What you point out is maybe partially true. There was an episode on the Hidden Brain podcast recently about the famous marshmallow test that speaks to what you

What you point out is maybe partially true. There was an episode on the Hidden Brain podcast recently about the famous marshmallow test that speaks to what you're stating. On this show they point out that the discipline to eat or not eat the marshmallow is also a function of if you believe that the person will actually give you the second marshmallow when they return. The predictability. But most Black students face this level of unpredictability moreso every day leading up to college admissions. Another, unrelated study, asked teachers to watch for misbehaving kids -- with a mixed race group of kids. The thing was that none of the kids were misbehaving -- but the teachers still pointed to the Black kids. Black kids live with this level of predictability all throughout schooling where they'll be called out for doing the same thing as white students who aren't called out. Eventually you learn to just eat the marshmallow, because the second one isn't coming even if you have the discipline to not eat the first. So then this ties back to the lottery. It turns out that little in life has 100% predictability. There's no guarantee that my startup will make me billions, even if I seemingly do everything that Steve Jobs did. But I increase my chances and the lottery works the same way. But it also does something else -- it also provides a marshmallow for the kids who know that in their current environment they face steep odds to ever take 16 AP classes or work with their dad's research lab to win the Westinghouse/Intel Science Fair. It turns out that fairness isn't so easy to determine.