Google added that part of the problem it faces in generating AI overviews is that some very specific search queries on the Internet lack high-quality information. And there is no doubt that Lynn’s work is not of high quality.
“The science behind Lynn’s ‘National IQ’ database is of such low quality that it is difficult to believe the database is not fraudulent,” Sear said. “Lynn never described his methodology for selecting samples for the database; In many countries, IQ estimates are based on absurdly small and unrepresentative samples.
Sear points out that Lynn estimated IQ in Angola using information from just 19 people, and in Eritrea using samples of children living in orphanages.
“The problem is that the data that Lynn used to generate this dataset is just bullshit, and it’s bullshit on multiple dimensions,” Rutherford said, pointing out that the Somali data in Lynn’s dataset is based on a single sample of refugees between the ages of eight and eight. 18 people were tested in a refugee camp in Kenya. He adds that Botswana’s result is based on a single sample of 104 Tswana-speaking secondary school students aged seven to 20 who were tested in English.
Critics the operate of national IQ tests to promote ideas of racial superiority indicate not only that the quality of the samples taken is needy, but also that the tests themselves are usually intended for Western audiences and are therefore biased before they are even published and administered.
“There is evidence that Lynn systematically falsified the database, preferentially including samples with low IQs while excluding those with higher IQs, in the case of African countries,” Sears added, confirming his conclusion based on 2020 preprint study.
Lynn has published various versions of his national IQ dataset over the decades, the most recent of which, titled “The Intelligence of Nations,” was published in 2019. Over the years, Lynn’s flawed work has been used by far-right and racist groups as evidence in support of claims of white superiority. The data was also transformed into a color-coded world map, showing sub-Saharan African countries with supposedly low IQs, shown in red, compared to Western countries, which are shown in blue.
“It’s a data visualization that you see all over Twitter and social media, and if you spend a lot of time in racist encounters on the Internet, you just see it as an argument from a racist saying, ‘Look at the data.’ Look at the map,” Rutherford says.
But according to Rutherford, the fault lies not solely with the artificial intelligence systems, but with the scientific community, which has been uncritically citing Lynn’s work for years.
“It’s not surprising actually [that AI systems are quoting it] because Lynn’s work on IQ has been pretty unquestionably accepted in the vast academic community, and if you look at how many times his national IQ databases have been cited in academic papers, it’s in the hundreds,” Rutherford said. “So the fault is not with the AI, the fault is with academia.”