesting to share/add. I’m not a serious nor a formal person, and if you’re more knowledgeable than intelligent, you probably won’t like me as I lack academic rigor.
Feel free to correct me when I make mistakes. I’m too certain of myself as my ideas are rarely challenged. Crocker’s rules are fine! When playing intellectual (I do on here) I find that social things only get in the way, and when I socialize I find that intellectual things get in the way, so I separate them.
Sure, as long as the video game isn’t heavily loaded on timing, reaction time, hand-eye-coordination, and experience. (I’m aware that these correlate to intelligence as well, but people who’ve played a lot of videogames will do much better on these, even if they’re not inherently smarter)
I’ve actually been using games to estimate the intelligence of people, and my intuition has never been far off, I can guess the results of my friends fairly accurately. All my bright friends do well on games we play, learning them quickly and performing well. Even verbal ability seems to correlate. This correlation is even better than income and languages spoken, though those two correlations are solid too. Your friends with 5000$ PCs are likely more than 1SD above the mean. Being in a well-off family is already a sign of good genes running in that family.
Intelligent people in my family are surprisingly good at card games and trivia games. Also dice games, even when it seems like luck places a hard limit on performance.
Another area where videogames are useful is diagnosing skewed cognitive profiles. I do very well in older shooters with simple graphics, and I’m absolutely trash in Overwatch and Apex. It feels clunky and I think my specs might be too low, resulting in input lag. Still, I’ve narrowed down the cause to the visual effects, I simply don’t process large amounts of visual information well. In older games, a single moving pixel means that there’s an enemy. In newer games, everything moves, from the grass to the background.
I don’t think there’s a very large burden of proof on you here, it would be weird to evaluate this idea as if it was unlikely. If anything it’s almost obvious that video game performance correlate strongly with intelligence. The data is rather fuzzy though (I’m lacking a word here, but essentially it’s difficult to reverse-engineer the results into the factors which explain/cause them)
Finally, I think the only issue with IQ tests is that people reduce intelligence to a single number. That’s like reducing your computer specs to a single number, you’ll have big a loss of information. So of course people have evidence (personal experiences) of IQ test scores failing them as predictors. I think 5 numbers is enough to cover most nuances and prevent large differences not explainable by numbers.