Civilizations also tend to change their qualities over time, thus we can see what changes tend to promote increased prosperity (or collapse).

the very qualities which made certain civilizations particularly stable in their own time periods might cease to be viable in other ones

What do you mean by "time periods"? The logic of your argument suggests you mean it as a proxy for some other changes. It would help to thing of those variables explicitly. For example, if you mean different levels of technology, it makes sense to look at qualities that were helpful in societies of different technological level.

Nah, I was deliberately ignoring the other half. The fact that one part of Multiheaded's comment was correct (though, AFAICT, irrelevant to the above discussion) doesn't mean that the other part (regarding economic determinism) is too.

Obvious things like environmental factors and the like were looked at very carefully.

Environmental factors can be very hard to control for. Maternal factors in the womb, DNA Methylation, etc, etc.

There's stuff for which the 'race-realists" explanations are very shaky. The considerable academic success of African immigrants to the US (even when compared to immigrant groups from other areas) is an example for which the explanations provided (high barriers to entry only let smart people in) is plausible, but it leaves plenty of room for uncertainty.

I dunno, this is a topic that can be debated for a really long time. Suffice it to say that I remain uncertain.

Larry Summers

Yes? I never claimed that political correctness never gets in the way of good decisions. I'm trying to understand reactionary thought, and that naturally causes us to touch upon politics, but I'm not attempting to argue for a political side here. You won't catch me defending the censorship of Summers.

I agree that Summers should be allowed to air ideas on public forums without fear of personal consequences.

The vitriol directed to Summers was also quite heavily criticized, and by some pretty influential people. The majority of students also supported him.

IQ is 60-80% heritable

But this is modulated by SES.

The heritability of IQ reduces with socioeconomic status. Primary source. So lets go with 60%.

this is fairly strong evidence to start with that race itself is the cause

How? If it is 60% heritable, and if the mean is 100, is a loss of 15% due to environmental factors really that unlikely?

Attempts to test that have controlled

Attempts to control for things do generally reduce the gap, but yes, you are right that they do not completely eliminate it. This is the reason why we can't dismiss the idea that behavioral differences of genetic origin exist, not a reason why we should accept the idea. It isn't possible to control for all factors. It could easily be something weird and unexpected (say, vitamin D deficiency, or maternal health) that creates the difference.

Consistently it has been found that not only is this gap a question of genetics

No: Consistently, attempts to control for things have not accounted for the entirety of the gap. There is a difference.

fact is patently obvious to anyone who's even glanced at the statistics or has lived/worked on a college campus.

I've done both. My anecdotal experience disagrees. My glances at statistics haven't settled anything.

PhD

African immigrants to the US (not African Americans, recent voluntary immigrants) are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US, outperforming both Asian and European immigrants in educational achievement. (I know that the "race realists" will say that this is because only smart people can immigrate. That explanation is not be sufficient to extinguish the doubt the evidence raises, especially since we're comparing immigrants to immigrants)

Keep in mind, I'm only maintaining that there is cause for uncertainty. The evidence I provide is not meant to refute your claim - only to reduce what I perceive as your overconfidence and to dispute your claim that any layman could see that you are right, but for their biases. Mine is the weaker claim.

We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.

In other words, in a perfectly fair system a maximum of one in every fifty Blacks would go to college at all and half would drop out before graduating, with a tenth of those remaining being able to pursue higher degrees. About eighteen times that many Blacks enroll in college today (~38%), seventeen times that many graduate college (~17%) and four times as many are given PhDs (0.4%). Unsurprisingly most of the latter are unemployed or work in higher education themselves. These figures are proudly attributed to Affirmative Action and represent one of the biggest wastes of time and energy ever undertaken by our government.

Not all the abilities measured by IQ are that important to education; see the last two sentences in this comment. Calculations like yours would underestimate the ideal number of women and Jews in academia, and for all I know (admittedly little) that may also apply to African-Americans.

Okay, I am now going to give you not my own views, but the views of the average liberal layperson on this matter. This is meant to illustrate why it's not obvious to laypeople that AA doesn't work, not a defense of AA.

if someone is not qualified for a university, they are more likely to fail than the qualified, non-black students in the example.

"The point of affirmative action is to uplift the entire group. It doesn't matter if minority students fail out at higher rates - if the net effect is more minority students with degrees who have come into contact with college culture and gotten education, they will go home and have a positive impact on their families (especially younger siblings) and wider community. Even if they don't impact anyone else, said minority students can get a higher paying job. They will have left the poverty cycle. If these benefits in any way transmit to their direct progeny, racial inequality will be reduced in the long run. "

Downvoted for off-topic whining. There are places where I'd consider it appropriate to complain about karmassinations (e.g., the open thread), but I can't see how a reply to Ishaan's comment would be such a place.

Assuming this is primarily a problem because it makes your comments less likely to be read, why not just change your handle? That'll throw them off your tail.