Part of the problem, particularly with Western culture, is the desire to assign everything a rank, without much clue as to whether or not the metric used is credible at all. Your GPA, SAT/ACT/GRE scores, IQ, credit rating, college major, average income and choice of university all form an impression on people who want a nice box to put you in, whether you like it or not. Sure, some intelligence is probably required to achieve high rankings in some of those areas, but it isn't indicative by itself of who you are or what you're capable of. To the perceptive crowd on Hacker News, this probably seems obvious, but to most of society, these facts and figures define who you are and what you should do with your life.

The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else, rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.