You're advocating an arbitrary system over a rules system. Who decides whether the sob story the janitor's son tells is sufficient? Is having two drug-addled pa

You're advocating an arbitrary system over a rules system. Who decides whether the sob story the janitor's son tells is sufficient? Is having two drug-addled parents better than one? In a rules based system, you get in or don't based on your qualifications and prerequisites. You can predict how the system will act in restricting you. It is fairer. In a system where everyone must be judged, it leads to exercises in capriciousness, which is what we're seeing now. "We have too many that look like you, we need a different assortment of appearances." That's arbitrary. "Your story made me sadder than his story, you get in." That's an awful way to run a system. That's how you get aristocracy with arbitrary power. It's what every monarch of the old systems lorded over the peasants. We're just recreating it in technicolor in all of our non-governmental systems, and it just seems so utterly foolish. The claims for why we're doing it seem noble, but they always seem that way. What this arbitrary mechanism always achieves is the opposite of its stated intent.