The School of Athens by Raffaello
We are in a world where every hand is carrying the eye of a digital information tornado. These days were foreseen by many bright minds such as Paul Virilio and Marshall McLuhan decades ago. However, forecasting, believing, knowing and living are completely different things. Today, we are living, witnessing... Data is prevalent, everything is connected so people can access and read and share and instantly believe and then create groups that are called echo chambers. Some call this the era of "post-truth".
I am sure you have read the popular sentence below:
"If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room".
This was attributed to many famous people but no one knows the one who said it. On the other hand, when one reads it, it gives a positive vibe... It feels like it is putting forth a number of messages that would be useful for the ones who are to improve themselves. For example,
1. Be close to the people whom you can learn from
2. Be confident enough to work closely with the ones who are more talented than you are
3. Be open to be challenged
4. Don't stuck into your comfort zone
It is possible to write down a couple of messages more but I believe the ones above are giving the idea.
So far, so good... Let's have a closer look into the original sentence and try to analyze it to the bones. I want to test it by trying to use the core guidence of the sentence for building social groups. Can a person build or get integrated to a team by following the sentence?
When we decompose the proposition, it can be re-written as "don't be the smartest person in the team". Let us assume that everybody has a visible tag, on which the person's smartness level is written. So while you are walking around to build up teams, when you meet a person, you can easily distinguish whether you are smarter or not. In such a situation, if you are smarter, you must reject to team up. If you are not smarter, then the other person is smarter; and he/she rejects to team up. Therefore, it is impossible for you to get socialized by following the proposition unless two persons are equally smart. This will be valid for third, fourth and the other consecutive candidate members of the team, as well. As a result, this famous sentence advises us to team up with the ones who are equally smart. We all know that, it is not possible because any given population is likely to have normally distributed smartness scores rather than equal scores. Even you are in an imaginary society, where all members are equally smart, it will not be beneficial for you because intellectual flow in such a population would be minimal. Variations are making populations richer.
As a conclusion, we can say the well known motto above is not a good advice. If we follow it, we cannot socialize.
If so, why is it that popular? Is my approach faulty?
Think.