I don't know why people look down on trust-fund kids. Being born smart ,as this author clearly was- is just another innate advantage, like being born rich. It's that the latter is denigrated. High IQ, or music talent, or sports talent is just as unearned as having rich parents. Yet we're supposed to downplay or feel ashamed of the latter.
Because wealth, unlike those other things, is readily transferable by taxation to level the playing field. I don't necessarily agree it should be, but if we could sap intelligence or other skills from the gifted and spread them around to shore up deficient people, I bet there would be a faction of people supporting this as the moral thing to do: "why should talented musicians meet and mate and produce offspring who keep disproportionately high inherited talent they didn't earn?", they might say.
This is 100% what Generative AI is doing and I am one of those people who "support this as a moral thing to do".
I would go as far as to claim that it's a moral bad as a creative to put a payway behind any of your work and those who subvert it (i.e. fine-tuning your likeness into a model) are doing ethically good work.
Hmmm, kiiiiiinda. But if we declare equivalences without providing any justification, there's little substance:
We should look (up|down) to people who (do|don't) have X.
It's meaningless. In order to make this seem meaningful, you could dictate some premises, for example:
We should look up to people who have inherited wealth.
We should look down upon people who don't have high IQ.
What issue does this illuminate? By declaring unearned wealth and unearned IQ (or unearned musical talent) to be comparable, what can we learn? Are they, in fact, comparable in any meaningful way?
It seems an odd approach. The initial premises seem to illuminate the person who selects them, rather than illuminating any societal issue. What can we learn from your selection, other than that you seem to feel an affinity towards those with inherited wealth?
There is of course one apparent distinction between inherited wealth and inherited ability, be it musical or sporting or intelligence or what have you. Wealth tends to be accrued, while talent can only be recognised when it is shared.
