I’ve been thinking a lot about meritocracy lately, and I’ve come to believe that opportunity magnifies inequality. Here’s one way I’ve seen it explained: If there are two main reasons for outcome differences: innate talent and environment, and if you equalize environment you will see outcomes spread out by talent over time.

Let's say you have 10 runners in a small-town high school. And let's say the slowest runs a distance in 90 seconds, and the fastest runs that same distance in 70 seconds. But we come to find out that many of the kids aren't getting good sleep, they're dehydrated, and they are competing without having eaten in over 24 hours.

So we fix the home situations, get them all their nutrition, keep them hydrated, etc. And now the slowest runners all get faster. But the fastest runners do as well. And in fact, they get faster relative to the slower runners. The distribution actually opens rather than closing.

Our common vision of meritocracy is giving everyone equal chance to succeed, which will allow those who want it most---and who work hardest---to get the best results. It sounds ideal, and I've always been a supporter of the concept. Unfortunately there's conflict between this and what happens in practice.

In practice, you're not only improving the playing field; you're also inviting more players. If you not only give all the 10 runners a perfect home life and the best nutrition, but you also increase the running pool from 10 to 10 million, you're going to create extraordinary distance between the best and worst runners.

A level playing field essentially conducts a talent-selecting exercise for those who are most gifted at that task, whether it's running or playing chess or writing novels. You might be inclined to say, it's not necessarily genetics. It might be their hard work. Or their tenacity. Or their self-discipline. Well, yes, except those have been shown to be a lot more similar to height and eye-color than we previously thought. In other words, heritable. Self-discipline, for example, comes in at roughly 60% heritability in a large meta study.

As a progressive this is disturbing. But as someone obsessed with why things happen, I'm relieved to have a more realistic model than what I was given. Somehow my previous model was that you could have it both ways, i.e., you would equalize environment, have everyone compete to their best ability, and somehow that would result in roughly equal outcomes. That's silly. How did I miss that for all this time? The obvious answer is that it's what I wanted to believe. And same for all the people that taught it to me.

Right, so Santa Claus is just your parents. Now what? What do we do with this information? I know what the extreme right will do with it, and it's not pleasant. They'll basically sprint (poorly) to the conclusion that all (or at least most) current disparities between individuals and groups is "just natural", and we should just get over it and stop trying to fix things.

I reject this for two reasons: 1) the playing field isn't equal in far too many of these competitions. We still have extraordinary environmental disparities that prohibit people from running their fastest. And 2) never tell me the odds.

I'm a huge believer in what I call, "Behaving as if…", which I picked up initially from Camus and turned into General Absurdism. It's the idea that love might be chemicals, and there might be no real meaning in the universe, but we have to---or at least should---behave as if it weren't true.

I am not sure I want to know my artistic limitations. I want to behave as if I don't have any. And nobody currently knows how my drive and stubbornness and mediocre talent might combine to form something special. Jordan got disrespected as a kid. If they tested his Midi-Clorian count it wouldn't have been as high as Yoda's. But he didn't care. He got passed up. He got disrespected. And he put in the work and became The Goat.

The point is that Midi-Clorians are stupid. You never know what's possible with tremendous drive, and mentoring, and a bit of luck.

So, my takeaway is that we should realize that opportunity is the a counterbalance to equal outcomes. It's its opposite, not its champion. Give more people equal chances, and you'll have more variation in the outcomes. As moderate, center-leaning people we have to accept this. We cannot let truth be a weapon for those who would give up on those who are less lucky. That's step 1: acknowledging and accepting truth.

Step 2 is telling every kid that nobody---including their parents, their teachers, and even them---know what they're capable of. Are you going to be in the NBA if you're 5'1"? Probably not. Are you going to play Carnegie Hall if you have no musical talent whatsoever? Probably not. But most everything else is in-between. Just like it was for Jordan.

It's Absurdism. As a society we need to accept that opportunity increases inequality, and be ok with that. But we must simultaneously acknowledge that the destinies of individuals are neither predetermined nor known. Just like Jordan and Sisyphus, we must behave as if.

Acknowledge, and then rebel.