
Decrying equality of outcome evades structural inequalities in opportunity - telotortium
https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/jordan-peterson-does-not-support-equality-of-opportunity-6bf80f3321a0
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telotortium
Original title and summary:

> Jordan Peterson Does Not Support ‘Equality of Opportunity’

> When conservatives decry “equality of outcomes,” they’re usually evading a
> debate about structural inequalities in the distribution of opportunity

I selected a title that hopefully reflects the argument of the article well
without being too clickbaity.

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Eridrus
I think this article is correct in identifying bad faith, but I don't think
conservatives are really wrong that many people _have_ embraced equality of
outcome as the goal and the yardstick against which everyone is measured
against.

You can see this in many tech-oriented diversity discussions where diversity
advocates will brush off any discussion of "the pipeline problem" as
meaningless.

Which is understandable since this can be an easy way to disclaim any
responsibility, but it also makes discussions difficult because these metrics
don't tell us anything about where in a system inequality exists and assumes
that every actor in the system has a responsibility to ensure equal outcomes
regardless of anything upstream of them and any other interests (e.g. making
money) that they might have.

You see this pretty starkly in work on Fairness in Machine Learning, where it
is clear that you have to specify exactly what your fairness criteria are, and
it turns out that what many people actually want is equality of outcomes. This
is some interesting reading on the topic:
[https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-
sco...](https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-scores-is-
mathematically-inevitable-researchers-say)

In any case, I'm not sure what the point of this article is; is the argument
that equality of opportunity is unachievable "absent a degree of social
engineering that would make Chairman Mao blush", so we should seek equality of
outcomes instead?

