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League of Legends Rank Predicts IQ, Study Finds (plos.org)
limbicsystem writes: A new publication in the journal PLOS ONE shows that your rank in League of Legends (LoL) correlates with your intelligence quotient (IQ). Games like LoL and DOTA II apparently depend on the same cognitive resources that underlie tests of fluid intelligence. That means that proficiency in those games peaks at the same age as raw IQ -- about 25 -- while scores in more reaction-time based games like Destiny or Battlefield seem to decline from the teens onwards. The researchers suggest that the massive datasets from these online games could be used to assess population-level cognitive health in real-time across the globe. The authors have a nice FAQ (and open datasets) here.
What it tests for is shown to make accurate predictions of important things. That is all that matters. No one is saying that it measures a person's worth, or the full extent of their intellect. There is no problem with what it is, only with what people misinterpret it to be.
I think it's pseudoscience on the same level that the MBTI is pseudoscience - not so much in what it does, as what people *think* it does. An MBTI or IQ test very accurately measures... your ability to take an MBTI or IQ test. The basic premise behind the tests - that personality can be reduced to four scores on four linear axes, or problem-solving ability reduced to a score on one linear axis - seem to be gross oversimplifications. Incomplete pictures, vis-a-vis the Platonic ideals you think you are measuring with these tests. Which is not to say that you won't find all sorts of correlations between peoples' MBTI and/or IQ, and how their lives turn out. It *is* to say that those correlations don't mean what you think they mean. An IQ test measures very specific types of problem solving, taken in a bubble, in a manner that almost no real-world problems are presented to a person.
FWIW, since you wanted to make this personal, I assume I did quite well on the IQ tests I was given in school. The result was always that they wanted to put me in GT or AP courses. But I am lacking in the sort of narcissism that would prompt me to go out of my way to take an IQ test at age 28, or join Mensa, or make a post like yours on Slashdot.