As far as I can see, the comments did not (just) assert that adjusted wages were nearly identical. They asserted:
1) That this is not a serious issue and 0 economists study it.
2) That at no point in history was the adjusted wage different between men and women. (This was asserted and not argued for.)
Comments which just asserted that adjusted wages might be nearly identical can still be seen. I agree that this might be debated. The other two opinions appear more extrem and much less plausible, as far as I am concerned.
I still feel that silencing someone is unhelpful. Why not let their claim stand? if outrageous - let it be handily refuted with logic and data and them made to look foolish. This is far more effective then silencing someone who then becomes a martyr. I also find it interesting that people on the far opposing side, those who come in with raw pay gap numbers whilst shouting "discrimination", they seem to always get a pass? Pay inequality has been well known since WW1, but all except a tiny portion of actual discrimination has been repeatedly dis-proven since the 1980s. Still huge numbers of people still parade the societal discrimination mantra proudly. People and parties run elections on it. Classes in prominent universities are taught preaching it (based on a few personal accounts, court cases and raw un-ajusted statistics). It is almost a religions justice objective for many to fix the unprovable wrongs of a system. Those are the people I often see shouting down the logical thinkers and data analysts.
This denialism is not compatible with the facts. While part of the gender pay gap can be explained by the factors you describe, not all of it can. This unexplained part is often assumed to be (largely) due to discrimination. This unexplained part has also been shrinking over time, indicating that discrimination has decreased. (See
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13524-014-0320-... )
Here are journal articles on the topics, showing that economic researchers are covering the topic:
Wikipedia do mention the distinction between unadjusted versus adjusted pay gap in the Gender pay gap article, but sadly the article is very sparse on details.
It is the adjusted pay gap that is disputed. No one is really disputing unadjusted pay gap, through some consider that unadjusted pay gap should include everyone including those unemployed. The problem with unadjusted pay gap is that it ignore context.
With context we get a very large variation in the data sets, and large variation in control variables. There is no standard in what variable to use with adjusted pay gap.
Variables commonly cited when comparing full time employed men and women is that men work almost an hour longer per day than women for the same job. Women also use about 50% more sick days, and if I remember right from a study from Norway, about 200% more likely to have children compared to men. Those that have children are then also more likely to stay at home to take care of them, which is a related issue but not the same as pay gap. Overtime is an other factor which correlates with pay raise, as is moving work location and changing employer.
A good sign when I look at such studies is if they can use the same data to predict whom will get a pay raise within the same gender group. The better they can do that the better they can account for those factors when comparing the gender groups to each other. Sadly very few studies does this.
The point of linking these studies was that economists study these issues. As I am not an economist myself, I do not want to weigh in on the specific final conclusion the literature arrives at. All I can say, that multiple studies seem to find an unexplained part which is taken to be due to discrimination.
I think a good comparison is to look at global warming studies. They too have a lot of unexplained data which are unaccounted for which could be due to natural phenomenon, but their conclusion is that global warming is man made and those unexplained parts are just unaccounted variables.
A scientific method to address the mix of unexplained data is to use prediction models on the assumption that the theory is correct and see if it works to explain the data. In the case of global warming we know that the prediction model does not work and the measured data is significant outside of what a natural phenomenon would look like. scientists has thus mostly discarded the theory of natural phenomenon and instead looked to combine the multiple studies and find man made explanations for unexplained data.
The same thing was done with gender pay. If we assume gender discrimination is causing the gender pay gap then a more gender equal nation should predictable have a lower gender pay gap. What we get instead is the opposite, the so called gender-equality paradox, where the more gender equal a nation is the higher the gender pay gap becomes. We really should follow the same scientific standard as global warming scientists and discard the theory of discrimination as the cause of gender pay gap, but we don't. Instead we see "half" of people trying to explain the failed predictions with the injection that the more gender equal nations is in reality less gender equal, and the other half arguing that it doesn't matter that the prediction model do not explain the data.
This is where I think most contention lies in the discussions around gender pay gap.
> The point of linking these studies was that economists study these issues
The sentence I said that triggered you was "0 economists are working on this problem", referring obviously to the pay gap caused by discrimination.
You have linked to inaccurate (as per comment above) studies that study whether there is a pay gap or not, and are inconclusive.
Since the pay gap as a problem--therefore not as a hard-to-measure occurrence but as a problem caused by discrimination--has not been proven, there are 0 economist working on this problem.
It's not been proven to be an actual problem that exists, and that's why no economist is working on fixing it.
I doubt your assessment of the literature. Since we do not seem to agree on this, I would defer to the opinion of specialists in this case. An independent panel of economists would thus have to settle the issue.
But your other argumentation is quite interesting. Do you also hold that 0 physicist ever worked on the theory of phlogiston? Or on ether? Neither of those to exist. Because your argumentation would also imply that. I would reject that suggestion. So even if I were to grant that this problem does not exist, which I do not, I would disagree with the conclusion of your post.
> But your other argumentation is quite interesting. Do you also hold that 0 physicist ever worked on the theory of phlogiston? Or on ether?
The pay gap as caused by discrimination has not been proven to be a problem. That's why there aren't people working on solving it.
I honestly don't know what the things you mentioned are, but I fail to see how physics are related to this topic. However, if you really have to use examples a better one would be that I'm saying that there weren't a lot of scientists working on curing AIDS before AIDS appeared.
> This unexplained part is often assumed to be (largely) due to discrimination
This is literally the part that is controversial, and you're asserting it as a given. Controlling for almost any confounding variable so far has reduced the wage gap, the majority of which was/is often put forward as primarily having been the consequence of discrimination to begin with.
There are things that are also simply very difficult to control for, but are certainly at play. Are you sure that productivity is being measured outside of hours worked? Aggressiveness in salary negotiation? Actual hours worked vs. full-time time presumption as all members being 40 hour week? I often see one study attempt to control for one factor and fail on another. Cartoonish discrimination strikes me personally as among the least likely defacto explanations for the remaining gap.
The most important IMHO is salary negotiation. Women are less prone to challenge what they're given. That's the reason why a razor for women that is identical but painted a different color is more expensive--women will buy it without challenging the price. Following the same pattern, women are less prone to both negotiate a better salary when hired and ask for a raise.
It's also true that women value people more than objects and work jobs where they take care of people instead of fiddling with objects, which pays less and is less scalable. Finally, less women get satisfaction from "being the best", so while there are a lot of women CEOs and in particular women politicians, most women are not attracted by the prospect of sacrificing everything to get to the top.
There are people that have been taught that there is discrimination, and will see it everywhere. With the pay gap--which would normally be explained by a variety of naturally-occurring things--they just jump to the conclusion that of course it MUST be caused by patriarchy and discrimination. Since it's a very hard thing to measure, you might even be able to find studies that "prove" this theory.
Those women lose however, because if they spent as much time working on the skills that would help them get more money (in particular negotiating skills) as much as they spend complaining about oppression or commiserating themselves, they would make the same if not more than men.
The most powerful people in Europe are women (Merkel, May, etc.). Either there is no powerful oppressive male patriarchy, or we really suck at it. Either way, women get become as successful as they are willing to work for, in western countries.
From Wikipedia I read: "a substantial portion of the pay gap (12%) remained unexplained.". Pretty small, and a lot smaller than what feminists claim the gap to be.
Then, at the end of the same section you linked: "In 2018, economists at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, working with Uber analyzing the gender pay gap of Uber drivers demonstrated an average 7% pay gap in a context where gender discrimination was not possible and pay was not negotiated, showing the difference entirely explainable as the difference in average productivity between men and women".
Am I mistaken in interpreting this to mean that only 5% is unexplained, and that "unexplained" does not mean evil patriarchy?
Any group of people will be discriminated by 5%. For instance, I'm Italian. Are you telling me that in the States I won't find 5% (or even 12% or more) of people that think I'm dishonest, mafioso, lazy, etc..?
I believe you are willfully misconstruing my position instead of trying to engage in the most charitable interpretation.
You original comment which has now been flagged suggested that 0 economists took the issue of the gender gap serious. By "denialism" I meant to refer to your position of denying that this is an issue at all. That it is an issue treated by serious economists is a fact. You have since reneged from that denial, which I consider a step forward. What you are now questioning is how big an issue it is.
Nowhere in my comment do I refer to any "evial patriarchy", although I do consider such an issue grave. If around half of the working population is discriminated against by 5% that would be a pretty huge issue overall. That other instances of discrimination exist, for example discrimination against people of Italian descent does not change that.
I am afraid you are also incorrect in picking out the end of the Wikipedia section I linked to. As this section I linked to points out, the Uber setting is very special because the pay is set via the Uber company without hiring the drivers in the usual sense.
> I believe you are willfully misconstruing my position instead of trying to engage in the most charitable interpretation.
I don't believe so.
> You original comment which has now been flagged suggested that 0 economists took the issue of the gender gap serious. By "denialism" I meant to refer to your position of denying that this is an issue at all. That it is an issue treated by serious economists is a fact. You have since reneged from that denial, which I consider a step forward. What you are now questioning is how big an issue it is.
I have no idea why it was flagged because it was a normal comment, and not even a very controversial position to hold. You're saying "has now been flagged" like I called for all women to be killed while swearing and offending people (perhaps to discredit me/my opinions?).
As for changing my mind (or even "reneging from that denial"), I think you're overestimating yourself: you didn't present anything that made me change my mind. 10% of unaccounted "discrimination" would be proof that this is an issue? Even if it was (which we don't know), like I said you can find 10% of people that will discriminate against anything: Italians, women, attractive vs. unattractive people, blacks, blond people, fat people, skinny people.
This whole thing is overblown. There are certain people that want to see injustice everywhere and will use the 10% pay gap that is unaccounted for to prove that there is a problem of women being oppressed, while either there is no problem, or it's so little to be negligible and most importantly similar to other biases.
> I am afraid you are also incorrect in picking out the end of the Wikipedia section I linked to. As this section I linked to points out, the Uber setting is very special because the pay is set via the Uber company without hiring the drivers in the usual sense.
I think it's a perfect example. Even taking away human bias--so, removing the hiring process, men and women perform differently. That's why it doesn't make sense to compare men and women like they're exactly the same, or why when you do you'll get a 10% discrepancy.
You know what we could agree on? That we are human and will naturally be 10% biased towards anything. Not only women, but all groups of people I mentioned and more. Sometimes it's women, sometimes it's Italians, sometimes it's attractive vs. unattractive people. This obsession with equality of outcome creates a lot more problems than that 10%, considering that while you may lose 10% on your workplace because of bias/opinion X, you might gain 10% in other aspects of your life and at the end it just averages out. In first-world and second-world western countries people have equality of opportunity, which is what really counts.
EDIT: HN doesn't allow me to reply to your comment below (thread too deep), but it's not worth it anyway.
Here is a case in which I think you do not engage in the most charitable interpretation: 'You're saying "has now been flagged" like I called for all women to be killed'
A more charitable interpretation would have been that I wanted to make clear that what I responded to can no longer be seen. I ask you to please interpret me as charitably as possible. I will try to do the same.
You said 0 economists study the issue. I showed you that multiple economists study it. You now also assert that I didn't make you change your mind. Do you still hold that 0 economists study the issue? If you do not, you have changed your mind. If you do still hold that opinion, then I am not sure how to proceed as that would indicate that you are impervious to argumentation.
You are using the number of 10% in two ways:
1.) About 10% of the gender pay gap are unaccounted for and therefore likely to be the result of direct discrimination.
2.) Every group is discriminated against by other people by around 10% of the population.
But these are very different issues. If every group was discriminated against by 10% of the population, the resulting pay differences would (more or less) even out. The does not, which suggests that this a widespread and systematic phenomenon. For some people, although perhaps not you and I grant that it would need to be debated, this might make the problem appear more severe.
Much of your posts just questions the importance of the issue. That is a normative question, which I consider separate from the issue whether the gender pay gap can be partially traced back to discrimination. Here is what I hold in regard to that normative question: I do not want to tell other people that they should not care about the discrimination they experience when I am on the end that profits or at least does not suffer it. It is up to people subjected to this treatment to decide how big of an issue they want to make out of it. I suggest it is a good normative heuristic that one should be wary to question the severity of the problem if one is on the side who is not affected by it. If you are fine discounting discrimination you experience, then that is all well but I would suggest you should not extend that to other people so easily.
(I edited this post to more adequately reflect the position of the previous poster.)
I just don't understand how any thinking person can argue this. If women were actually taking less money for the same output then why would anyone hire a man? Discrimination surely exists, but do you really think that not one single company ever would take advantage of this fact to become successful?
He offers a response to L.A. Paul and a way to choose in light of changing selves. I am not sure how convinced I am myself, but it is very good philosophical work.
Wikipedia say's it's from a Man called David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001); an American philosopher, so...From Plato and Socrates until you get to 2001 there is a lot of stuff to learn, indeed...
<Warning, humor ahead, your are free to skip it>...
</humor> I will let to master it after lunch, before back to the office </humor>
"Few questioned the institution of slavery, and none the patriarchy"
Plato's Republic questioned both slavery and patriarchy. Since this is arguably the most influential philosophical work of the classics, the above statement doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It is true that slavery and patriarchy were the deeply engrained status quo at that point of history and that Plato's vision had authoritarian features, but there was more questionening than the linked text suggests.
Epicurus allowing women into his school as a matter of rule rather than exception, thousands of years before our universities would do so, also deserves our respect.
Whether or not these topics fall under the domain of philosophy, let me assure you that people in philosophy departments are covering them. Especially philosophers working in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have a lot to say about issues such as embodiment, the relation between agents and environment (consider the extended mind debate or the debate about affordances), representation (e.g. Fodor), and many more.
In my experience when philosophers say something about those things, they say it in natural language (typically English), and that is not precise enough for measurement. All problems can be handwaved away with ad-hoc modification.
The difference between philosophers 'doing' AI and what e.g. DeepMind do is that the latter are precise enough (indeed as precise as possible -- pace the Church-Turing thesis) about their research hypotheses that they can measure and confirm/refute their hypotheses, unlike the former.
Whence all progress in AI since Turing, Shannon, Zuse et al has come from programmers and not philosophers.
Which philosopher has laid down the foundations of the field? One good starting point for AI is Leibniz' Calculemus!, and Leibniz was a mathematician/programmer and not a philosopher in the sense that the original article by Tim Maudlin seems to defend. Leibniz even built automata, formaliesed (propositional logic) etc!
I've had this discussion on HN several times before. As soon as you start pointing out the contributions of philosophy to various fields, people start denying that the people in question were philosophers. So you really can't win. By this logic, any philosopher who made a contribution to mathematics or science was ipso facto a scientist or mathematician and not a philosopher.
I completely agree with you. It's a difficult subject.
I have proposed
the following two definitions:
1. Philosophers in the original article: best understood as acedemic
philosopers.
2. Progress in AI/maths/hard science: comes from those who actually
"do the maths/implementation/repeatable measurement" as opposed to
using natural language only for discussing their ideas.
In my opinion the purpose of all science is truth, and truth (pace
Socrates and the slave boy) must -- among other things -- be
reproducable by others, ideally by every human. Technology for truth
has improved over time, with mathematisation (and edge case
programming and exectuion on a computer) as the current state of the
art in reproducibility. When Frege succeeded in formalising
first-order logic, the sacred heart of rationality, informal methods
became second-class. All substantial progress in subjects formerly
restricted to informal methods has since come from formalisation and
empirical experiment.
If you don't agree with my (1, 2) above, than that's fine, we are talking abotu (slightly) different things.
You seem to be assuming that philosophers are somehow restricted to using natural language only, but
* the formalization and regimentation of natural language has always been a fairly central concern in philosophy (that's where formal logic comes from);
* mathematics can be, and used to be, done in largely natural language.
What was a good definition of philosopher then is not what is a good definition now. Meaning evolves!
I invite you to think historically, and in terms of ongoing differentiation of science: the drive towards formalising/axiomatising mathematics which was started in earnest at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, has been accelerating. These days mathematics is partly verified in interactive theorem provers like Isabelle/HOL, Coq, Agda and Lean. A Fields medallist (Voevodsky) dedicated his post-Fields career towards more mechanisation of Mathematics. I predict that in 100 years from now, mathematics that is not formalised in a mechanical tool will not be publishable in reputable venues.
Philosophy is also much more formal than it was 1000 years ago (e.g. compare [1] to [2]). Indeed, the formalization of mathematics was driven by philosophers trying to put mathematical reasoning on an adequate foundation.
> The difference between philosophers 'doing' AI and what e.g. DeepMind do is that the latter are precise enough (indeed as precise as possible -- pace the Church-Turing thesis) about their research hypotheses that they can measure and confirm/refute their hypotheses, unlike the former.
They still remain in a framework of axioms we made. This gains nothing, and what's more, many scientists used to know this. Everything you measure you measure according to a ruler you or someoone else ultimately made. Yes, numbers are more precise, but more importantly, they're just numbers. And like what Douglas Adams said about money.. it's very odd how much revolves around numbers, seeing how it's not the numbers that are unhappy, guilty, and so on. Never bought into that, and always preferred the company that puts me in.
> And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities, but pointer-readings which we can observe, The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the world-qualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber.
— Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Domain of Physical Science (1925)
> The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
-- Konrad Zuse
> But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum
How would you measure something like nobility? Do things you cannot measure exist? Can things you cannot prove mathematically true? Can they be right? Should a person who doesn't love wisdom, or people for that matter, even be allowed program machines that decide over the lives of others?
In game theory (such as prisoner's dilemma) there is a concept of cooperation and betrayal. When an agent interacts with another agent, she has to decide whether it is in her best interest to cooperate or exploit the other. Depending on the social environment and the existence or future interactions with the same agent, the choice can change. A noble human would be one who does not betray the larger good for its own limited gain. Thus nobility emerges from the cooperation/betrayal strategy in a multi-agent game.
Only if you think philosophy of mind is the same thing as computer science. I would consider neuroscience and psychology to be more informative for questions about the mind.
I am in awe of the empirical work in Neuroscience. The last few years have seen a "Cambrian Explosion" of new measurements. We can now measure live neurons at scale! I do think this work is also much more interesting than arm-chair thinking about the brain, consciousness, embodied cognition etc. However, as a working programmer/logician/foundations of maths person I'm in much better a position to compare and contrast formal work in my field with philosophers contribution than I can in neuroscience.
How do you see the influence of the Heideggerian critique of cognitivism, via Hubert Dreyfus, on the "Heideggerian AI" movement which preceded the shift away from classical symbolic AI towards connectionism and embodied learning?
Here's from the introduction to his paper Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require making it more Heideggerian:
> When I was teaching at MIT in the early sixties, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: “You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand how the mind works. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed. We are now programming computers to exhibit human intelligence: to solve problems, to understand natural language, to perceive, and to learn.” In 1968 Marvin Minsky, head of the AI lab, proclaimed: “Within a generation we will have intelligent computers like HAL in the film, 2001.”
> [...] As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic” – a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed, — Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.
Dreyfus agrees with you, in a way, although where you criticize philosophers doing AI, he criticizes the philosophical prejudices of AI practitioners, who often hold beliefs derived from Cartesian views on the mind. He especially criticized the grand claims of early AI researchers, but I think the criticism is still easily applicable.
Here, for example, from his book Being-in-the-world:
> Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements.
I'm not familiar with the Heideggerian critique of cognitivism, or of Hubert Dreyfus' work, but some of your quotes sound agreeable. I am not convinced however that the frame problem and related issues are unsolvable. The way forward is to program, measure and improve.
I agree partially. It is true that philosophy cannot entirely keep up with scientific and technical developments, which is not surprising given the amount of resources that flow into philosophy compared to the money spent on STEM fields. That being said, philosophers hardly talk about the Chinese room and qualia these days. There is even a tiny move away from the hard problem of consciousness. See: https://philpapers.org/archive/CHATMO-32.pdf
Also, there is me. I have a PhD in philosophy and work towards an MPhil in CS to cover the areas you mention. Some philosophers are on it, trying to keep up.
Philosophy of mathematics is just one part of the connection between philosophy and mathematics. Many historical philosophers have been heavily influenced by mathematical thinking.
To give just a few examples from European history of philosophy: Spinoza took the geometric method (basically the axiomatic method) from Euclid. Kant is heavily drawing on geometry and the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry has been suggested as disproving him. If you look into Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Sciences, you will find a lengthy discussion of calculus.
In current analytic philosophy there are many other areas of overlap and cross-polination, for example in decision theory and metaphysics.
1) That this is not a serious issue and 0 economists study it.
2) That at no point in history was the adjusted wage different between men and women. (This was asserted and not argued for.)
Comments which just asserted that adjusted wages might be nearly identical can still be seen. I agree that this might be debated. The other two opinions appear more extrem and much less plausible, as far as I am concerned.