In informal logic books and classes, you can find long lists of standard fallacies, such as “appeal to authority”, “argument ad hominem”, and “begging the question”.
The more popular a position is, the easier it is to be dogmatic. Maybe my experience is biased, but while I am constantly hearing both sympathetic and unsympathetic criticisms of libertarianism, and responses to those criticisms, I almost never hear conservatives or especially progressives defending their own ideas. They mostly stick to criticizing the other side. Who is the defender of the status quo? Krugman? Donald Wittman?
I emphatically agree with your point about assumptions. I am no longer surprised when persons confidently declare that something is impossible, when it actually has already happened in history. I wonder if this timidity toward variation and experiment doesn’t hold back society to a remarkable degree. If someone doesn’t want to participate in an experiment, that's fine, but why prevent others from doing so? Mostly it seems to be because we have inherited a mass-production mass-consumption mindset from the progressive era.
You said that the gender pay gap disappears after "controlling for occupation," but what if the effect of sexism occurs earlier in the causal chain than that? That is, what if the reason women opt into different occupations at different rates is itself because of sexist factors? If so, then "controlling for occupation" wouldn't suffice to show that sexism isn't responsible for the gap in pay.
(I myself don't have an opinion about the pay gap, but I don't think your argument is enough to settle the issue. This is not an invitation to "fight me.")
You can always hypothesize some hidden sexism, racism, etc., that no one can either prove or refute. That's why people like the concept of "systemic racism". The initial suggestion was that employers are discriminating against women by paying them less. When that turns out to be false, you can always say, "Well, maybe there's some other kind of sexism that we don't have any evidence for."
That's basically what the post is about. People just assume that there's sexism, and there's no way of making them revise that belief. If you rebut the evidence for it, they'll say they don't have to give up the belief because you haven't positively proved that it can't be true.
The more popular a position is, the easier it is to be dogmatic. Maybe my experience is biased, but while I am constantly hearing both sympathetic and unsympathetic criticisms of libertarianism, and responses to those criticisms, I almost never hear conservatives or especially progressives defending their own ideas. They mostly stick to criticizing the other side. Who is the defender of the status quo? Krugman? Donald Wittman?
I emphatically agree with your point about assumptions. I am no longer surprised when persons confidently declare that something is impossible, when it actually has already happened in history. I wonder if this timidity toward variation and experiment doesn’t hold back society to a remarkable degree. If someone doesn’t want to participate in an experiment, that's fine, but why prevent others from doing so? Mostly it seems to be because we have inherited a mass-production mass-consumption mindset from the progressive era.
You said that the gender pay gap disappears after "controlling for occupation," but what if the effect of sexism occurs earlier in the causal chain than that? That is, what if the reason women opt into different occupations at different rates is itself because of sexist factors? If so, then "controlling for occupation" wouldn't suffice to show that sexism isn't responsible for the gap in pay.
(I myself don't have an opinion about the pay gap, but I don't think your argument is enough to settle the issue. This is not an invitation to "fight me.")
Occupation and other pay-relevant factors.
You can always hypothesize some hidden sexism, racism, etc., that no one can either prove or refute. That's why people like the concept of "systemic racism". The initial suggestion was that employers are discriminating against women by paying them less. When that turns out to be false, you can always say, "Well, maybe there's some other kind of sexism that we don't have any evidence for."
That's basically what the post is about. People just assume that there's sexism, and there's no way of making them revise that belief. If you rebut the evidence for it, they'll say they don't have to give up the belief because you haven't positively proved that it can't be true.