Google added that part of the problem it faces in generating its AI summaries is that there is a lack of high-quality information on the web for some very specific searches. And there is little doubt that Lynn's work is not of high quality.
“The science underlying Lynn's database of 'national IQs' is of such poor quality that it is difficult to believe the database is anything but fraudulent,” Sear said. “Lynn never described his methodology for selecting samples in the database; many countries have estimated IQ from absurdly small and unrepresentative samples.”
Sear points out that Lynn's estimate of Angola's IQ is based on information from just 19 people, and Eritrea's is based on samples of children living in orphanages.
“The problem with that is that the data that Lynn used to generate this data set is just nonsense, and it's nonsense in multiple dimensions,” Rutherford said, noting that the Somali figure in Lynn's data set is based on a sample of refugees between eight and twenty years old. 18 who were tested in a Kenyan refugee camp. He adds that the Botswana score is based on a single sample of 104 Tswana-speaking secondary school students between the ages of seven and 20, who were tested in English.
Critics of the use of national IQ tests to promote the idea of racial superiority point out not only that the quality of the samples collected is poor, but also that the tests themselves are typically designed for a Western audience, and are thus biased before they are used. even administered.
“There is evidence that Lynn has systematically influenced the database by preferentially including low IQ samples for African countries while excluding those with higher IQs,” Sears added, a conclusion supported by a preprint 2020 research.
Lynn published several versions of his national IQ dataset over the decades, with the most recent, called “The Intelligence of Nations,” published in 2019. Over the years, Lynn's flawed work has been used by far-right and racist groups as evidence to support claims of white superiority. The data has also been converted into a color-coded world map, where sub-Saharan countries with so-called low IQ are colored red compared to Western countries, which are colored blue.
“This is a data visualization that you see all over Twitter and social media, and if you spend a lot of time in racist hangouts on the internet, you just see this as an argument from racists saying, 'Look at the data. Look at the map,” Rutherford says.
But according to Rutherford, the blame lies not only with the AI systems, but with a scientific community that has been uncritically citing Lynn's work for years.
“It's actually not surprising [that AI systems are quoting it] because Lynn's work on IQ has been accepted quite unquestioningly by much of academia and if you look at the number of times his national IQ databases have been cited in academic works, it is in the hundreds,” Rutherford said. “So the fault does not lie with AI, but with academia.”
