Comment by graecea

That's just an attempt to salvage meritocracy. The problem is that there is no single metric one could rigorously construct that encapsulates everything one needs for success, partly because 'success' isn't well-defined (there's no such thing as 'winning', remember?) and partly because even if such a metric were constructed it would rapidly become obsolete as one's personality and genreal society evolve.

In more technical terms, some spaces just aren't metrizable ;)