I think what I, and CNET, are driving at is that SAR is the lingua franca of EM radiation studies. Cell phone radiation, regulations limiting cell phone radiation, experiments on rats, and so forth are most always phrased in terms of SAR.
Perhaps our disagreement stems from a different interpretation of 'output'.
Um, since the SAR level is measured in Watts/Kg... how is it relevant? I highly doubt any of those "Top 10" models have anywhere near 1kg of mass. Which means, they don't output anywhere near the wattage you are lead to believe they do.
The SAR level measures the "radiation in watts absorbed by a kilogram of biological tissue under laboratory conditions." - I'm quoting the page you linked in your other reply. I believe your page answers your concern quite elegantly.
I can't speak to this ES phenomenon, nor your anecdotal argument, but it was documented in 2003 - and hasn't been successfully challenged by any new research, to my knowledge - that cell phone radiation seriously injures the blood brain barrier in rats. This was found to be the case for radiation levels similar to those found in modern cell phones.
I would call that a low probability hypothesis, but it's interesting to think about. I'll be switching to a hands-free headset soon, and we'll see how that works out.
And aside from this proximity issue, cell phones often get above 1 Watt of output. Wifi devices tend to be between 20 and 100 miliwatts.
Anecdotally, I get a terrible headache that lasts for hours if I talk even 30 seconds on a cell phone. I'm probably not typical, but I'm certain cell phones aren't as harmless as most folks (and regulatory agencies) think.
I fear that's a bit simplistic. We live in a much different socio-political era than we did in 1776. Some ways of changing the system are no longer valid.
Also, I would suggest that it's more that systemic disempowerment makes americans lazy rather than the other way around. You may disagree with me- I'm not sure by your comment- but they're certainly part of a positive feedback loop.
It is a beautiful analogy, but there are some pretty deep differences.
As you said, the "IP ecosystem" is our creation. However, I'd add that the "IP ecosystem" moves and expands at a sustainably exponential rate. Natural ecosystems do not. Which is very important in some "ecosystem management" issues, if we do want to draw the analogy.
Having spent years of your life thinking about online communities, signal-to-noise, and participation, you'd undoubtedly bring an interesting perspective to the meta-discussion that we're having now on Slashdot.
If you had to suggest changing something about how Slashdot works, what would it be? And how would that tie into things you've done, encountered, or seen on Wikipedia?
Why is it worth so much to obtain just the plain DNA code of a lot of people?... I would rather have them see putting a prize on unraveling DNA decoding schemes exhaustively.
That's the holy grail, of course. But consider that this goal is currently rather far out of our reach- and that the speedy sequencing of genomes is a necessary and important step in achieving this goal.
Until we get a good bottom-up model for complex gene behavior, statistical analysis is one of the main tools, if not the main tool available to understand what genes actually do. And statistical analysis of genes depends on large genome sample sizes, and that depends on speedy mass sequencing of genomes.
So I'd say the prize is attached to the correct feat.
Wikipedia is an open document. The revisions are clear and publicly visible. Why is it all right to censor and prohibit posters whose motivations are obviously suspect, while completely (naively?) ignoring the gazillions of posters whose motivations are probably no less base, but not obviously so?
Low-hanging fruit and statistical estimation of bias, my good Styopa. Anyone who is personally, financially, and professionally invested in a the outcome of a highly competitive (and public opinion-sensitive) contest will tend to act more from bias and self-interest in editing wikipedia than will John Q. Public.
If you ban Congressional staffers from editing political wikipedia articles on their candidates and the opposition, you might lose a few good edits, but you'll prevent many more.
Wikipedia's methods and policies aim for improving the general signal-to-noise ratio by getting the low-hanging fruit, then relying on the community for further analysis of edits. As problematic as this may seem at times, I doubt there exists a better approach.
I don't disagree with anything you brought up, per se-- but I do want to mention the terribly long lead-times on vehicles. Modern automobiles are such finely-tuned, heavily-regulated beasts that it takes a huge amount of effort to make even a modest change; to switch technologies completely (i.e. building a hybrid) with current processes might take a decade.
So in the end, I don't think the problem is Detroit's current attitude (the NYT ran a few articles about the changing attitudes of US auto manufacturers). I think it was Detroit's attitude 6 years ago, and the lack of nimbleness in the auto-design process.
When an X-prize is issued using this wording, it really makes me think twice if they really even know what they want done to win the prize.
For what it is worth... in the article, the X-prize folks did NOT use the word "decode" when referring to DNA; they said "sequence". Only the LiveScience.com article writer used the word "decode". -----
I love Slashdot, but I die a little inside each time I see a +5 comment based on a completely incorrect understanding of the article stemming from the poster obviously not reading the article. We need to discourage this as a community.
I'd suspect that the legal status of someone that's, well, legally dead would be rather iffy. And for good reason- why should we set aside economic power for inactive (and potentially never-to-be active) members of our society? I think the burden of proof that this should be possible lies on them.
There's also things such as Adverse Possession that could throw a wrench into things. I'd recommend that any 'cryonauts' conceive of any post-death, pre-revival arrangements to be tentative at best.
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. - Samuel Johnson
I think Taco made a lot of good points, but in the end I do want to read something that's had some basic quality-control done on it. If 500,000 people are going to read a submission, a little work goes a long way.
And I strongly believe that reading something written poorly really does disrupt one's thought process. It matters. Spelling included.
I touch on most of this in my reply to Arcys, but I think you cover some interesting ground.
To come back to the orginal point, it would be interesting to study addiction in gamers, and how that compulsion varies across cultures. Is it related to IQ (in that culture) or other factors? Is that culture particularly prone to addiction in other areas, such as gambling or physical drug addiction, and what sort of people get addicted to what things?
Whether tendency toward gaming addiction varies significantly by culture is an excellent question. I'm *guessing* Japan's "missing million" ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/corresponden t/2334893.stm ) can't be explained through only culture, nor only genetic predisposition.
Gaming for example, seems to me to be more of an addiction of more wealthy individuals, both down to the cost of entry and the free time needed to sustain it. Some drugs are equally the purview of the wealthier classes, while other cheaper drugs are the choice of the poor.
You might be right. I'd *guess* that gambling addiction, physical drug addiction, and online gaming addiction would all share some of the same neural pathways, so one could speak of a general "tendency toward addictive behavior"... yet, as you say, culturally some addictive things are the purview of the wealthy and some of the poor. It's really hard to make any broad statements on this. That said, it's an important subject.
Thanks for the reply. I think it'd take a book to fully explore and support the hypothesis I'm trying to make, but I think some interesting things can be said about it on a discussion forum regardless. I'll limit the scope of my assertions as best I can. If you think I'm wrong about something do call me on it. That said, there's not much literature on the exact subject at hand, so if I can't cite anything specific, it may be there's nothing to cite (pro or con).
The IQ test, (Often the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale) is a standardized test. When you standardize on a population you reject questions that produce both a low or high score. When applied to a population that is different from the standardized one, some of the questions that they would have performed well may have been rejected.
That's interesting. I believe that methodology is specific to certain IQ tests, and it appears the IQ tests used in the study tended to be non-verbal and not standardized to a specific population per se. Here's a quote from the person responsible for posting this data on the web-
"A large number of the studies were done by professional psychometricians "standardizing" well-known IQ tests, typically culture-fair nonverbal ones like the Raven Progressive Matrices on nationally representative samples." ( http://www.vdare.com/sailer/lynn_and_flynn.htm )
Furthermore, though it's an interesting topic, my hypothesis doesn't really need IQ tests to reliably measure any real dimension of intelligence, nor does it really require IQ tests to be valid across cultures; all it requires is that the results be stable (and I believe all modern IQ tests are) and be correlated with a higher-than-normal propensity to online game addiction.
So, it gets down to whether high IQ people (whatever that may entail) tend toward online game addiction, all things being equal. There's anecdotal evidence in favor of this in my personal experience, in popular culture, and perhaps from intuition.
Off the cuff, I'd suggest the mechanism involved might be related to the attraction high IQ people have to abstract contexts and well-defined, meritocratic, intelligence-based competition, or to put it another way, online games present rewards in ways that appeal more effectively (statistically speaking) to the dopamine structures in high IQ people. In any case, online gaming pushes certain psychological buttons, and will affect people with different brain structures differently. Intuitively and anecdotally, people with high IQs tend to have different psychological buttons than others. It's no stretch to say that probably translates into a different propensity to online game addiction.
This is pretty uncharted in scientific literature, but I can imagine it'll be charted in the upcoming years. Considering how significantly negative online game addiction can be it's an important topic. Anything that takes much of its toll from the high IQ segment of society is also serious for practical reasons.
Cheers, Mike
p.s. In Japan (avg IQ 105) there's a phenomenon called the "missing million". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/corresponden t/2334893.stm As anecdotal for IQ-MMO addiction correlation evidence this doesn't really control for culture, but it's still fascinating stuff.
Unfortunately, posts with a contrary position are only moderated upward if they make explicit mention of Slashdot groupthink.
A typical Slashdot moderator will read a post that supports an unpopular position, he'll moderate it down unless the post mentions Slashdot groupthink. In an effort to show that he's independent he will moderate the post upward.
The net result is that only meta-posts about Slashdot itself are given a fair hearing.
Well said. I 'friend' people for comments like this. I wish you were logged in.
I'm not racist, I don't think IQ means anything incredibly important and I'm sure it's not the whole picture, and I think your response was lacking. Given that, here's my response.
You can't compare IQ across populations. IQ is standardized on a population and then only predictive on that population. If the test had of been standardized on African-Americans, Asians would score below 100. Its all down to how good your culture is at answering the IQ questions picked.
That's a pretty bold, sweeping assertion. IQ tests aren't perfect, but neither are they arbitrary. I'm going to call you on that. Do you have any sources supporting this? Especially given that ACT/SAT/GRE are largely IQ tests?
The source you picked is a bit suspect as at least one of the authors seems to have a racist agenda.
I won't apologize for a racist, if that's what he is (it's hard to tell), but the fact remains that this is an interesting question, he's one of the few compiling any sort of statistics, and I don't think you've made a good case on why his statistics are invalid. If you have counter-statistics, I'd love to see them. Basically, I think you might be attacking your stereotype of the misinformed racist layperson. I can understand that, since this is a touchy subject, but it's also an interesting subject if we can find a good way to discuss it.
Now I suspect you didn't go far enough in your research to find this, but just remember that IQ has long been used to justify racial superiority. When ever you see a cross cultural comparison based on IQ please consider the source.
I appreciate your point (though I think your suggestion that I "didn't go far enough" in my research was inappropriate- you don't know me, and I'm not calling your credentials into question), but taking this stance hinders any serious discussion about this issue. I don't conflate IQ with superiority, and acknowledge IQ has been mis-used in the past. It's also not what most people think it is, and isn't the whole picture of a person. *But* I think the burden is on you to prove that IQ measures *nothing* given the amount it's used in our society. The military uses extensive IQ testing, and ACT/SAT/GRE tests are basically IQ tests.
As for the rest of your post, as a psych student I would be very interested to see the correlation between intelligence and obsessive behaviour (of any kind). While it is a stereotype that more intelligent adolescents play video-games, I would need evidence to show that there is any causal relationship.
I find this response a little too dismissive. But to respond, I think though there is little non-anecdotal data on this subject to date, there is plenty of anecdotal data, as you mention, and examining the lives of famously successful intelligent people (i.e. Newton, Einstein, Kant) showcases obsessive tendencies. Conflating "famously successful intelligent people" and "intelligent people" to make an anecdotal argument certainly isn't a bulletproof argument-- but personally it's more than enough to suggest that someone should study this. China, however, has to make immediate and important predictions on how their population will react to online gaming, and I think they'd be foolish to rule out a genetic component which is also correlated to IQ out of hand, given the (ample anecdotal) evidence.
If you put serious thought into a response, I will respond.
Other factors are mentioned by the article; I'm sure they're very valid. However, I suspect these problems are amplified by some other factors that, on their own, are relatively harmless or positive.
Basically, people in south asian countries have, on average, very high IQs. The best data I have on South Korea is that the average IQ there is 106 (normalized on UK=100, where the US has an average of 98- http://www.isteve.com/IQ_Table.htm ). That may sound wonderful, but with a high average IQ you get high IQ personality problems, such as a tendency toward addiction to video games (whether high IQ folks have a general tendency toward addictive behavior is another argument).
I'm not too surprised. I expect similar problems in China (average IQ = 100 *before* many rural citizens live in a 'modern' IQ-enhancing society, and before they've had access to iodized salt and enriched bread and such). China's decision to curb the MMO culture by limiting playing time may end up a wise move.
Yes, it helps solve the aforementioned "needle in a haystack" problem which plagued the Seigenthaler article. There will presumably be fewer needles in the haystack of Wikipedia.
It's not a perfect fix, but then, there'll never be a perfect fix for social problems in community-driven sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. The Intel move is pretty huge-- perhaps it'll take a little time for things to get back to normal with releasing sources for new things.
It would also be enlightening to read whether they're legally obligated to provide these sources.
I think what I, and CNET, are driving at is that SAR is the lingua franca of EM radiation studies. Cell phone radiation, regulations limiting cell phone radiation, experiments on rats, and so forth are most always phrased in terms of SAR.
Perhaps our disagreement stems from a different interpretation of 'output'.
Um, since the SAR level is measured in Watts/Kg... how is it relevant? I highly doubt any of those "Top 10" models have anywhere near 1kg of mass. Which means, they don't output anywhere near the wattage you are lead to believe they do.
The SAR level measures the "radiation in watts absorbed by a kilogram of biological tissue under laboratory conditions." - I'm quoting the page you linked in your other reply. I believe your page answers your concern quite elegantly.
It's quite repeatable- like clockwork.
Just curious, what sort of a story do you figure this could make?
I can't speak to this ES phenomenon, nor your anecdotal argument, but it was documented in 2003 - and hasn't been successfully challenged by any new research, to my knowledge - that cell phone radiation seriously injures the blood brain barrier in rats. This was found to be the case for radiation levels similar to those found in modern cell phones.
0 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57488,0
I'd suggest taking a look at CNET's cell phone radiation chart. Updated Feb 22, 2006.
I would call that a low probability hypothesis, but it's interesting to think about. I'll be switching to a hands-free headset soon, and we'll see how that works out.
You're absolutely right.
And aside from this proximity issue, cell phones often get above 1 Watt of output. Wifi devices tend to be between 20 and 100 miliwatts.
Anecdotally, I get a terrible headache that lasts for hours if I talk even 30 seconds on a cell phone. I'm probably not typical, but I'm certain cell phones aren't as harmless as most folks (and regulatory agencies) think.
I fear that's a bit simplistic. We live in a much different socio-political era than we did in 1776. Some ways of changing the system are no longer valid.
Also, I would suggest that it's more that systemic disempowerment makes americans lazy rather than the other way around. You may disagree with me- I'm not sure by your comment- but they're certainly part of a positive feedback loop.
It is a beautiful analogy, but there are some pretty deep differences.
As you said, the "IP ecosystem" is our creation. However, I'd add that the "IP ecosystem" moves and expands at a sustainably exponential rate. Natural ecosystems do not. Which is very important in some "ecosystem management" issues, if we do want to draw the analogy.
Having spent years of your life thinking about online communities, signal-to-noise, and participation, you'd undoubtedly bring an interesting perspective to the meta-discussion that we're having now on Slashdot.
If you had to suggest changing something about how Slashdot works, what would it be? And how would that tie into things you've done, encountered, or seen on Wikipedia?
Why is it worth so much to obtain just the plain DNA code of a lot of people? ... I would rather have them see putting a prize on unraveling DNA decoding schemes exhaustively.
That's the holy grail, of course. But consider that this goal is currently rather far out of our reach- and that the speedy sequencing of genomes is a necessary and important step in achieving this goal.
Until we get a good bottom-up model for complex gene behavior, statistical analysis is one of the main tools, if not the main tool available to understand what genes actually do. And statistical analysis of genes depends on large genome sample sizes, and that depends on speedy mass sequencing of genomes.
So I'd say the prize is attached to the correct feat.
Wikipedia is an open document. The revisions are clear and publicly visible. Why is it all right to censor and prohibit posters whose motivations are obviously suspect, while completely (naively?) ignoring the gazillions of posters whose motivations are probably no less base, but not obviously so?
Low-hanging fruit and statistical estimation of bias, my good Styopa. Anyone who is personally, financially, and professionally invested in a the outcome of a highly competitive (and public opinion-sensitive) contest will tend to act more from bias and self-interest in editing wikipedia than will John Q. Public.
If you ban Congressional staffers from editing political wikipedia articles on their candidates and the opposition, you might lose a few good edits, but you'll prevent many more.
Wikipedia's methods and policies aim for improving the general signal-to-noise ratio by getting the low-hanging fruit, then relying on the community for further analysis of edits. As problematic as this may seem at times, I doubt there exists a better approach.
I don't disagree with anything you brought up, per se-- but I do want to mention the terribly long lead-times on vehicles. Modern automobiles are such finely-tuned, heavily-regulated beasts that it takes a huge amount of effort to make even a modest change; to switch technologies completely (i.e. building a hybrid) with current processes might take a decade.
So in the end, I don't think the problem is Detroit's current attitude (the NYT ran a few articles about the changing attitudes of US auto manufacturers). I think it was Detroit's attitude 6 years ago, and the lack of nimbleness in the auto-design process.
When an X-prize is issued using this wording, it really makes me think twice if they really even know what they want done to win the prize.
For what it is worth... in the article, the X-prize folks did NOT use the word "decode" when referring to DNA; they said "sequence". Only the LiveScience.com article writer used the word "decode".
-----
I love Slashdot, but I die a little inside each time I see a +5 comment based on a completely incorrect understanding of the article stemming from the poster obviously not reading the article. We need to discourage this as a community.
I'd suspect that the legal status of someone that's, well, legally dead would be rather iffy. And for good reason- why should we set aside economic power for inactive (and potentially never-to-be active) members of our society? I think the burden of proof that this should be possible lies on them.
There's also things such as Adverse Possession that could throw a wrench into things. I'd recommend that any 'cryonauts' conceive of any post-death, pre-revival arrangements to be tentative at best.
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
- Samuel Johnson
I think Taco made a lot of good points, but in the end I do want to read something that's had some basic quality-control done on it. If 500,000 people are going to read a submission, a little work goes a long way.
And I strongly believe that reading something written poorly really does disrupt one's thought process. It matters. Spelling included.
Kudos for airing this issue.
50 man days to
1. undo what little damage he did, and
2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
If you were logged in I'd give you a longer reply.
I touch on most of this in my reply to Arcys, but I think you cover some interesting ground.
n t/2334893.stm ) can't be explained through only culture, nor only genetic predisposition.
... yet, as you say, culturally some addictive things are the purview of the wealthy and some of the poor. It's really hard to make any broad statements on this. That said, it's an important subject.
To come back to the orginal point, it would be interesting to study addiction in gamers, and how that compulsion varies across cultures. Is it related to IQ (in that culture) or other factors? Is that culture particularly prone to addiction in other areas, such as gambling or physical drug addiction, and what sort of people get addicted to what things?
Whether tendency toward gaming addiction varies significantly by culture is an excellent question. I'm *guessing* Japan's "missing million" ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/corresponde
Gaming for example, seems to me to be more of an addiction of more wealthy individuals, both down to the cost of entry and the free time needed to sustain it. Some drugs are equally the purview of the wealthier classes, while other cheaper drugs are the choice of the poor.
You might be right. I'd *guess* that gambling addiction, physical drug addiction, and online gaming addiction would all share some of the same neural pathways, so one could speak of a general "tendency toward addictive behavior"
Thanks for the reply. I think it'd take a book to fully explore and support the hypothesis I'm trying to make, but I think some interesting things can be said about it on a discussion forum regardless. I'll limit the scope of my assertions as best I can. If you think I'm wrong about something do call me on it. That said, there's not much literature on the exact subject at hand, so if I can't cite anything specific, it may be there's nothing to cite (pro or con).
n t/2334893.stm
The IQ test, (Often the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale) is a standardized test. When you standardize on a population you reject questions that produce both a low or high score. When applied to a population that is different from the standardized one, some of the questions that they would have performed well may have been rejected.
That's interesting. I believe that methodology is specific to certain IQ tests, and it appears the IQ tests used in the study tended to be non-verbal and not standardized to a specific population per se. Here's a quote from the person responsible for posting this data on the web-
"A large number of the studies were done by professional psychometricians "standardizing" well-known IQ tests, typically culture-fair nonverbal ones like the Raven Progressive Matrices on nationally representative samples." ( http://www.vdare.com/sailer/lynn_and_flynn.htm )
Furthermore, though it's an interesting topic, my hypothesis doesn't really need IQ tests to reliably measure any real dimension of intelligence, nor does it really require IQ tests to be valid across cultures; all it requires is that the results be stable (and I believe all modern IQ tests are) and be correlated with a higher-than-normal propensity to online game addiction.
So, it gets down to whether high IQ people (whatever that may entail) tend toward online game addiction, all things being equal. There's anecdotal evidence in favor of this in my personal experience, in popular culture, and perhaps from intuition.
Off the cuff, I'd suggest the mechanism involved might be related to the attraction high IQ people have to abstract contexts and well-defined, meritocratic, intelligence-based competition, or to put it another way, online games present rewards in ways that appeal more effectively (statistically speaking) to the dopamine structures in high IQ people. In any case, online gaming pushes certain psychological buttons, and will affect people with different brain structures differently. Intuitively and anecdotally, people with high IQs tend to have different psychological buttons than others. It's no stretch to say that probably translates into a different propensity to online game addiction.
This is pretty uncharted in scientific literature, but I can imagine it'll be charted in the upcoming years. Considering how significantly negative online game addiction can be it's an important topic. Anything that takes much of its toll from the high IQ segment of society is also serious for practical reasons.
Cheers,
Mike
p.s. In Japan (avg IQ 105) there's a phenomenon called the "missing million".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/corresponde
As anecdotal for IQ-MMO addiction correlation evidence this doesn't really control for culture, but it's still fascinating stuff.
Unfortunately, posts with a contrary position are only moderated upward if they make explicit mention of Slashdot groupthink.
A typical Slashdot moderator will read a post that supports an unpopular position, he'll moderate it down unless the post mentions Slashdot groupthink. In an effort to show that he's independent he will moderate the post upward.
The net result is that only meta-posts about Slashdot itself are given a fair hearing.
Well said. I 'friend' people for comments like this. I wish you were logged in.
I'm not racist, I don't think IQ means anything incredibly important and I'm sure it's not the whole picture, and I think your response was lacking. Given that, here's my response.
You can't compare IQ across populations. IQ is standardized on a population and then only predictive on that population. If the test had of been standardized on African-Americans, Asians would score below 100. Its all down to how good your culture is at answering the IQ questions picked.
That's a pretty bold, sweeping assertion. IQ tests aren't perfect, but neither are they arbitrary. I'm going to call you on that. Do you have any sources supporting this? Especially given that ACT/SAT/GRE are largely IQ tests?
The source you picked is a bit suspect as at least one of the authors seems to have a racist agenda.
I won't apologize for a racist, if that's what he is (it's hard to tell), but the fact remains that this is an interesting question, he's one of the few compiling any sort of statistics, and I don't think you've made a good case on why his statistics are invalid. If you have counter-statistics, I'd love to see them. Basically, I think you might be attacking your stereotype of the misinformed racist layperson. I can understand that, since this is a touchy subject, but it's also an interesting subject if we can find a good way to discuss it.
Now I suspect you didn't go far enough in your research to find this, but just remember that IQ has long been used to justify racial superiority. When ever you see a cross cultural comparison based on IQ please consider the source.
I appreciate your point (though I think your suggestion that I "didn't go far enough" in my research was inappropriate- you don't know me, and I'm not calling your credentials into question), but taking this stance hinders any serious discussion about this issue. I don't conflate IQ with superiority, and acknowledge IQ has been mis-used in the past. It's also not what most people think it is, and isn't the whole picture of a person. *But* I think the burden is on you to prove that IQ measures *nothing* given the amount it's used in our society. The military uses extensive IQ testing, and ACT/SAT/GRE tests are basically IQ tests.
As for the rest of your post, as a psych student I would be very interested to see the correlation between intelligence and obsessive behaviour (of any kind). While it is a stereotype that more intelligent adolescents play video-games, I would need evidence to show that there is any causal relationship.
I find this response a little too dismissive. But to respond, I think though there is little non-anecdotal data on this subject to date, there is plenty of anecdotal data, as you mention, and examining the lives of famously successful intelligent people (i.e. Newton, Einstein, Kant) showcases obsessive tendencies. Conflating "famously successful intelligent people" and "intelligent people" to make an anecdotal argument certainly isn't a bulletproof argument-- but personally it's more than enough to suggest that someone should study this. China, however, has to make immediate and important predictions on how their population will react to online gaming, and I think they'd be foolish to rule out a genetic component which is also correlated to IQ out of hand, given the (ample anecdotal) evidence.
If you put serious thought into a response, I will respond.
Other factors are mentioned by the article; I'm sure they're very valid. However, I suspect these problems are amplified by some other factors that, on their own, are relatively harmless or positive.
Basically, people in south asian countries have, on average, very high IQs. The best data I have on South Korea is that the average IQ there is 106 (normalized on UK=100, where the US has an average of 98- http://www.isteve.com/IQ_Table.htm ). That may sound wonderful, but with a high average IQ you get high IQ personality problems, such as a tendency toward addiction to video games (whether high IQ folks have a general tendency toward addictive behavior is another argument).
I'm not too surprised. I expect similar problems in China (average IQ = 100 *before* many rural citizens live in a 'modern' IQ-enhancing society, and before they've had access to iodized salt and enriched bread and such). China's decision to curb the MMO culture by limiting playing time may end up a wise move.
Yes, it helps solve the aforementioned "needle in a haystack" problem which plagued the Seigenthaler article. There will presumably be fewer needles in the haystack of Wikipedia.
It's not a perfect fix, but then, there'll never be a perfect fix for social problems in community-driven sites.