Well, this has taken an unexpectedly scenic route through the weeds, but alright, let’s put the kettle on and have another go.

The central issue seems to be that you’re treating my original claim as if I had presented a completed statistical proof of individual causation, when what I actually said was that I was experiencing difficulty finding work and believed age was a contributing factor. Those are two rather different beasts, unless we’ve decided that every statement about one’s own experience must first be peer reviewed by the Royal Statistical Society before being permitted out of the house.

You’re right about one thing: the evidence I gave doesn’t establish that ageism is the sole cause of my unemployment. I never said it did. What it establishes, at least from my perspective, is that I have encountered circumstances where age appeared to be relevant. You can dispute that interpretation, obviously. What you can’t really do is turn “I think age is a factor in my experience” into “I have claimed to have mathematically demonstrated that ageism is responsible for 100% of my unemployment.”

That’s where Karl Popper becomes rather inconvenient for both of us. A hypothesis needs to be falsifiable, not magically transformed into a certainty by either side. If my claim is “age may be contributing to my difficulty finding employment,” then the appropriate response is to identify evidence that makes that explanation less plausible, not simply point at the aggregate unemployment rate and declare the case closed like a detective who has found a fingerprint on the wrong corpse.

And this is where your argument about unemployment rates gets a little slippery. A low unemployment rate for an age bracket does not establish that I personally am not experiencing age discrimination. It establishes that the aggregate unemployment rate for that group is low. Those are different propositions. One is population-level data, the other is an individual claim. You’re using the former to dismiss the latter, which is a bit like using the average temperature of the Atlantic Ocean to determine whether one particular person is currently wet.

Now, could my perception be wrong? Absolutely. I could be mistaken about the role age is playing. There could be other explanations. That’s perfectly reasonable. But “you haven’t proven ageism caused your unemployment” and “ageism isn’t affecting you” are not the same statement. The first is a demand for stronger evidence. The second is a conclusion you haven’t established either.

And yes, the factors I mentioned apply to unemployed people in other age brackets too. That’s rather the point. They’re examples of why the headline unemployment figure is not a complete description of somebody’s experience in the labour market. You asked whether they were relevant to your rebuttal, and strictly speaking, no, not all of them are. I brought them up because your rebuttal relied heavily on a single aggregate statistic as though it answered a question it doesn’t actually measure. In hindsight, that was probably rather like bringing a sundial to a submarine and complaining that nobody had asked what time it was.

As for the “it doesn’t mean it affects you personally” point, you’re correct that my original statement was personal. But that doesn’t make the issue disappear. If I say, “I think X happened to me because of Y,” you can reasonably ask what evidence I have for Y. What you can’t reasonably infer is that because Y doesn’t happen to everyone in my demographic, it therefore didn’t happen to me. That’s not an argument, it’s just changing the subject while wearing the argument’s hat.

And since we’re apparently collecting philosophers now, Bertrand Russell would probably have something unkind to say about that distinction between what follows from the premises and what we’d quite like to follow from them. The fact that something is statistically uncommon doesn’t logically entail that it didn’t happen in a particular case. If one person is struck by lightning, the fact that most people aren’t struck by lightning is not a particularly compelling rebuttal when they’re standing there smoking slightly.

I also think you’re giving “straw man” a rather enthusiastic workout. I wasn’t saying your rebuttal was “older workers have high unemployment, therefore you’re wrong.” I was saying that the unemployment statistic doesn’t by itself answer the question of whether age played a role in my particular experience. If that’s not what you intended the statistic to establish, then fair enough, but in that case I’m not entirely sure what work you think it is doing in the argument.

Ultimately, I think we’re arguing past each other. You’re asking me to demonstrate that ageism caused my unemployment to a standard sufficient to establish the proposition objectively. I’m saying that I have observed things in my own experience that lead me to believe age is a factor. Those are not mutually exclusive positions. I can acknowledge that my evidence is anecdotal and still regard it as evidence. Popper would probably object to me treating it as proof, and Russell would probably object to the entire conversation on grounds of insufficient logic and inadequate tea.

So, yes, if my original wording was “I am unemployed because employers are discriminating against me because of my age,” then I’ll happily concede that that’s a stronger causal claim than the evidence I presented can establish. If what I said was “I’m experiencing difficulty finding employment and I believe age is one of the factors contributing to that,” then your unemployment-rate statistic doesn’t refute it.

It merely tells us that my experience isn’t the median experience of my age bracket.

Which, rather unfortunately for the argument, was never the claim.