I'm not a mathematician at all, so yeah I certainly didn't have a chance.
> It was not some great awesome fair thing that math was dominated by some outrageous outliers on the iq spectrum. It's not some great awesome fair thing now either.
I don't see these as equivalent circumstances. For most people if they get beat by someone smarter or someone stronger, it may be disappointing but they can still respect and admire that they were beat by talent/determination/etc.
Getting beat due to access to money just feels slimy, because at some level we all realize money is not distributed on a meritocratic curve at all, at least not if you are measuring values any well-adjusted person would consider positive.
Rawls had a concept of the "veil of ignorance" which is probably better for thinking about fairness rather than "meritocracy". No one should lose sleep over the fact that the tiny number of corporates with enough capital can now beat out the tiny number of 180 iqs at a task (mostly generating proofs) that is not really valuable.