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’.