Is the US a ruthless cognitive meritocracy that reliably promotes outlier talent? VB Knives defended that claim in a Twitter argument against Living Room Enjoyer that got my attention.¹ Knives argued that if you have a 150 IQ, you'll be a National Merit Scholar, which "at a minimum" gets you a free ride at a state flagship university, from which you can proceed to law school, med school, etc. Enjoyer shot back: I'm a Merit Scholar, where's my free ride? Knives asked Grok, Elon Musk's AI; Grok recommended the University of Alabama, ranked #169.

How elite is elite?

About 1.3 million high school juniors take the PSAT each year. Around 16,000 become Semifinalists (top 1.2%), of whom about 95% become Finalists. Of those 15,000 Finalists, fewer than half (6,930) receive a scholarship authorized by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. The flagship National Merit Scholarship is a one-time $2,500 payment; other NMSC-administered awards are sponsored by third parties like colleges or businesses.

The free ride comes from the Merit Scholar collectors.

The University of Alabama (the example Grok cited in the thread) doesn't just offer a mild incentive to National Merit Finalists, but a package covering tuition for up to five years, housing, a $4,000/year stipend, and a $2,000 research allowance. The University of South Florida covers full cost of attendance for non-Florida National Merit Finalists. UT Dallas covers tuition and fees for up to eight semesters plus housing. A few dozen other schools do similar things.² The common requirement for college-sponsored awards is that you designate the school as your "first choice" through NMSC's system.³

A perfectly meritocratic academic sorting would put the top 1% of the population in the top 1% of slots. To get a numerator for percentiles, I summed fall-2024 first-time undergraduate enrollment reported to NCES/IPEDS⁴ by US News 2026 rank of National Universities.⁵ Since being in college at all is part of the sorting process, I used the approximately 4.2 million surviving members of the relevant birth cohort as my denominator.⁶

The results:

• University of Florida (#30, full cost of attendance via the state Benacquisto Scholarship for Florida-resident NM Scholars at any eligible Florida public or independent institution): about 2.2% of the age cohort attends a school ranked this well or better. 98th percentile.⁷

• University of South Florida (#88, best ranked school I found offering a substantively full ride for applicants from other states): about 9%. 91st percentile.⁸

• UT Dallas (#110, canonical NM full-ride school): about 11%. 89th percentile.

• University of Alabama (#169, Grok's pick): about 16%. 84th percentile.

The remaining 84% of the cohort either attends a school ranked below #169, attends a liberal arts college or regional university outside this ranking, attends a two-year institution, or doesn't enroll at all. All top-50 schools combined enroll about 4.8% of each year's birth cohort.

If the system were a ruthless cognitive meritocracy, the NM Semifinalist (one of 16,000 selected from a 4.2 million cohort — the top 0.4% by count) would find themselves surrounded in college mainly by people like themselves, the way students at Australia's selective-entry public high schools (James Ruse, Melbourne High, Mac.Robertson) or at the University of Melbourne are surrounded by cognitive peers selected primarily by exam.⁹ Instead, our Semifinalist is grafted into a hybridized class that mixes high-g outliers with the broader 84th-98th-percentile population: the children of comfortable professionals, kids with good-but-not-extraordinary test scores and polished applications.

Suppose a bright youth is ruthlessly optimizing for the meritocratic track. They don't even have to be an extreme outlier with an IQ of 150; they could have an IQ anywhere above 140, the 99.6th percentile.¹⁰ They score in the top 1.2% of PSAT test-takers, becoming a National Merit Semifinalist. They become a Finalist. They designate one of the nine Florida NMSC college-sponsor institutions as their first choice, which makes them eligible for a college-sponsored scholarship (sponsor schools typically offer these to all or most designating Finalists, converting them to Scholars; University of Florida at #30 is the obvious pick for a Florida resident, since the state's Benacquisto Scholarship then covers full cost of attendance at any eligible Florida institution; if they are not fortunate enough to already reside in Florida, they can attend the University of South Florida at #88). They attend for free. They graduate with a strong GPA. They score well on the LSAT or MCAT. They get into an elite professional school such as a T14 law school or equivalent.¹¹

How strong is this sort? Sarah Constantin's taxonomy of extreme elites distinguishes "One-Percenters" (groups of a few million: engineers, programmers, people with IQ over 130), "Aristocrats" (hundreds of thousands: doctors, lawyers, Ivy alumni), and "Elites" (tens of thousands: Google engineers, AIME qualifiers). The total number of people entering some recognizably elite professional or graduate track each year is probably 20,000-40,000, or about 0.5-1.0% of the age cohort — Constantin's "Elite" tier.¹³

This bright youth, if they also happen to be more enterprising than neurotic, on good enough terms with their school principal to get an endorsement, and have noticed the opportunity, can reach a credentialed position roughly commensurate with their ability rank. The financial barriers at each stage are low. Undergrad is free if you play the NM game, and by the time you're admitted to an elite professional school it's not hard to find a lender willing to cover the cost; much of it is covered by federal lending and unsubsidized loans can often cover the rest.

But the attribution of "ruthless meritocracy" to the system is misplaced. If the entrant ruthlessly exploits the meritocratic elements of the system, they can reach a social rank commensurate with their g without taking the sorts of risks an enterprising young man would have needed to take in, say, medieval Europe, to reach a similar rank.

Think of it this way. There is a system in this country where you take a test in high school, and if you score really well, the system sends you a letter saying congratulations, you are very smart, and then — this is the important part — does nothing. It's like when your dentist sends you a reminder postcard. Except the postcard says "You are a genius" and the next step is "Figure it out yourself, genius."

Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery's "The Missing 'One-Offs'" showed that high-ability, low-income students, particularly outside metro areas, systematically undershoot.¹⁴ The binding constraint isn't financial access (elite schools often have generous need-based aid) but the kind of strategic knowledge about how to navigate the system that is distributed by class, geography, and school counselor quality. This undershooting is conspicuous not at the 99.5th percentile of measured ability, but around the 90th.

What meritocracy was for

The word "meritocracy" entered English from Michael Young's 1958 dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, but the concept is older. Napoleon's "la carrière ouverte aux talents" is usually cited as its modern origin. Revolutionary France was fighting simultaneous wars against multiple European coalitions while suppressing internal insurrections, having just guillotined much of its hereditary officer class. The old-regime army had numbered roughly 150,000-200,000; the levée en masse, the first modern mass conscription, produced over 750,000 men under arms by 1794.

Promotion on the basis of merit was a desperate response to the problem that the people who had been running the army on the basis of birth were dead or in exile, the army was five times larger than it used to be, and the external performance pressure (lose and the Republic falls) was existential. Before the Revolution, 90% of officers had been aristocrats; by 1794, only 3% were. Even then, Napoleon's own practice drifted back toward class selection: his lycées were few and expensive and his officer corps increasingly recruited from "good families."¹⁵ Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black (1830) depicts the result: Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son who idolizes Napoleon and dreams of rising by military merit, finds that after Waterloo the army (the red) no longer offers a path for men of his class. Only the clergy (the black) does. He advances through the seminary, through seduction and the careful management of appearances and relationships (one is reminded of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, or perhaps Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier).

The American system is not under that kind of pressure, but it does have procedures for promotion partly on the basis of test scores. Poor and unconnected high-g types can use these procedures to climb from a high PSAT score to a top professional school degree while spending very little money, if they know the tricks and are willing to spend a decade on it. The result is something like a hybridized mandarinate: a credentialed administrative class selected partly by examination and partly by family resources and social compliance. This system affords somewhat more meritocratic upward mobility than the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian Empire.¹⁶

The compliance pipeline

When I think about where I'm dependent on the applied intelligence of others, I think of airline pilots, nurses, plumbers, power grid operators, engineers, and probably still most people who work at Amazon regardless of job title or school.

When the United States has faced problems where deploying high-g people mattered, problems with external performance pressure comparable to Revolutionary France's, it built specific institutions to do it. The Manhattan Project built the bomb. The MIT Radiation Laboratory recruited physics professors from across the country and had them building radar systems that worked; the slogan was "the physicists built the bomb, but radar won the war." Los Alamos hired Feynman at twenty-four. During the wars, incompetents in positions of authority were exposed and replaced, and the people who survived on merit found themselves in charge. After the wars, some of those people built institutions that preserved wartime selection principles in peacetime: Bell Labs had the people who invented the transistor, information theory, Unix, the laser, and the solar cell, all under one roof in Murray Hill, New Jersey. They hired people who had demonstrated the ability to solve hard problems, and got out of the way.

The modern professional-managerial pipeline is if anything laser-focused on getting into people's way. It recruits intelligence into a compliance meritocracy¹⁷, inculcating the sorts of loyalties that generate a class of 24/7 vibes-performing PMC apparatchiks instead of the hypercompetent manager-leaders who won the World Wars. Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes documented a managerial culture in which technical competence and independent judgment had largely been displaced by an anxious attunement to what the people above you want to hear.

Michael O. Church analyzes American class as three parallel ladders: Labor, defined by work, reputation, and personal accountability; Gentry, defined by education, professional identity, collegiality, and cultural influence; and Elite, defined by control of large enterprises that insulate them from accountability. This gives us more adequate terms to describe what the credentialing pipeline does. It does not move people up the Labor ladder; it teleports them from Labor to middle Gentry with an option to audition for Elite status,¹⁸ adopting the values and anxieties of a social infrastructure that, past a certain point, checks not for credentials or competence but for whether you're part of the vibe.

There are excuses of a sort, offered for the non-test elements of admission and advancement: GPA maintenance, extracurriculars, "holistic" criteria, the "leadership" requirement that selects for a specific flavor of self-promoting sociability. Some say that they screen out mere test-taking machines, but in favor of what?

A medical student I know was administered an ethics exam. She was asked, in such-and-such a scenario what would you do? She'd been working in a hospital where, unambiguously, the stated policy was to do X, but the practice was to do Y.¹⁹ She knew that if she lied and wrote X, her answer would be marked as correct on the ethics exam, while if she told the truth and wrote Y, that would be marked as incorrect. She wrote X.

The function of the test was not to detect ethics. Or rather, the function of the test was to detect ethics, in approximately the way a cancer test is supposed to detect cancer. It was to establish that she could and would identify which audience she was performing for and produce the expected output, without ever forcing the contradiction into common knowledge.²⁰

The NMSC application requires a principal's endorsement, "leadership," and social legibility. Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" reports that teenagers whose attention is on the object-level world rather than on social navigation are a marginalized minority; popularity is a full-time job and they won't pay the full cost. (I think even having an identifiable minority category like that was a Gen X thing; nowadays "nerd" just means "member of a fandom.") Graham is a little unhelpful, though, because he relegates normality to the background as an unexamined default from which nerds deviate. Ayn Rand's "The Comprachicos" (1970) problematizes it:²¹ the Progressive education system replaces cognitive training with "social adjustment" starting at age three, producing the pack-reading baseline Graham takes as given. John Taylor Gatto's The Open History of American Education traces the design of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for social engineering from its Prussian origins through its American adoption. His Prussian-model genealogy is well-documented in mainstream education history.²²

So an otherwise marginal high-g teenager applying for a National Merit scholarship is being asked to simultaneously win the acceptance of an anticognitive pack, ruthlessly instrumentalize the system, go along with being piecemeal instrumentalized and conditioned to follow orders, and then somehow emerge with enough independent orientation left over to do something worthwhile once they've won their way into the elite.

I was a National Merit Semifinalist. I was in the 5% who never became Finalists. I didn't complete the application. The whole thing seemed like it was asking me to perform a kind of narcissism: to collect figurehead titles in high school clubs and then boast about them, as though being elected secretary of the Latin club contributed to my community or meant people respected and relied on me for my sound judgment, work ethic, and initiative. It would have been different if any of it had been organized around meeting some real need. Instead the process seemed to be asking me to pretend that my value was constituted by the approval of the same institutional structure that was conspicuously wasting everyone's time.

I was unhappy in high school. I didn't write treatises like this about it, but when anyone asked I was articulate enough to say that it didn't seem like I was being prepared to be of real use to anyone. I was visibly unhappy enough that my mother sent me to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist prescribed low-dose Lexapro, gave my mother a photocopied magazine article about Temple Grandin, and told her that while I didn't technically have Asperger's, this would help her understand me better. I was the back-row thinker the system had correctly detected and was now asking to perform enthusiastic consent.

I was not typical of the people Hoxby's research describes. I grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Stamford, Connecticut; some of my high school classmates ended up at Harvard or Princeton; my family was close with a legacy Yale family from the time I was in preschool; I've shared meals with billionaires and my former housemates are people the New York Times and New Yorker write about. I'm not the kind of person who's supposed to get lost by the system. I went to an alternative primary school for kids whose parents didn't want to put them through the ordinary schooling meat grinder, and even there, at least one classmate who stayed on track went Ivy League and medical school.

The cases common enough to show up as a statistical signal look different from mine: Hoxby and Avery found that of 25,000-35,000 high-achieving, low-income students (top 10% of test-takers, A- GPA or above), few apply to any selective college, even though selective schools would often cost them less than the community colleges they actually attend, because of financial aid. These students come from districts too small to support selective public high schools, aren't surrounded by other high achievers, and may have never met a teacher or older student who went to a selective college. Among low-income high achievers whose application strategies resemble those of high-income high achievers, seventy percent come from just fifteen urban areas. Steve Sailer's gloss on this is that the system works at the 99.5th percentile and fails at the 90th. But my case suggests something worse: even at the top of the top, even with every demographic advantage, the system isn't looking for people who won't perform enthusiastic consent. It sent me an invitation to audition, but when I wouldn't dance, it silently moved on.

What does the pipeline produce? A person who successfully navigates it spends roughly a decade in continuous performance mode: maintaining GPA, prepping for standardized tests, performing in professional school, billing hours. They end up credentialed and well-compensated. And that's it.

My son's fifteen-month well-child visit was at a community health clinic in New Haven staffed by Yale-affiliated physicians. The pediatrician who saw him, a Yale resident still in training, came in, did what I understood to be the standard exam (stethoscope, abdomen, genitals), and then, without context, asked me what he was eating. I described his diet. When I mentioned that he sometimes ate processed snacks like Goldfish crackers, she told me to cut back on those. She didn't say why. I asked. She said it was his weight. I said, "I know he's big, but he's also tall." She said she was going by his weight:height ratio. That's when I remembered: they hadn't measured his height that day. The ratio the pediatrician was using to tell me to feed my toddler less had a fictitious denominator. She hadn't noticed. She hadn't looked at the child on the exam table and thought does this kid look fat? She had looked at a number on a screen and dispensed advice. Once the nurse came back and measured his height, nobody had anything more to say about my supposedly obese toddler. I'd had the sense for a while that there was no channel for information from an ordinary doctor's visit to flow upward into the system and cause heuristics to get reexamined. Unless, of course, it's not an ordinary visit at all, but one performed under the aegis of a study design and blessed by an IRB. But it's easy to second-guess that kind of impression, until you run into clear, unambiguous evidence of gross inattention.²³

A physician still in the credentialing pipeline — college GPA, MCAT, medical school, now residency — has had her cognitive ability verified at every stage. But the system that verified it now gives her eight minutes to give the patient, and the system of record, the impression that the boxes were checked.

Elite lawyers mostly work to fight elite lawyers. The professional-managerial class functions as a self-perpetuating job-creation scheme, its members selected not for the ability to solve problems but for the disposition to manage them in ways that preserve the positional advantages of the class they've been recruited into. The financial-political system that produces demand for this is a debtor-aristocracy in which capital is not allocated on the basis of productive capacity, but rather members of the job-creation class act as gatekeepers with preferential access to low interest rates.

The hoops are not individually onerous. But the disposition required to keep jumping through them, the learned vigilance about what the next evaluator wants, is structurally antagonistic to the kind of cognition that produces work commensurate with 150-IQ capacity. Paul Graham identified this pattern in "The Lesson to Unlearn" and built Y Combinator to select for exactly the hoop-jumping disposition he was criticizing. The thing being selected for is anxious responsiveness to authority, not the capacity to sit with a hard problem for months.

Isaac Newton had a Cambridge fellowship that was basically a sinecure. He sat in his room thinking about Galileo and Kepler and the motions of the celestial bodies, and then (the story goes) an apple fell on his head and he saw a way to unify terrestrial and celestial mechanics.

Albert Einstein was working as a patent clerk in Bern, spending his free mental bandwidth on a specific technical problem: Newtonian gravity assumes instantaneous action at a distance, but special relativity prohibits faster-than-light causal influence, so gravity as Newton described it can't be right. He'd been turning this over for two years when one day, sitting in his office chair, he was startled by the thought that a person falling freely would not feel their own weight. He later called it "the happiest thought of my life." It became the equivalence principle: gravity and acceleration are locally indistinguishable, which means gravity isn't a force propagating through space but a property of the geometry of spacetime itself. The insight took eight more years to work out mathematically, but the flash came while he was musing in a chair, not anxiously staying busy to justify his position.

Spinoza ground lenses, and lived cheaply, which gave him plenty of time to think about foundational problems profoundly enough that the next generation of great philosophers all understood themselves to be living in his world.

The pattern is the same in each case: a mind that had been dwelling on a hard problem for a long time, in conditions of sufficient slack to let the pieces rearrange themselves.

What's the big deal? Spinoza, Newton, and Einstein had their political realities to accommodate; we have ours. Why would we think that kids these days don't stand a chance?

Newton ran the Royal Mint, prosecuted counterfeiters, and sat in Parliament. But Isaac Barrow had talent-scouted him at Cambridge, championed his work, and resigned the Lucasian Chair so Newton could have it at twenty-six. The revolutionary work was already done. The politics came after.

Einstein had a harder road: quit high school at fifteen, failed an entrance exam, graduated with an undistinguished record, spent two years unable to find academic work, and got the patent clerk job through a friend's father. That was all before the 1905 papers. Afterward came fleeing Germany, helping other scientists get out, and lobbying Roosevelt to build the bomb. Despite all this, Einstein seems to have believed that things had deteriorated badly between his youth and 1954, when he told The Reporter that if he were a young man again, he would not try to become a scientist: "I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances."

Half a century later, Peter Higgs was no Einstein, but he did identify the mechanism by which subatomic particles acquire mass. Shortly after receiving his Nobel Prize, he said in 2013 that he would not get an academic job today because he would not be considered "productive" enough: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." These are not outsiders complaining about a system they failed to enter. These are people who won an earlier generation's meritocracy and are telling you the current one wouldn't have let them play.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was brilliant like Newton and Einstein, but he was an anxious striver. He co-invented calculus, and his notation (dy/dx, the integral sign) proved so superior to Newton's that continental mathematicians using Leibniz's system pulled ahead of the British for most of the 18th century; the British eventually had to abandon Newton's notation and adopt Leibniz's. He identified the conservation of kinetic energy (his "vis viva"), anticipating what became a cornerstone of physics. He did important work in formal logic that wouldn't be appreciated until the 19th century. He conceived of binary arithmetic, the characteristica universalis (a formal language for all reasoning), and the idea that space and time are relational rather than absolute, which Einstein would vindicate two centuries later. But the gap between what Leibniz did and what he could have done is visible.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums up the gap honestly: Leibniz's mathematics made a significant difference in 18th-century European science; his contributions as engineer and logician, however, were relatively quickly forgotten and had to be re-invented elsewhere. Leibniz himself was aware of the problem. He wrote: "If I were relieved of my historical tasks I would set myself to establishing the elements of general philosophy and natural theology, which comprise what is most important in that philosophy for both theory and practice." He spent decades compiling a genealogical history of the House of Brunswick because that's what his patron required. He never finished it.

There was a wedge forcing open that gap between Leibniz's extreme potential, and his merely great achievements: patron management. Leibniz had to constantly attend to his relationships within the Hanoverian court, pursue the priority dispute with Newton, seek appointments, and produce work-for-hire genealogy. The tax on his attention was not that any single task was strenuous, but that none of them could be safely ignored. Newton could ignore the world for months; Leibniz could not.

Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic argues that Leibniz's metaphysics was substantially motivated by the need to preserve the metaphysical privilege for old-regime power relations that Spinoza's monism eroded. Where Spinoza's one-substance ontology amounted to a radical leveling (no part of nature is closer to God than any other), Leibniz's otherwise unmotivated commitment to metaphysical pluralism (the monads, the pre-established harmony, the "best of all possible worlds") preserved a hierarchical cosmos in which some beings are genuinely higher than others, which is the kind of metaphysics a court philosopher serving a Holy Roman elector needs. Einstein implied Spinoza powered his thought; Leibniz's metaphysics embedded the social commitments of his patronage, and those commitments likely fractured and enervated his.²⁴ That Leibniz felt the need to oppose Spinoza may have denied him the class of insight available to Einstein. The patron didn't just take Leibniz's time. It shaped what he was willing to think.

The credentialing pipeline can be thought of as a gigantic robot patron, operating at hundreds of thousands of times the throughput of the House of Brunswick, ceaselessly converting creative intelligence into loyalty. It does not just take a decade of your time. It shapes what you are willing to think. The system does not try to make use of intelligence. It does not identify 90th-percentile people and pull them toward positions of moderate responsibility and influence. It does not give 99th-percentile people hard problems and room to work on them. VB Knives's framing, that the system works if you just know how to use it, makes the solution look like an information problem: just tell smart kids about National Merit scholarships and LSAT prep. Solving the information problem gets more 150-IQ kids into large law firms. Is that really our problem? Not enough clever elite lawyers?

The stone which the builders rejected is become the head stone of the corner. — Psalm 118:22