5 ms·

What is your basis for equality of outcome being a bad thing? Can you give some examples of what you're talking about? To me, equity should mean that (for exam

What is your basis for equality of outcome being a bad thing? Can you give some examples of what you're talking about? To me, equity should mean that (for example) a paraplegic can still access most or all of the spaces that a person who can walk can access, which means making sure they have access to a wheelchair and public spaces have wide enough unobstructed aisles for those in wheelchairs to get through. This requires us to examine outcomes, not impartially treat all people the same (since the vast majority of people with the ability to walk wouldn't need the same assistance a paraplegic would). In a society like ours this also means some people have to make sacrifices - the owner of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant may face difficulties because their current capacity comes at the cost of having narrow aisles, and making their shop accessible would reduce capacity. In some countries (like the US) this is illegal and they can get sued for it. For the owner this is very bad, but the alternative (society is inaccessible to people in wheelchairs) is worse.

lazide 5y ago
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.
- zamfi 5y ago
  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.
  - lazide 5y ago
    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)
throwawayboise 5y ago
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.
- lazide 5y ago
  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.

lazide 5y ago

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.

zamfi 5y ago
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.
- lazide 5y ago
  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)

throwawayboise 5y ago

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.

lazide 5y ago
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.