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Costanza comments on I'm scared. - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a good point. It occurs to me that a disproportional number of people in this forum may have had the experience growing up of being the smartest, most promising kid in class. Maybe you were always put into the advanced classes even in subjects you weren't interested in. As you advance, the competition gets a little tougher, but you learn to push yourself, too.
For the overwhelming majority of people, this cycle has to end, early or late, with the shock of realizing that you are finally out of your league. Some poor bastard had to come to terms with knowing that he was obviously the dumbest physicist on the Manhattan Project, a net drag on the team.
The overwhelming number of people in historical times have died and been forgotten. How many people have lived? And of those, how many could possibly be even assigned a name by any historical records, let alone a place in popular memory?
Q: What do they call the person who graduates at the bottom of their class at medical school?
A: Doctor.
This doesn't follow. It might be that the dumbest person is still contributing productively. They'll just be contributing the least. Moreover, there might be enough variation in specific skill sets that no one is actually the dumbest (although I find this second argument to be weak. The truth is that some people really are better than others). Now it is more plausible that some of the dumber people who also worked less ended up distracting people in the project enough that they were net negatives. But that sort of argument requires that they be not only stupid but lazy and disruptive. In practice, few people with those traits last long in serious research.
This is true. I was thinking, though, of the purely emotional impact on someone who is used to being the smartest person in the room to suddenly finding himself the least smart person in the room. Specifically, it's a lesson I have had to learn myself -- for me, it was a lesson I started learning in high school, and have re-learned the lesson many, many times since then. It's not a fun lesson.