You're completely right that I kind of got off track there and thank you for calling me out on it. But in this comment I think you're conflating merit with pote

You're completely right that I kind of got off track there and thank you for calling me out on it. But in this comment I think you're conflating merit with potential. If we're comparing those two hypothetical people, the one with the lower score clearly has more potential as they overcame all those obstacles and did almost as well as the one who had a ton of advantages. But if (and I'm not saying this is an objectively good goal) you want to hire strictly off of merit, you hire the 80 because 80 > 79. If you want to hire on potential, it's a pretty clear choice to hire the 79. Not every job needs to be 100% merit-focused, but some should. A pretty good, and IMO relevant, example would be basically any job in the national defense / intelligence circles. We should not care what obstacles you had to overcome to get that 79, if someone else got an 80 they're the ones that should be working at the CIA/NSA/whatever. But there are plenty of jobs where potential is as important or more so than merit. That's part of why there's no such thing as the "two equally qualified candidates" thing that both sides like to use as examples so much.