A Quick Thought on the Use of Denial

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." ~ Christopher Hitchens, aka Hitchen's Razor.

Denial is one of the most simple and frequently used ways to avoid responsibility. The others being Excuses (it has to be this way), Blaming (it's your fault) and the almost miscellaneous and hard to categorize Telling-a-story/Diversion (you know this situation reminds me of...).

While I am open, even eager to being persuaded there is a fifth way to shirk responsibility, with almost a decade of cold calling call center experience (approximating a sample size of some 10,000+ random members of the Australian public I have spoken to) where on aggregate the majority of the general population do avoid responsibility for not wanting to do the survey; the above four - denial, excuses, blaming, diversion - pretty much exhaustively covered every call that did not actually resolve (either through a refusal or a survey). And yes, denial (I don't [subject of survey] so I can't help you) occurred more frequently than excuses (I'm busy), which were more frequent than blame (you always call during dinner time) and much more frequent than diversion (so what do you think about the alien autopsy?). And just so, people agreeing to do a survey was far more common than refusing to do a survey, so I'd guesstimate - having to recall spreadsheets of actual stats that some 60% of the tens of thousands of calls result in having to call again another time.

To be clear, and stay on topic, responsibility is good. I frame it in my mind as literally the ability to respond, it is an empowered position and as such we should seek to take as much responsibility as we possibly can ethically. Because I view responsibility as an empowered state however, this means one should avoid usurping responsibility from others because that is disempowering others. 

This is what I want to say about denial though:

To be guilty of denial requires the establishment of a fact to deny.

Creating a neat and tidy two-step process:

1. Provide sufficient evidence to support your claim.

2. In the advent that someone denies the evidence, you can label them a denier.

This could spare the world a lot of bad-juju. My concern arises from 'denial' or 'denier' being used as a pejorative, specifically with the practical function of discrediting a speaker.

In practice this looks like someone getting labelled a x denier, a visible example being climate deniers whom probably label themselves climate skeptics.

"Here’s a fun fact: Climate change deniers tend to be, on average, more knowledgeable on climate science than those who embrace climate change as a serious threat.

This too, is somewhat intuitive when you think about it: Most of us are perfectly happy to defer to the apparent scientific consensus. So we don’t read the literature, we just say, “well, the scientists believe this, and I trust them.”

However, for those who are disinclined to trust the consensus position, and who strike an oppositional stance – they know they’ll have to justify it. They know their position is going to be unpopular, they know they’ll be bashed as ignorant science deniers. So they are more likely to actually read stuff – including actual scientific literature. They will be more motivated to get familiar with the big issues, identify apparent weak points/ gaps/ contradictions in the literature, to identify dissenters and their arguments." ~ Musa al-Gharbi, Three Strategies for Navigating Moral Disagreements.

The point of this is not that 'turns out, climate deniers are right' but more a promising explanation of how the misuse and overuse of accusations of denial arise. If you occupy a position that is a popular consensus, there is less pressure upon you to actually know your shit. The passage above speaks to my experience, where an excellent piece of programming from Australia's SBS channel program 'Insight' had an episode where one climate scientist responded to a roomful of skeptics:

 

I actually learned things, prompted by the skeptics relatively more informed questions. My threshold for convincing on climate change is low - for me it stands to reason - so I learned both from the skeptics, and the expert who is convinced and convincing.

Climate science and climate skeptics are exceptional though, the excerpted piece from the heterodox academy blog above has the subtle 'on average' giving us four groups, divided in two - non-expert believers, non-expert skeptics, expert believers and expert skeptics - though I've seen no compelling evidence that an expert skeptic exists.

Thus I am persuaded/confident, that the hierarchy of 'knows-least' to 'knows-most' goes: non-expert believers followed by non-expert skeptics, to expert believer. So if you add a small number of experts being deferred to by a large number of non-experts and then divide the cumulative knowledge by the total number of believers you'll get an average that is lower than that of the skeptics that have probably selectively informed themselves of facts that bolster skepticism...

I have not myself been accused of being in denial, unless of course a psychologist explained to me the grieving process. But I have witnessed on the "socials" faceless people being denigrated as a class for exercising the same skepticism I do.

I would like to expound upon a personal example for the express purpose of illustrating how difficult this really simple requirement can be: 

When I first heard the Gender Pay Gap statistic - though there are many, it would have been something like the 70c to a $1. Almost not to my credit, I didn't deny it, I thought 'woah! that seems outrageous, sensational' and I took it at face value. An established fact. Having worked in a professional corporate setting, and having at that point some training in economics through my Bachelor's degree in Marketing requiring I do Macro 1 + 2 and Micro, my next thought was 'how does that happen?' 

Because for me, the picture painted was that if a company needed to fulfill two junior positions in the marketing department - identical rolls and the core requirement was a qualification and not experience. I then thought of constraints on how the pay-gap could arise - the first being that salaries are often advertised with the job, if not there's salary surveys etc. or 'market rates' which is to say, pressure on companies to offer competitive salaries to attract and retain talent. 

So where in the recruitment process did the pay gap occur? Like if me and my classmate Agatha applied for the position and both were accepted - when, how and why would the company offer me $30k and her $21k...

It stretched my credulity that the managers and HR, payroll etc. ever were twirling moustaches and instructing somebody to 'apply the female discount muahahahaha' 

Absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence, but (and this I take from Matt Dillahunty) an absence of evidence where evidence would ordinarily be expected, is evidence of something. And given the ample supply of potential whistleblowers, and ample demand for whistleblowers, the absence of any testimony from a person in payroll that large gaps exist between men and women struck me as an absence of evidence. (For those already going for their hair to tear at it as they say 'the testimony does exist' I know, I'll clear this up shortly) Furthermore, in Australia there are other obvious constraints on how, why and where pay gaps can occur - like the minimum wage.

Of course, when I heard the alarming statistic it was early 2000s when lay-feminists were still mostly men, and so I didn't hear much about it for years. I could have much earlier cleared up the basic mistake I was making regarding the gender pay gap - the methodology by which the pay gap was calculated.

The 70c-to-a-dollar does not refer to 'equal-pay-for-equal-work' under which it is both sensational and outrageous to have someone discounted this way for their gender. The methodology is key:

The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working. Women are generally considered to be paid less than men. There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap. The latter typically takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience.[1] In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average female's annual salary is 79% of the average male salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.

 I was treating a non-adjusted pay gap as if it were an adjusted pay-gap. Both are issues, but are very different issues.

From my personal perspective, it is less outrageous if a female waitress is paid less than a male attorney than if a female attorney is paid less than a male attorney. And from my perspective the more interesting of the two problems is closing the 5% gap (how society values men and women differently), more so than the 21% gap which if restricted to paid work is an understatement of that problem. (how society values different work)

It's tempting, very tempting to dig into the juicy topic of the pay-gap, but it is meant to service as one example of where denial can be misapplied - like a 'pay gap denier' or broadly as a category of men in denial of either the pay-gap or 'the patriarchy', as in my experience the pay gap is most oft cited as evidence of 'the patriarchy'.

And since I am a fan of responsibility, if discussing the pay gap, one way to take responsibility is to ask questions like 'which pay gap are we discussing here?' and it isn't the case that one exists and the other doesn't, the adjusted pay gap gets into the weeds of near as I can speculate: how to reconcile paid maternity leave - where child rearing is a public good, with private firms where labor is a private good - and discussing things like UBIs, parental leave, compounding interest and class issues like paying one woman $80,000 for her baby to track her with an equivalent male colleague that chooses not to take parental leave equal to her, and another $15,000 to track her with her equivalent male colleague. Or the other probable source of unequal pay for unequal work which is the cumulative effects of pay rise discrimination based on gender (I get a 4% pay rise where Agatha gets a 3% pay rise, and the same next year meaning I get 4% increase of 104% of our starting wage and Agatha gets a 3% pay rise on 103% of our starting wage.) 

Or alternately if we are talking about the non-adjusted pay gap where you take a macro view of all the earnings of men and women and average it for each total population (or other measure of central tendency), then the discussion becomes things like (my speculation) why is a traditionally female dominated profession (like nursing, or teaching) paid so little compared to traditionally male dominated professions (like construction or policing)? Or alternatively framed as why do men dominate the distribution of top earning positions? which as an armchair economist and milkcrate sociologist I'm happy to discuss but not take a disproportionate amount of responsibility for being an individual and not the macro-economy. 

And I apologise for how 'mansplainey' the above two paragraphs are, but I do so because there are clips on youtube that have racked up 4.5 million views where two men both confuse the adjusted and non-adjusted pay gap:

Where Barack Obama says 'today the average full time working woman earns just 77c for every dollar a man earns' this is referring to the non-adjusted pay gap. He then says 'equal pay for equal work... it's not that complicated.' which while it could be argued is meant to be interpreted as a blanket statement that all work is basically equal so nursing is basically the same thing as construction, 'equal pay for equal work' is a slogan better suited to an adjusted pay gap, combining the two statements as he did paints a picture that a female junior partner in a private law firm is earning $77k to the $100k her male colleague earns holding all else equal. When instead it's $95k to $100k.

Then the egg is applied to Barack's face when we cut to a news story showing that the median annual salary of White House staff in 2013 is $65k to $73k. Helpfully, the graphic also has a source. Unhelpfully, that source is now archived, but with some digging you can get the source data here.

For me the red flags are 'Median' and also the 'Fox News' in the bottom corner, suggesting it's time for the old 'lies, damn lies and statistics' skepticism. Or as my old Market Research professor was fond of saying 'you have to get down and dirty with the data'. Because the 'oh snap!' there's a 12% median salary pay gap.

Here's the thing about a median salary - Imagine that I am the only white man employed in a country that is otherwise staffed entirely by women of color. The company employees 100 floor workers who are all paid $40k per year, they employ 10 middle managers (boo) of which I am one, all paid $50k per year. Then they have 8 executives all paid $120k per year, and 1 vice-president paid $220k and one president paid $600k totalling 120 employees (the math is why I am paid the middle bucks).

The average male annual salary is $50k per year, my wage divided by one - me. The average female salary is (100 x 40 + 9 x 50 + 8 x 120 + 220 + 600)/119 = $52,353. So here the gender pay gap is like +4% or something. The median male annual salary is also going to be $50k, because it's mine. But the median female annual salary is going to be very different to the average female salary - it's going to be $40k because if you arrange all female salaries from lowest to highest and then go to the 59.5th one (59th and 60th lowest wage) they will both be $40k, because 100 of the 119 female workers are floor workers.

The median annual salary of Obama's 2013 White House tells us nothing about the gender pay gaps he himself is concerned about (equal pay for equal work). From my glance at the data, for example: all Employee Analysts are paid $42k per year, regardless of whether their name sounds male or female. The sole exception is a 'Detailee' paid $80k and Detailees are the general exception where they are paid more for identical job titles, which I had to look up.

A perusal of other job titles follows a general rule of employees with the same job title are paid the same, but there are some exceptions like 'Records management analyst' and 'policy advisor' and 'information services operator' and of course the male white house calligrapher is paid more than the female white house calligrapher both of whom are paid less than the chief white house calligrapher who is female. But where there are disparities, I can't conclude that equal job title = equal work, because being policy advisor to energy might be a very different job than policy advisor on sport.

So how does Barrack Obama clean up his own back yard? Close this median wage gap? Well for one thing, he could fire a bunch of women from his white house staff. Because generally speaking increasing the number of employees will lower the median wage, and decreasing the number of employees will raise the median wage, but only if the number is large. The other thing he could do is rig the median wage by giving unequal pay for equal work. So the 2013 Obama White house employed 229 women, he just needs to take every female employee from 114th up to where they start earning $73k and pay them all $73k regardless of job title or what male employees holding the same job title earn. (I would predict with this solution, that Fox news would then report on the disparity in average annual wage, it's hard to get average and median to both be equal)

All of which is really in the weeds of the Gender Pay Gap and what to do about it in a post about denial. 

But this is what can happen when you don't properly substantiate your claim. When in other words, you do not actually know what you are talking about, which I suspect is so often the case in these times. 

At the opening of the post I went through the 4 ways to avoid responsibility, denial being but one of them. I was also taught that the only way to take responsibility, and subsequently what to look for is saying 'how can I help?' 

This is the thing, the people who take responsibility will actually scrutinize your claim because that is necessary to fix things - if you want to close a 12% gap in the median annual salary, as opposed to the average annual salary, or close a 2~3% gap in a specific role these are all different problems with different solutions. (and why Jon Oliver's shit on a table analogy doesn't work as an analogy, it does work as a joke, unless he is advocating that you can fix all pay gaps by just paying everyone everywhere the exact same salary.)

The nefarious aspect of misusing denial - to label others as denying an as yet unjustified claim, is that the people who take responsibility, who want to help are inevitably going to have to scrutinize your claim in order to attempt to resolve the complaint. 

A tangential but also nefarious aspect of misusing denial is the prevalence of undefined terms being slung about. This opens the door wide to Motte & Bailey tactics, probably the two most prominent among leftists are 'The Patriarchy' and 'White Supremacy/Systemic Racism' (I recently experienced a vicarious chafing listening to this interview which overall is worth listening to, and was an attempt to redress an anti-postmodern bias in the interest of heterodox, where at times in the interview, the interviewer asked the guest to define 'power' and 'the patriarchy' and in both cases the guest declined to define them the frustrating climax being 'who am I to define patriarchy?' style dodge, the answer to the rhetorical question is 'somebody who wishes to use it in conversation.') 

The 'Motte' part taking the form of treating the patriarchy or white supremacy as an overt active conscious and malicious system of oppression, a cartoon of which might be a Freemason Type secret society that men like me or us whites are denying the existence of. 

Whereas the Bailey in my experience is that 'the patriarchy' and 'white supremacy' are terms that simply describe that however society operates it favors whites and men. Aka they are synonyms for 'how things are' or 'the cumulative result of all time and space'. In which case, as a holder of a marketing degree - they are really bad synonyms for something that ostensibly passively everybody is participating in, all the time, because they suggest the more nefarious conspiracies by using terms that describe very concrete historical phenomena. 

In conclusion, to be sure, there are people who would deny a substantiated claim, because there are. Look at Young Earth Creation Apologists, their whole job is denying scientific theories. Denial may be the most common way to abrogate responsibility, but one of the other most common ways to avoid responsibility is blame - blame Obama, or blame a random person on the street for their failure to change society. Blame a stranger for not investing hundreds of hours into reading obscure inaccessible texts such that they are up with the abstract concepts of the moment in the discourse. 

Blame someone for being in denial of a claim you haven't established.