"[That] leads to hubris among the winners, leads them to inhale too deeply of their own success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way, to forget their indebtedness to those who made their achievements possible," Sandel said during a lecture last Thursday at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. "And it leads to humiliation to those left behind, those less fortunate than themselves."
It wouldn't be true to say that the press has stopped covering the aristocracy, since the Telegraph diligently covers the great estates, but the discussion now comes framed by the idea of meritocracy, which is objectively pretty ridiculous. So the Hon Nick Howard told the Telegraph a fortnight ago, If my son wants to take over [Castle Howard], he'll have to pass an interview, while other great estate owners stress their role as rewilders, ecowarriors or, at their most traditional, conservationists.
The first essay anybody writes is for school. Same here. But the only examples I remember are the ones I wrote at the end, in my A-level exams. One compared Hitler to Stalin. Another, Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X. I was proudest of the essay that considered whether the poet John Milton-pace William Blake-was "of the devil's party without knowing it." I did well on those standardized tests, but even passing was far from a foregone conclusion.
OpenAI has a "bottoms-up" culture, especially in its research departments. This makes the company "very meritocratic," where promotions are based on idea generation and execution.