Well... I highly doubt it, both because the original 'confusion' seemed blindingly obvious to me and because

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. ...

... that I actually do not want to answer, because noone has acknowledged that my point about the word innocuous is valid or valuable criticism.

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.

Point the second - Hypothetically, if this:

the difference in average pay between women and men is mostly attributable to differences in ambition and time voluntarily spent at home with children.

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.

Hypothetically, I agree with you.

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:

I don't think I'd use the word innocuous with the example of this reason for this gender difference. If it is a rational choice, why don't both genders make similar choices?

Do you agree?

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:

E.g. I've often heard it claimed that the difference in average pay between women and men is mostly attributable to differences in ambition and time voluntarily spent at home with children. I haven't looked at the matter enough to know if this is true. But if it is, then denying any population-level differences between men and women seems harmful, because it implies that something that actually has an innocuous explanation is because of discrimination.

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.