["meritocracy" was originally coined to refer to a system where the elites maintain class boundaries by claiming they're based on merit despite unequal access to the means to achieve merit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy). Then the elites started using the word unironically.
**The Rise of the Meritocracy**
The Rise of the Meritocracy is a book by British sociologist and politician Michael Young which was first published in 1958. It describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which intelligence and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited. The essay satirised the Tripartite System of education that was being practised at the time.
Meritocracy is the political philosophy in which political influence is assigned largely according to the intellectual talent and achievement of the individual.
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All the real rationalists are into ‘unschooling’ now,
because their children are obviously going to learn much more from
absorbing the wisdom of fellow rationalists than they’d learn at a
regular school with low IQ criminal plebs
[deleted]
Fortunately Rationalism has taught me that schooling makes no difference to anything, so nobody has to worry!
commodification of academic research has ruined science
All the real rationalists are into ‘unschooling’ now, because their children are obviously going to learn much more from absorbing the wisdom of fellow rationalists than they’d learn at a regular school with low IQ criminal plebs