So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.

There's no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans

So you are not going to let the absence of any facts get in your way.

Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution

Which presupposes that which is to be proven: That the Klu Klux Klan beat blacks up for being black, the way blacks beat whites up for being white every day.

The Klu Klux Klan made it dangerous to engage in certain political activities, especially if one was black (see the Wikipedia list of notorious Klan Murders). It did not make it dangerous merely to be black, the way it is dangerous merely to be white in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks. Klan violence was political violence, and indeed terrorism, but it was not race hate, not the race hate that we see so enthusiastically displayed by blacks on You tube

Come to think of it, it is also dangerous to be black in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks (the presence of whites makes blacks safer from other blacks), but it is even more dangerous to be white in such areas.

Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,

This may reflect the conservative belief in naive realism, that words refer to things in the world, and are ultimately defined by pointing at stuff, primarily by mothers pointing at stuff, as in "mother tongue". Leftists frequently believe that words create reality, hence they always start language projects.

If a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, no point in finding new words for shit. You want conservatives to say "gay". Observe. They say "gay", but somehow it sounds remarkably as if they saying (long, long, long list of words no one is allowed to say any more)

In the case of any particular couple, how the work, paid or unpaid, is divided, I don't really care. Unless the arrangement is a source of stress for that relationship.

I agree.

In one of my dreams last night, I was living with a sorceress. She needed some reagents, and her friend on the moon wanted to use a human skeleton for some occult purpose. So she removed my first person perspective/spirit from my body and put it on the mantle across from the magic mirror, so I could see things that were going on. She then incinerated my flesh, leaving charred bones held together in human form by magic.

I then watched an Indiana Jones-style path animation of my skeleton going to the moon, and of magic supplies for my sorceress girlfriend being sent from there to Earth. Other stuff happened in the magic mirror, and eventually there was another path animation of my bones being sent back. My bones were magically cleaned, flesh was put on them, and my spirit was returned to my body.

Despite the fact that she didn't ask my permission, I didn't mind and wasn't bothered by the events as they happened. In real life, I'm a different person and would probably mind such a thing.

My point is that whether something having to do with relative income or who does what in a relationship is a source of stress depends on the mindsets of the people in the relationship. If neither member of a couple minds acquiring goods or negotiable tokens by having one suddenly extrude the other's soul, scorch their body until their bones are black, and lend them to friends, and they're happier that way than they would be in less gruesome scenarios...that's what works for them.

I disagree with your conclusion, but on a somewhat pedantic level. Financial recompense and Optional reduction of financial expense are not equivalent. One is simply a pile of tokens. The other is a choice and a judgment about what to do with a pile of tokens. Do you disagree?

It depends somewhat on whether we are speaking descriptively or prescriptively, in terms of how people think about it.

Do I think that most people consider these to be the same, and that you are some odd outlier for interpreting it differently? No.

I just think this perspective is less useful, and leads to (amongst other things) such work being undervalued. Fundamentally, I have a set of choices in front of me that represent different outcomes; in some of these, my pile of tokens is larger than in others. When my pile of tokens is larger down one path than another, I am being financially compensated for making that choice (or financially penalized for making the other).

I did not notice stating this:

You stated that house work was financially unrecompensed.

This was my understanding of the comment here, and was what I initially objected to.

gender differences and choice difference probably do not wholly justify the pay inequity between genders.

To say that a situation is not wholly caused by enumerated factors is generally trivially true, so the question becomes how much connotation is intended, which means the question should probably be rephrased.

I don't think it's a good idea to ask if states of the world are justified when people disagree about the causes of those states of the world unless great care is taken to not be confusing. Those things can be addressed separately by just talking about causation and also asking what would be justified under a hypothetical set of facts.

And I am also calculating payment of intangible compensation, like the respect of others and self-respect.

I don't know how to think of those things, particularly self respect, particularly since the frame is not just causation but justice.

Heh, when arguing for the case that people should be careful with their wording, I'm challenged for a careless choice of wording. :-)

Innocuous in the sense of emerging from different-gendered people on average having different preferences and on average making different choices as a result. Me eating french fries every day, because I want to, is an innocous reason for eating french fries every day (though such behavior will probably cause health problems in the long term). Eating french fries every day because somebody pressures me into doing so, or because I genuinely can't afford anything else, is a non-innocous reason.

OK, I think I finally understand.

What was said was:

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.

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.

Someone (Eliezer?) once said something like: if you tell me exactly what it is that an Artificial Intelligence can't do, I can build an AI to do exactly that. If a person who believes in a fundamental difference at that sort of level between machines and animals can precisely define something, a computer can follow that definition.

It doesn't work quite as well here. But if someone gives a good enough answer for their question of "who", with exactly why an animal wouldn't count, or a computer, or a corporation, they may make their question so complicated that it only has one answer or no answers as asked.

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?