If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room

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If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room

This is quite bad news for clever people, but barely better tidings for the great, face-slapping mediocrity, for it will make our lives harder too. But at least it explains why everyone seems so confused: it means at least one person in every room is in the wrong place.

At least. For Nobel laureates and humanities professors have no monopoly on room disorientation: to the contrary, the stupider you are, the more likely you are to be in the wrong place.

It will also be disappointing for teachers, since it implies all of them are in the wrong room, all the time: a teacher either:

(i) is the smartest person in the room, and, per Mayer’s Law, ergo is in the wrong room, or

(ii) is not the smartest person in the room, in which case what is she doing teaching these people in the first place?

It also means lavatory cubicles are just wrong, on principle.

I have just had an argument with my daughter about who should leave the kitchen. Eventually we agreed she should go. But, dilemma! The minute she left I became the smartest person in the kitchen, so I had to leave too. I joined her in the laundry.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DAD?" she is yelling at me. "Now I have to leave the laundry, too."

Firstly, being the stupider one I don’t see how I was meant to know this? Secondly, I don't think she was allowed in there by herself in the first place, but her presence at least gave me some cover.

But as soon as she left I had to leave as well.

Just when this was getting really annoying for both of us, traipsing around the house, going in and out of all the rooms, we worked out what to do. (It was my daughter’s idea: she’s the smart one.)

Finally, we can sit down. As luck would have it, it is quite a mild evening for December, though it looks like it might rain.

But I need the loo.

See also

• Paradox