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Clarica comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong
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you do not address my point of the word choice 'innocuous'.
Ok: let's suppose he intended the primary definition of innocuous, "not harmful." If a choice is made voluntarily, then by the assumption of revealed preferences it is the least 'harmful.' If we forced women to choose with the same distribution that men do, then on net women would be worse off- i.e. harmed by our force.
It seems incontestable to me that distributions of values are different for men and women. If values are different, choices will be different, and that is optimal.
I agree that men and women have different distributions of values due to sexual dimorphism. It isn't obvious, though, that those different values are sufficient to explain women choosing to stay and home and raise children at a greater rate than men. For example, it may be the case the women face greater social pressure to raise children or that when couples choose who should continue working and who should stay home there is an unjustified cultural assumption that women should be the ones who stay home. There may also be social pressures in the other direction: pushing men to work more than is optimal. It is harder to find social companionship as a stay at home father and Western culture ties the ability to provide for a family to man's worth. Even if these cultural norms are the product of on-average sexual dimorphism they would still harm those who deviate from the average values of their sex. A man who prefers to stay home and raise children and a woman who prefers to leave children at home to work may face additional costs to their decisions because their values deviate from what they are expected to value due to their gender.
I do not have any objection to your use of the word innocuous, here.
I think that calling the choice to spend more or less time doing financially unrecompensed work in the home an innocuous gender difference, is careless. The harms of the various choices have not been evaluated that well. And it may be impossible to evaluate that harm without bias.
It is not uncompensated financially, if the alternative is hiring someone to do the same work. It may or may not be under-compensated, depending on her other options.
I find this a fascinating assertion. What other harms do you imagine might be unevaluatable?
Who would compensate them? Whose benefit is it for?
I do not really understand your questions. Can you define 'who' 'them' 'whose' and 'it'? Would, compensate, benefit, is, and for I get.
Not sure if serious. Just in case you are, however: 'them' is referring to the people doing financially unrecompensed work in the home. 'it' is the financially unrecompensed work in the home. 'Who' and 'Whose' are up to you to define - that's why they're phrased as questions, dontcha know.
I am trying to be clear about the fact that the ONLY part of this thread I care about was the use of the word 'innocuous'. All these other questions are good questions that people are asking, and answering, for themselves, and for other people, every day. Which I have no quarrel with.
I do not want to answer these questions for other people. This question:
is an excellent question that I actually do not want to answer, because noone has acknowledged that my point about the word innocuous is valid or valuable criticism. All the feedback I have seen so far dodges this small point to ask me much tougher questions about how individuals should be making these choices.
Why me? I make no assertions other than that the word 'innocuous' in that specific argument suggests that the reasons their is gender pay inequity is harmless. Because I am not sure that it is harmless.
I do not want to quantify the harm, but if you want me to take a stab at it, how about this:
Do some pay inequities cause stress? Does stress aggravate some mental disorders? (for the record, I am not trying to suggest that this harm is greater to either gender!)
Point the first - Now I'm confused. Is it that
or is it that "I do not really understand your questions."? Or did my explanation allow you to understand that you didn't want to answer, or...
Point the second - Hypothetically, if this:
is true, then gender pay inequities do have an innocuous explanation- namely, the above. Kaj_Sotala made no claims beyond that, certainly not to the extent of claiming the above statement is true in the real world.
This leads me to believe your point is not valid or valuable criticism. If you think I'm wrong, could you explain why?
Your explanation couldn't possibly have cleared it up?
Well... I highly doubt it, both because the original 'confusion' seemed blindingly obvious to me and because
indicates to me something other than "Oh, so that's what that was about!" In fact, it seems more along the lines of "Your clarification was not needed because I was missing the point intentionally."
But in the interests of being as charitable as possible, I have edited my reply.
Than you for making clear that you do not agree that my point is valid or valuable criticism.
My objection to the word choice of harmless is based on my feelings, which I have not fully examined, that there may be harm.
Hypothetically, I agree with you.
I think I am having the most objection, in the statement you quote, with the phrase 'mostly attributable'. I can think of several other reasons that can and do account for a gender-based inequity, all possibly innocuous. The one that springs to mind is something to do with women and negotiation of payscale, but as I look for resource that can explain what I mean by that more clearly than I have managed to, I came across another interesting theory on wikipedia, that I had never heard of before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_pay_for_women#Different_Studies_and_Economic_Theories
"They interpret their findings to suggest that employers are willing to pay more for white male employees because employers are customer driven and customers are happier with white male employees. They also suggest that what is required to solve the problem of wage inequality isn't necessarily paying women more but changing customer biases."
This difference does not seem so harmless. Do you agree?
I think this might be confusing pedanterrific because if I read you right above you don't agree with him. I thought your position was similar to the one I made here that that explanation of pay inequality, even if true, is not innocuous because the reason why men and women make different choices about work and home life could be harmful social pressure, or some other reason that we don't think people should have to face in an ideal world. But I could have misread you when you wrote this:
Yes, of course. That's trivially true and not in dispute.
I still think you're rather missing the point, however. I don't see how it makes sense to object to the phrase 'mostly attributable' when that's a premise of the hypothetical. Let's look at the original comment in context:
That is, IF [the difference is mostly attributable to something innocuous], THEN [denying population-level differences seems harmful]. That's all that was said. Kaj_Sotala never claimed the innocuous explanation was true.
Editeditedit: I apologize for my horrible social skills.
OK, I think I finally understand.
What was said was:
One common explanation of harm and utilities is that the "real" or important utility function held by a human is that implied by the humans actions. If a human chooses A over B, that means to the human A has a higher value than B to the human. This runs us into problems, for example when humans choose B over C and C over A, but there is no agreed upon way to discuss the relationship of humans to utility functions. We just don't know how to extract the human and cut the nonsense without cutting the human! This is despite extensively discussing extrapolate volition. One way to get people to actually choose consistently among A, B, and C is to teach them about this paradox, but let's just say for our purposes here that it's clearly not out of line to discuss people's "true" preferences being something other than what they choose.
Vaniver: Ok: let's suppose he intended the primary definition of innocuous, "not harmful." If a choice is made voluntarily, then by the assumption of revealed preferences it is the least 'harmful.' If we forced women to choose with the same distribution that men do, then on net women would be worse off- i.e. harmed by our force.
Clarica: I think that calling the choice to spend more or less time doing financially unrecompensed work in the home an innocuous gender difference, is careless. The harms of the various choices have not been evaluated that well.
One issue is that language is flexible, and it is common to see "innocuous explanation" as a way of discussing the motives of a person causing the things the explanation explains, rather than according to the usual adjective-noun relationship where the adjective modifies the noun.
For example: a video teaching "how to fold a shirt" with the audio 50 decibels is a harmless explanation. The same video with the audio at 125 decibels is a harmful explanation.
No one argues that the explanation itself would have only good consequences, the discussion is instead what sort of harmlessness is meant instead. Whether the author's intent is clearly that, if it is discovered that women's actions alone cause the statistical difference, i) employers are doing no harm in the hypothetical case, or ii) if a similarly plausible interpretation is that no one is suffering harm, for had they chosen as men, there would be no disparity.
Context points to the first explanation as the best contrast with "discrimination", what employers are allegedly doing, and what hypothetical evidence would clear them of, but it's easy to see why someone intending the second point might have used the same words.
The sentence might be rewritten: "But if it is, then denying any population-level differences between men and women seems harmful, because it implies that something fully explained by innocuous behavior is because of discrimination."
The principle of charity protects us in similar cases where we happen to only see one interpretation and it is the wrong one.
I feel like this is an accurate, thoughtful, and generous explanation of the confusion I have and the confusion I cause. If I could spend my few measly karma points upvoting this, I might!
After I read it, because it's late, and I can not take it all in right now. And I'm grateful for the effort, and the clarity of the parts I already understand!
Why was this downvoted?
If I had downvoted it, it would be because I can't really imagine reading "Who would compensate them?" and responding "Can you define 'who'?" as a serious attempt at communication.
And you call yourself pedantic? There were a number of referents in my comment which could have applied, and while I usually feel at no disadvantage in a battle of wits, I have a mental problem that either renders me easily confused, or fully aware that I am not a mind reader.
This comment is supposed to be serious and funny. Can you guess which parts I think are funny, and why?
Ready for some meta-meta-irony? At the time I chose the username, I actually wasn't aware that "terrific" is a word people commonly misspell.
At this point I'm afraid to try.
Actually, 'this comment' was self-referential. The comment you reviewed was intentionally serious, and unintentionally ridiculous. I get that a lot.
But ridiculous is funny, and I totally agree with your last judgement of funny, and wish I had noticed that it was funny, BEFORE I posted. I am trying to get comfortable with being accidentally funny.
I should really just stick with a pretense that everything funny I say is intentionally hilarious, instead of just occasionally patently ridiculous. Apparently.