Jan
15
One of Dr Johnson’s most famous utterances, made on the 7th of April 1775, was “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel“. But of course he did not mean that you should not love your country. He simply meant, in his time, that people who waved the flag and proclaimed their loyalty to King and country were usually hiding something or trying to distract you from something else. “Free speech” is the “patriotism” of our times.
Over the holidays, a painful attack of sciatica kept me lying down and lying still, especially during the critical festive days! This provided plenty of space for thought. I found that I had become obsessed by an article that I read in the Guardian newspaper (10 December 2024 by Hannah Milner and David Pegg) concerning Elsevier‘s decision to reevaluate articles by the “race scientist“ Professor Richard Lynn. This man, now deceased, had apparently published over 100 articles in several Elsevier journals between 2002 and 2023. He is particularly widely known for his national IQ data sets, first published in 2002 and revised in 2010. The Guardian elicited these views from fellow academics:
“They are concerned about flawed research being used to support racist ideology, but also about the frequency with which Lynn is cited in passing by experts in other fields who may not be familiar with the controversy that surrounds his work.”
And “Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear(Prof Rebecca Sear, president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Associat), Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.
The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment,” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.
Prof Jelte Wicherts, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has published several critiques of Lynn’s methodology and concluded that Lynn’s 2010 paper appeared to have systematically excluded higher IQ scores in calculations of IQ in African countries.
“The main inclusion criteria he had been using appeared to be the IQ itself, not objective measures like whether it was a normal, healthy sample,” said Wicherts. “That’s quite a lethal indicator of bias.”
I am no expert in the academic disciplines concerned, but it does seem to me that the judgement that much of an entire continent was nearly educationally subnormal was worthy of some interrogation, by the editors of the journals concerned and not only by Professor Lynn’s peers. That this material has been floating around as respectable data for 22 years is difficult to imagine; the fact that even when retracted it will still exist in the data systems of the world, and in the AI sensibilities of the world seems to me almost unthinkable. In the past few years I have become acquainted with quite a few directors and managers of integrity units in journal publishing. They have all been splendid people and I admire their ethics and their effort. Yet in my 55 years in publishing, appointments like this have only come along in the last five years. We do have a lot of catching up to do.
And then, as I tried to lie still and wait for the anti-inflammatory drugs to work, came further inflammation of a different sort. Elon Musk and his abandonment of fact checking, followed by Mark Zuckerberg‘s pathetic “me too“ led me to read articles describing the pushback of these “free speech“ advocates against the “soft authoritarian dictatorship of woke“. Apart from wondering whether these men were more concerned with cost cutting than ideology, with margins rather than freedom of expression, I also wondered about these two streams of public information flowing in opposite directions. In science, we are desperate to root out the illegitimate, the unfounded and the downright wrong; in social media we will tolerate any lie, distortion or pure prejudice on the grounds that anyone, anonymously or not, has the right to say anything about anyone. Professor Lynn should be alive and publishing on X.
Eventually the drugs worked and I was able to walk again. All that I have left from my festive season in bed is a nasty headache – the world of information is in crisis. I know that I am meant to believe that the world cannot survive without continuous sacrifice to the gods of growth and profit. My experience of the world of information and data tells me however that the world cannot survive without trust in the data that we handle and in the identity of its sources.. Reliable truth is fundamental to both of them.
The full text of the Guardian article of 10 December 2024 is available here:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-reviews-national-iq-research-by-british-race-scientist-richard-lynn?dcr=apps&edition=uk#:~:text=Prof Rebecca Sear,issue very seriously.”