If the restaurant owner has to close up because he can't make enough revenue to be profitable with the accessible floor plan, who has benefitted? Not the owner, not the normally-abled customers, and not the disabled customers. I guess you can say that everyone got the same outcome though.

The challenge of course is that if there is no penalty for doing something harmful to a portion of the population, then people will keep doing it - probably indefinitely.

It might be easier to think of it as a evolutionary process. Adding in things like (enforced) laws around making space for wheelchair clients for a business will select against those that don't do it. That will inevitably result in churn (and cycle of life death/rebirth and associated pain and loss), but as long as there is sufficient presence of the 'species' (to extend the analogy) that does what you want, then it's the equivalent of weeding a garden. Sucks to be the weed, but if no one does it, it turns into a giant mess of bad stuff and everyone loses.

It's also important to not starve by 'weeding out' all your crops. It's a balance.

Equality of outcome tends to skew towards ignoring decisions or actions that individuals take (as they can and are influenced by the environment), and looking at the environment.

The tricky part is, the real world can’t be quantified or modeled in a way that is tractable to humans in a larger way (near as I can tell anyway), so the people and environment get squashed into coarse buckets like skin color, education level, etc. which not only don’t reflect any individuals actual circumstances, but can be gamed in various ways.

Since individuals also respond to the pressures they are under, it makes it easier and easier to see folks who become more and more helpless and take on a victim mindset (aka there is nothing I can do to get better, hold on while I finish this liter of vodka) - because it works in very real ways, and it’s the easy path. And you can’t reliably quantify something like that, it’s usually too subtle or subjective.

This can easily lead (without very careful and mindful leadership - which doesn’t scale, and often doesn’t get selected for either) to essentially co-dependence. If they try to improve, they lose support and/or get kicked out. If they get worse, they get more help.

There are of course plenty of examples of failure and dysfunction the other direction - insisting that someone who is fundamentally screwed by the environment ‘get better’ while not providing any support and/or dishing out beatings for every minor infraction.

And if you set your metric to ‘everyone has the same outcome/rewards’ - well, it is REALLY hard to do well. Fundamentally, you’ll never get a population to all perform the same. As a species we have a wide and diverse set of skills, predispositions, upbringing/parental influences, resources, and other attributes, and there is literally no way to make everyone equally successful at everything without maybe somehow making everyone equal on all those other fronts - which plenty of dystopian novels on THAT.

So if you can’t make everyone equally successful or identical or have the same upbringing/influences or resources, you can get ‘equal outcomes’ another way - anyone who sticks up above the pack gets smacked down until everyone is equal again, or any venue or opportunity that can’t be made equal gets banned. And that does scale, and also has the benefit of being easily measurable and doable. Which is why you see it so often.

Which is also pretty dystopian, as it’s enforced ‘lowest common denominator’ by definition, and tends to destroy any innovation or improvements and slowly (or not so slowly) suffocates the society. It’s easy to go down, it’s hard to go up.

For your example, if we wanted to be 100% sure that everyone in a wheelchair had equal access to everything without some massive improvement in technology - we’d need to pave every backcountry hike (and ban the ones that we didn’t want to spend the money on), ban rock climbing, ban most skydiving, etc.

Which would essentially destroy the experience one was theoretically trying to make equally available.

I’d caution you to recognize that the slippery-slope argument you are making requires an engineer’s adherence to an extremely strong definition of “equality of outcome”.

The ADA requires only “reasonable accommodation” which is why you can still have rock climbing walls. Not many people are suggesting that we break everyone’s legs for equity, either.

But most insidious about the slippery slope argument is the implication that since this absurd outcome is the inevitable consequence of addressing equity issues, that we should not try.

This is, respectfully, crap. Yes, we should not ban rock climbing walls. Yes, we should reduce thresholds to help those in wheelchairs. We don’t need a framework that survives being taken to an unreasonable extreme in order to make progress. We are reasonable people who can make judgment calls, not paperclip-making universe-destroying automatons.

I take it you skipped the paragraph in the middle pointing out the nature of this and where I was pointing out the slippery slope?

The reality is there are a LOT of real world examples of this going all the way to the far poles, so this isn't hypothetical - and it often gets very murderey. Authoritarians of all stripes tend to take the approach of 'if it isn't working, do it harder', and 'if they don't like it, it's because they're bad/the enemy'. And authoritarians get power when people get scared or unhappy, more often than not.

The 'evening the playing field'/'equality of outcome' approach is literally what was used to justify taking out all the intelligensia and rich folks in Russia and China during the communist revolutions, the 'punish them harder because they keep failing' approach is what is being used to punish minorities in a number of states literally right now in the US - and I could go on.

I don't know why you would assume I think the ADA is a problem. The ADA is a reasonable setup - but it also doesn't guarantee, or attempt to guarantee, equalities of outcomes. It attempts to guarantee a reasonable level of equality of ACCESS and/or accommodations. Which is fundamentally different, and inherently has a reasonability test that can help shut down the real outlier stuff (like wanting to shut down all non-wheelchair accessible climbing walls or whatever).

It's the difference between everyone getting an interview (or an internship) vs everyone being promoted to VP - or it being illegal to have someone who is a VP (in the meaning we have today)

I read your entire post, which is absolutely pointing out the slippery slope. And sure, many others have slipped down this slope.

What I am saying is that your proposed dystopia is not the inevitable result of considering equality of outcome, as you seem to be suggesting, and that one should be very careful when making slippery slope arguments for doing nothing.

Let’s be super clear: dystopias involving murderous authoritarian leadership claiming to act in the name of equity are a problem with murderous authoritarian leadership, not a problem with equity or desiring equitable outcomes, right?

The ADA is an outcomes-focused law, that’s why it comes up in this context. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but few people are arguing for guarantees, and that’s the straw man you’re arguing against.

The ADA is not an outcome (as in success) focused law though? It is a opportunity based law. There is nothing in the ADA saying that everyone with a disability needs to succeed to the same level as someone without that disability, rather that a reasonable accomodation must be made to give them the tools to TRY.

And for the rest, you lost context a bit - I was replying to the comment in the parent post to mine, which asked

'What is your basis for equality of outcome being a bad thing? Can you give some examples of what you're talking about?'

My point is that fundamentally, true equality of outcome (if taken to mean 'everyone gets the same rewards/has the same success') may naively sound nice, even very fair, but is not only impossible, but undesirable when you look at what it would take to try to get there (depending on the degree of course). And when people try to quantify what they mean by 'rewards' it also tends to be obvious that most people's concrete ideas (and scale) of rewards do not line up with each other.

And then gave some examples.

A rephrasing of the idea, is the saying "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (Karl Marx), but there are a great many ways to put it.

There are many non-murderey areas that tend to be eas(ier) to balance, like education. If I've always wanted to be a mathematician, but have no knack for it, does that mean I get infinite tutoring? Most people would say no, and I can't think of anyone that has tried in practice. Many will say 'well, you can get x years of normal education, but if you fail out that's it'. Most will say 'well, you can apply, and if you have good grades, the state can cover it', etc.

Most of those fall on the spectrum of equality of opportunity (aka ability to try/take a swing). Equality of outcomes is when you say 'Everyone should be able to be a mathematician, so everyone (or x percent of everyone) must be a mathematician'. That... gets weirder. What if they don't WANT to be mathematicians? Do we make them? What if their background/interests don't line up, so they hate the studying, and keep failing the tests? Do we fake the numbers? Beat them until they comply? Fail a bunch of everyone else until the numbers match?

This is in no way to downplay very real issues with culture, racism, sexism, etc. that do happen. It's to point out the dangers of taking naive and course metric driven approaches to the problem.

When we're talking wealth, access to jobs and political leadership positions, etc. there is also a long history of it getting much, much uglier.

The particularly murdery/authoritarian examples happen because since it is fundamentally impossible for everyone to actually get the same rewards/outcomes in almost all cases and people can't all agree on what it would concretely mean to even get the same rewards/outcomes, the people in power either give up without succeeding and then get replaced (or rarely, has a coherent enough and smart enough power base that they can give a nuanced and sane answer that is not merely propaganda - looks like Sweden might have pulled that off?), or try harder. In government, try harder often means overpower resistance, purge dissenters, neutralize political opponents who don't support you - to various degrees of brutality. You see it everywhere, in the US, England, Russia, etc. In a revolution, that also usually means lining people up against a wall.

Especially if the power base/population is angry and unhappy, and particularly if it is large (since that typically means the spoils are large for the winners), and since the naive answers sound good, there is huge incentive for someone to also tell people what they want to hear while trying harder, even if they know it's bullshit, and use tools like propaganda, secret police, you name it. It also provides really effective cover to do nasty things in the name of doing the right thing.

There are some really recent historical examples of people getting all the power to try the hardest. Which tends to attract/filter for authoritarian types - probably especially the murdery ones after awhile. See Lenin vs Stalin (or really Stalin vs everyone else who could conceivably challenge his power)

Mao did multiple purges. The Khmer Rouge was.... particularly nasty. All of that was done in the name of helping the everyman and producing a just outcome for the everyday person.

I'm not really sure how to respond to this. The phrase "equality of outcome" only means "everyone must have exactly the same success/income/wealth/accolades/etc" when taken to an untenable extreme, and very few people are making this argument. Most policy people are careful not to take "naive and coarse metric-driven approaches" to the problem, though of course there are plenty of examples of e.g., companies mandating diversity targets etc. that can be seen as naive and treating a symptom rather than a problem.

All that said, the person you originally responded to gave the example of being able to go to a restaurant in a wheelchair, which is exactly what the ADA covers, and it requires taking into account outcomes: asking "can we make reasonable accommodations so that all who would like to eat a restaurant can reasonably do so?" means looking at the outcome of whether a paraplegic (as in the original post) can access the restaurant. You can think of this as opportunity instead of outcome if you like, but it's the example in the original post that you responded to, so I'm not sure your accusation that I "lost the context a bit" is fair. (If anything, it seems that you took "equality of outcome" out of context from the post you are responding to.)

Now, the rest of your post makes it super clear that you are not arguing the same thing as I am.

When I, and I think most people (maybe not Marx?) say "equality of outcome," I mean things like people are equally listened to in meetings, considered for promotions, able to enter the fields they want to enter, able to rent accommodations, etc. and crucially that these things are irrespective of irrelevant attributes like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., the issues that you note. But very few people are really arguing for ignoring relevant attributes, fewer still are arguing for entirely equal incomes, and basically no one is arguing that everyone "should be able to be a mathematician" despite having no aptitude for math.

I'm going to say it one more time, because you keep not responding to my point: as a society, we can favor equality of outcomes as in the examples above without also "purging dissenters", "neutralizing political opponents", or doing so "to various degrees of brutality".

Murderous authoritarianism simply does not inevitably follow from considering equality of outcomes. Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and the Khmer Rouge are not the inevitable result of considering equality of outcomes, and the argument that "equality of outcomes" is a bad metric because it's fundamentally impossible to improve it without turning into a murderous dictatorship is false, and you've provided zero evidence for it.

True point about the wheelchair example! I wasn’t using it in the sense of equality of outcome because it really doesn’t apply [https://edeq.stanford.edu/sections/equality-outcome ]. I took the question about equality of outcome and ran with it.

You obviously haven’t been listening to the same news, or were in the same corporate meeting rooms, or have dealt with the HR realities I have.

There are numerous large players right now making it very clear that equality for them is x percent of your workforce is female, or black, or white, etc, and they need to be paid on exactly a specific curve - or else. I’ve had friends who were told (for leadership positions at very well known companies) that they were more than qualified, but weren’t the right color or gender - just in the last year.

It has been made clear that compliance with expected distributions is required [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201]

And this isn’t a exaggeration. I’ve literally had very senior managers at a FAANG say to me (in diversity training!) ‘well, we have too many white guys here, so let’s start figuring this out’

What you are referring to is equal treatment - which is great! It is not equality of outcome by any definition I’ve seen used. I’ve always seen ‘x percent of workforce is y’ and ‘pay for x workers is z’. And that is exactly the coarse metric I am referring to. And it is, very clearly, being used in the real world right now to do the things you are saying no one is doing. My wife has endless complaints about it, as she is a female engineer and gets bombarded with recruiters that leave no shadow of a doubt they they are talking to her because she is a woman (and they only are interested in woman), and her actual skills are secondary - which pisses her off to no end.

And if you think you can go into any big tech company right now and complain if you notice this happening without being fired - then I have bad news for you. At least the brutality here is low though, and we don’t have to worry about getting shot over it! I’ll take that any day of the week. If you think a lot of the back and forth harassment going on politically isn’t to neutralize political opponents, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

And if you read it, I never, ever, said it was inevitable you would end up with a Mao or a Stalin. I said they tend to grow in conditions where the population is unhappy or scared, and is willing to listen to things that sound good but don’t work - and need people to ‘try harder’.