  In recent paper "Quantifying Inequities and Documenting Elitism in
PhD-granting Mathematical Sciences Departments in the United States"
(arXiv:2308.13750) by a group of accomplished and/or aspiring mathematicians,
the authors use data to challenge ``the idea that the mathematical sciences in
the United States is a meritocracy''. We show that, regardless of the validity
of the challenged idea, the arguments in the paper are invalid. Namely, among
other flaws, they rely on a logical trick of asserting the validity of the
conclusion derived from an assumption which the authors neglect to test (and
which actually contradicts their own data).
