If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room
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We are indebted to Marissa Mayer for this golden nugget of wisdom:
If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
At first blush it seems rather appealing. Only when you reflect on the downward spiral it incites does its counsel of oblivion become plain. For if — as it may, for it explains a few things — Mayer’s Law reveals a true fact about the world, it is a distressing one for a few groups. At least one person in every room is in the wrong place. At least; most likely it is more: Nobel laureates have no monopoly on room dysphoria. To the contrary, the stupider we are, the more likely we are to be in the wrong room.
Clever people: Firstly, and obviously, it is bad news for brain-boxes, who must now continually absent themselves from rooms they probably quite enjoy being in.
Stupid people: It is hardly better we of the great, face-slapping mediocrity, whose lives will become harder too, dealing with this insidious brain drain whenever two or three are gathered together.
Teachers: This news will also be disappointing for teachers, implying as it does that none of them are where they should be: they disqualify themselves from their surroundings either by being too smart — per Mayer’s Law — or not being smart enough, it being a founding proposition that you should not educate people who are already cleverer than you are.
Lavatories: It also means lavatory cubicles are just wrong, on principle.[1]
O! Paradox: It gets worse. The plain implication is that no room has a stable equilibrium and occupancy tends to zero. For example, 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.”
Being the stupider one, I don’t see how I was meant to know this? Plus, I don't think she should have gone 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.
Not sure what we will do when someone needs the loo.
See also
References
- ↑ There may be an exception for those high tech self-flushing ones you find in Japan, for uncommonly dull people.