A recent article by Samorodnitsky and co-authored by two renowned censorship champions, namely, Kevin Bird and Rebecca Sear, requests that all published papers that have ever used Lynn & Vanhanen (2006) national IQs (or subsequent, revised version, up to Becker & Lynn, 2019) to be retracted. They ignore a plethora of evidence suggesting that L&V or B&L IQ data are robust, despite the questionable data quality regarding lower-IQ countries. This is a case of non-classical measurement error. But many other variables commonly used in either economics or psychology often display a similar form of non-classical measurement error, and sometimes display quite dramatic biases in one or both tails of the distribution due to misreport bias. The right question is to ask how the biases can be corrected, not whether the research and their authors should be cancelled. Econometricians proposed a wide variety of techniques to deal with non-classical measurement error. In fact national IQ researchers already employed some robustness analyses. This article will dispel the logical fallacies used to negate IQ research.
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