I agree with you on that, and that is unfortunate.

I do suspect the degree to which the people perceives that the "PC-police" controls everything is overblown.

I'm using a less-than-anonymous handle here, and I've just expressed support of Summers' right to present his data. I've also expressed open-mindedness (though not acceptance) towards the idea that genetically determined behavioral differences could conceivably exist.

I've got sufficient faith in the system that it won't punish me for open-mindedness to un-PC ideas. If I thought that what happened to Summers was a really common thing, I'd be using an anon handle to even discuss reactionary thought.

Would you say my trust is poorly placed?

It also depends on where you say said things (I see people post race- and gender-essentialist stuff on Facebook with their real name quite often, and nothing bad has happened to any of them as a result AFAIK), and which tone you use (sometimes truth isn't enough).

(But from what little I've read about the Summers incident, I agree the reaction was unfortunate.)

The cause of this seems highly separated from the topic of discussion (heritable intelligence) though. I think it is more than obvious that the main cause is selection bias; that is in general why immigrants in general often outperform those who already live there. If you have the drive, determination, and consciousness to be able to go through such a major life change, that itself says something about you. So this filter lets in only those who are talented in this regard.

This model makes the prediction that immigrants from countries that are harder to migrate from will be smarter than those who can migrate more freely. This is seen in the real world: As stated here, African immigrants to the US are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US. They beat out, say, Asian immigrants (who also overperform on average.) And Asian immigrants beat out, say, Canadian immigrants, who no one really claims are all that special or particularly distinguished (as migrating from Canada even easier.)

See here.

Here is one source which lays them out cleanly. Click on the first table.

http://www.asian-nation.org/immigrant-stats.shtml

Note that even though the educational achievement goes African immigrant >Asian immigrant > European immigrant > US-born, most of the metrics of financial and economic success go European immigrant > US-born > Asian Immigrant > African Immigrant.

I've seen findings to the effect that with each successive generation after the second, non-white immigrants tend to become poorer and less educated, though i don't remember which group they were looking at. If this interests you enough for me to go find them, let me know.

There are various possible explanations for this...

1) Self-Selection effects cause immigrants to seek education in greater numbers. interpersonal racism distorts market forces (see: various race-resume and job interview studies) to counteract the benefits of higher education. After the 2nd generations any self selection effect dies out and members of non-white racial groups drift economically downward.

I consider [1] to be the strongest hypothesis for the cause of race-related differences in socio-economics regardless of whether or not race-correlated-genetically-based differences in intelligence exist. I think there is plenty of evidence that racism is sufficient to create economic disparities - the mechanism is parsimonious and the steps are well-supported.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that there are not also genetic differences. Just because racism is sufficient to explain socioeconomic disparity doesn't mean it's necessary. Furthermore, we can't just assume that socioeconomic disparities alone can create the observed trends in behavioral intelligence testing. I don't think it's silly to have suspicions that genetic differences exist, but I still feel that it is really silly to be confident that they exist and claim high certainty concerning the magnitude, direction, and nature of these differences when we don't currently have much general insight into the mechanisms behind genetics and intelligence. It's even more overconfident to be certain that said supposed genetic differences have large-scale economic consequences. In general, one aught to be suspicious of big ideas with no well-understood mechanisms.

I was going to have a 2) and a 3) alternative hypotheses arguing devils advocate for the race realist side (invoking regression to the mean, affirmative action, etc) as well as a non-race-realist but also non-racism side, but as there appear to be a sufficient number of people who disagree with me present maybe I should just wait for someone who actually holds that opinion to supply those arguments.

FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn't expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.

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.

Look at this from a different perspective; how much evidence of climate change would I have to reject as "just indicative," how many discipline's consensus's would I have to ignore, how much special pleading and goalpost-moving would I have to do before you gave up on reasonable argument and called me a climate kook?

As far as I can tell, the implied analogy here between Ishaan's position and climate kookery is an unfair one. I am not aware of a consensus on the aetiology of between-race IQ differences comparable to the consensus on global warming.

Of course, even if there aren't synthesis reports written by hundreds of scientists, or statements from national scientific societies, there are smaller-scale reports & surveys on the IQ controversy. But what Ishaan wrote turns out to broadly agree with those.

The two obvious examples here are the research summaries published in the wake of the commotion around The Bell Curve. One is "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", a report by an 11-member panel approved by the American Psychological Association.

For IQ's heritability the panel reports values "of the order of .45" in childhood and "around .75" "by late adolescence" (p. 85). On the possibility of environmental factors entering into the white-black IQ gap it suggests that socioeconomic status "cannot be the whole explanation", but pays respectful attention to other cultural explanations of the gap (pp. 94-95) while acknowledging that they "have little direct empirical support" (p. 97). As for genetic factors: "There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential." (p. 97); "There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis." (p. 95). These conclusions are compatible with Ishaan's, except for the review's estimate of adult IQ heritability being higher than Ishaan's 60%.

The other research summary is Linda S. Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography". It goes into less detail on IQ's heritability, but where it gets quantitative it says "estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8" (p. 14), which brackets Ishaan's 60% estimate nicely. As for the cause of lower black IQ, it says:

22. There is no definitive answer to why IQ bell curves differ across racial-ethnic groups. The reasons for these IQ differences between groups may be markedly different from the reasons for why individuals differ among themselves within any particular group (whites or blacks or Asians). [...] Most experts believe that environment is important in pushing the bell curves apart, but that genetics could be involved too.

23. Racial-ethnic differences are somewhat smaller but still substantial for individuals from the same socioeconomic backgrounds. To illustrate, black students from prosperous families tend to score higher in IQ than blacks from poor families, but they score no higher, on average, than whites from poor families.

This too is consistent with what Ishaan wrote.

(A shorter petition, "Behavior and Heredity", appeared in American Psychologist in 1972 over the names of 50 researchers. But it doesn't make any claims specific enough to compare to Ishaan's.)

I also know of a couple of surveys. The more recent is Charlie Reeve & Jennifer Charles's "Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views", but that didn't ask its respondents about heritability or causes of interracial IQ differences. The older survey is Mark Snyderman & Stanley Rothman's "Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing", which did ask.

In fact, it broke the heritability question down further, by asking about IQ's heritability among American whites and American blacks, considered separately:

7. White heritability estimate. Despite a consensus that there is a significant heritability to IQ in the American white population, experts disagree on the issue of whether there is sufficient evidence to arrive at a reasonable estimate of this heritability. Thirty-nine percent feel that there is sufficient evidence, compared to 40% who do not. Twenty-one percent do not feel qualified to answer. Only those respondents who feel there is sufficient evidence were asked to provide a heritability estimate. The mean estimate for the 214 received is 0.596 (SD = 0.166), meaning that these experts believe, on the average, that 60% of the variation in IQ within the American white population is associated with genetic variation.

8. Black heritability estimate. Experts are much less inclined to believe that sufficient evidence exists for an estimate of IQ heritability among the American black population. Twenty percent feel there is sufficient evidence, and 54% feel there is not. The mean heritability estimate for 101 received is 0.571 (SD = 0.178).

Those averages are very close to Ishaan's. As for the black-white IQ difference:

12. The source of the black-white difference in IQ. [...] Forty-five percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15% who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. Twenty-four percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to support any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination.

There was no majority opinion in the survey. Even after cutting out the non-responses, only a bare majority (about 53%) felt confident in saying the IQ difference had a genetic component. Meanwhile, about 45% of those who responded took either the same position as Ishaan (insufficient data) or a more environmentalist one.

All in all, Ishaan's views are about as hereditarian as the expert consensus, where that consensus exists. I don't understand which "discipline's consensus's" Ishaan's meant to be ignoring. (I'm leery of the suggestion of "goalpost-moving", too, since I can't spot any substantial drift in the claims Ishaan made over time.)

But at the same time; a 1sd difference (either the -1 for Black Americans or the +1 for Ashkenazi Jews) in a highly g-loaded test is such a heavy finger on the scale that I can't imagine how my numbers would be off by the order of magnitude required to call the modern proportions "reasonable."

Sure, I didn't mean that modern proportions are reasonable; mine was just a nitpick.