Google added that part of the problem it faces when generating its AI overviews is that, for some very specific queries, there is a lack of high-quality information on the web. And there is no doubt that Lynn’s work is not of high quality.
“The science underlying Lynn’s ‘national IQ’ database is of such poor quality that it is difficult to believe that the database is not fraudulent,” Sear said. “Lynn has never described her methodology for selecting samples in the database; Many nations have IQs estimated from absurdly small and unrepresentative samples.”
Sear points out that Lynn’s estimate of Angola’s IQ is based on data from just 19 people and Eritrea’s is based on samples of children living in orphanages.
“The problem is that the data that Lynn used to generate this data set is just nonsense, and it is nonsense in multiple dimensions,” Rutherford said, noting that the Somali figure in Lynn’s data set is based on a sample of refugees aged eight to 18 who were assessed in a Kenyan refugee camp. It adds that Botswana’s score is based on a unique sample of 104 Tswana-speaking secondary school students, aged seven to 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 being collected is weak, but also that the tests themselves are typically designed for Western audiences and, therefore, They are biased even before they are applied. administered.
“There is evidence that Lynn systematically biased the database by preferentially including samples with low IQs, to the exclusion of those with higher IQs, for African nations,” Sears added, a conclusion supported. by a 2020 preprint study.
Lynn published several versions of his national IQ data set over the decades, the most recent of which, called “The Intelligence of Nations,” was published in 2019. Over the years, the flawed work of Lynn has been used by racist and far-right groups. groups as evidence to support claims of white superiority. The data has also been converted into a color-coded world map, showing sub-Saharan African countries with supposedly low IQ colored in red compared to Western nations, which are colored in blue.
“This is a data visualization that you see all over Twitter, all over social media, and if you spend a lot of time in racist gatherings on the web, you just see it as a racist argument that says ‘Look at the data.’ Look at the map,’” Rutherford says.
But Rutherford believes the blame lies not solely with artificial intelligence 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 citing him) because Lynn’s work in IQ has been accepted without question by a large area of academia and if you look at the number of times his foundations of national IQ data have been cited in academic papers, it’s in the hundreds,” Rutherford said. “So it’s not AI’s fault, it’s academics’ fault.”