Wow, I don't think I've ever been accused of Marxist propaganda before. Certainly not before lunchtime.
Okay, I'm going to try and be charitable. I agree that high IQ people create "real progress" and they come from the majority. A good example I expect we would agree on would be Steve Jobs: very smart, responsible for lots of progress.
The problem I see with meritocracy as it exists in the real world, for example, college admissions is that it doesn't reward Steve Jobs. It rewards the smart but boring, the clever but not too clever, the academically bright and socially conservative. When I quoted "minority", I didn't mean that there is some special cadre of people who are better; the quote refers to the fact that only a few people are responsible for human progress. There are plenty of high IQ people, but few Einsteins or Gates or Jobs.
And returning to TFA, it seems obvious that selecting an ever-smaller fraction based on quantifiable measurements doesn't measure merit. I'd argue "merit" is simply not accurately measurable, certainly not on a large enough scale for college admissions.
So the idea of selecting randomly from a fraction of "good enough" is likely to give as good a result, whilst also improving problems of social mobility and possible finding those diamonds in the rough who might have greater "merit" but not be good at standardised testing for whatever reason.
