[dash2]

No, my point is that bad research which conforms to people's priors should not be taken seriously.

There are many experiments on video game playing. Most of them are short run, obviously. But never underestimate researcher ingenuity. Here's a cute paper which uses as an instrument "did your roommate bring a video game to university"? Not beyond critique, but plausible: https://economics.uwo.ca/people/stinebrickner_docs/paper2.pd.... It's also relevant because the dependent variable is how much students study, and their resulting performance.

More to the point, if anyone seriously thinks video games will raise kids' IQ, and can persuade funders of it, they could simply give the treatment group an Xbox. That would be expensive - say $20K-ish - but much cheaper than the benefit of an extra IQ point or 2, over millions of children.