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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

by zamfi 5y ago

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.

lazide 5y ago
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 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 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’.

by zamfi 5y ago

lazide 5y ago

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 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 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’.