Why is the analogy ridiculous? You should read The Chosen, by Karabel, which is probably the best history of elite college admissions. Much of what we do in college admissions today are remnants to reduce the number of Jewish people at Ivy League schools -- and then later a focus on meritocracy. Colleges have historically taken stock of the "type" of people they accept and adjust to their liking.
I'm ignoring analogies containing terrorists in it lol. It's true that colleges are historically and currently biased. But that does not mean that you just drop the idea of meritocracy and just say fuck it have a lottery. Instead you move towards the ideal and crack down on college biases, e.g, you can assign students to colleges based on prospective student's college preferences and SAT scores; that's how it works in plenty of countries.
I choose terrorists because everyone dislikes them. Seemed non-offensive. But you can make them whatever group you think is harmful in your mind (maybe progressives for you).
The question is what is the ends meant to achieve by the meritocracy? The goal of most institutions in our world is to make the world a better place for us to live in. If the meritocracy seems to run counter to that then it may not be achieving its goal. And the point I was trying to make with the terrorists is that if you blindly treat meritocracy as its own ends then you can end up making the world a worse place for it.
The thing about putting terrorists in an analogy is it distorts the intent of the analogy in unexpected ways, so you lose what you're trying to convey.
The framework that I'm coming from is that work/talent/etc must be rewarded in a predictable manner in order for kids to have the motivation to perform and succeed. If the system gets unpredictable, kids will be demotivated and not compete in the system anymore. As in, if it's a lottery and my classmate who does worse than me gets into a better college than me, this isn't a fair competition so why try studying, I'll go into sports or something where the best person under the competitive framework wins.
You argue that if the system is too predictable then too many undesirable people might succeed. Which might or might not be true, it's pure speculation. We're talking about high achieving students who want to get into good colleges; no need to compare them to terrorists. Purely test based systems work in plenty of other countries without the college graduates collapsing society.
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.
