Be the Dumbest in the Room and Average Up (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series, I discuss how the “born brilliant” theory and the “hustle harder” gospel (championed by CEOs who treat 80-hour work weeks as entry-level commitment) have merit but are incomplete. First-gen students/ immigrant workers face massive barriers despite identical work ethics, while mathematical reality shows we’re all slouching toward mediocrity. Just ask Kodak, who invented digital cameras then promptly ignored them.

TL;DR: Your escape hatch? Strategic friend upgrades. Hack your achievement by seeking to be the “dumbest person in the room” while bringing something valuable to the exchange. The verdict is clear: Your destiny isn’t fixed in your DNA or your alarm clock setting — it’s sitting across from you at lunch, assuming you’re in the right zip code.

Well, Reference Groups.

I’d like to propose engineering reference groups as a countermeasure to our destiny of averagedom. I don’t know if it’s going to work but maybe it’s worth a shot. It’s hard to fight entropy but giving up is no way to live. Perhaps from an ergodic theoretic perspective, this is a globally futile enterprise, but at least from a local perspective, say the span of our lives or maybe even a generation or two, it’s worth the effort.

Weber said people work hard because of the Protestant work ethic, which connects hard work, frugality, and prosperity to salvation and divine favor. (Nothing motivates like the fear of eternal damnation!) According to the , reference groups are the largest predictor of achievement levels. An extension of the theory by suggests three kinds of reference groups and how socialization affects achievement. The TLDR on Kemper is: individuals pattern their behavior after normative, comparative, and audience reference groups; the first establishes standards, the second provides benchmarks for self-evaluation, and the third offers feedback and validation that shapes future performance and goals.

Hockey, Spelling, and Math

Howard Scripps Spelling Bee. Yeah, Asians gonna dominate but you’d think there be some distribution of the bounty. Nope. Over the last 10 years, only a few handfuls of non-South Asian-Americans (non-Indians) have placed in the top 10. So it’s not even close. If your last name isn’t Patel, Krishnamurthy, or Rao, just pack up your dictionary and go home.

Same thing happened with the National Geography Bee (GeoBee). At least someone had the humility to just call it quits and , citing a desire to “focus on programs that students around the globe can more equitably participate in” and the impact of the pandemic. Right, so was it COVID-19 or melanin? I suspect they got tired of engraving “Subramanian” on every trophy.

Malcolm’s Tall Tales: The January Hockey Hoax

The storytelling Malcolm Gladwell commands is entertaining (albeit not always believable) so I couldn’t help but follow up on his discussion of the best hockey players being born in January. Gladwell’s popularized this theory, suggesting that January birthdays gave players an advantage in age-grouped youth leagues, but subsequent research has shown the effect is much weaker than claimed and diminishes at higher competitive levels. It’s okay it was bound to be wrong and in fact I think he repudiated his original points in Revenge of the Tipping Point (which I haven’t read yet so won’t comment).

But what I did find out was pretty shocking. If you just look at Southern Ontario, which makes up about 12% of Canada’s population and less than 0.2% of the world’s population, it has produced over 40% of all active NHL players worldwide. And zoom in even further: Peterborough, Ontario — a city of about 84,000 people (roughly 0.001% of the global population) — has produced over 20 NHL players, including stars like Steve Larmer, Cory Stillman, Eric and Jordan Staal, and Mitchell Stephens. That’s a serious reference group if you happen to live in Peterborough. Granted, the vast majority of the world doesn’t have access to ice hockey and thinks of a disease when they hear NHL (Non-Hodgkin lymphoma), nor could care less, but we’re talking about hockey here — not , which truly nobody cares about.

Fjords and Gold Medals: The Norwegian Winter Olympics Enigma

Or just look at . Being rich and being cold most of the year obviously helps. But so is Sweden (with twice the population), Denmark, and Finland. Just like plenty of communities in Northern Europe and North America. But Norway is a skyscraper in that world. So…perhaps there’s something about fjords that produces Olympic champions?

Differential Equations as Bedtime Stories: The Chinese Math Domination

My personal favorite is MIT and the Putnam exam, arguably the hardest math exam in the world. Though the International Math Olympiad (IMO) is more famous and may in fact be harder from a problem solving perspective.** The IMO has been dominated by Chinese, Russian, and American teams in recent years, with . Are the kids being fed differential equations instead of fairy tales for bedtime stories? My guess is that these people have some pretty incredible reference groups.

As for the , yes the math competition where the median score is usually ZERO out of a possible 120 points, when it comes to the rankings there. Last year (2024), all five of the top 5 participants were from MIT. Of the top 25, only four were not from MIT. In fact in the next 75 ranked participants, 48 were from MIT. The only thing abnormal about this is that in other years, the manhandling was even more extreme. Shame on MIT for not being more inclusive, I mean it is math after all.*****

Comparing Notes, Not Self-Worth: The Brene Brown Caveat

But comparison is the source of our discontents. And Dr. Brene Brown, an expert in emotions, has some things to say about this. Even if you can’t stand the Costco book industrial complex, really is a pretty cool book. Brown argues that comparison undermines our sense of worthiness and belonging, leading to shame, disconnection, and diminished well-being. Anyway, the main warning is to use reference groups as inspiration rather than for harmful comparison that leads to self-judgment. Compare notes, not self-worth.

Because Competition is for Losers

Related is Thiel’s view that competition is for losers. Better to do something completely different than the same thing everyone else is doing and compete. Though I suppose Apple, the master of dominating a market by being last-to-market would beg to differ, but that’s different…

There is some truth then to the maxim that you are the average of your five closest friends. But if this is the case, don’t you want to level up and be the one who drags down the average? Be the dumbest person in the room — it’s the fastest way to get smarter!

We can’t pick our family but we can pick our friends. It’s a slippery slope to be so strategic but if you had a blank slate, you might as well choose to level up. I have a related post on making friends.

Cheat and Change Your Coordinate System

It’s like you’re in calculus class and stuck on a hairy integration problem, and changing your coordinate system makes all the difference.

For example, suppose we want to find the volume of the region given by: 9 ≤ x² + y² ≤ 81 and 0 ≤ z ≤ √(x² + y²), and since you’re in calculus class, you assume you have to integrate. Computing this using Cartesian coordinates is really hard. But when you switch to cylindrical? Bam. The solution comes out like butter. Though who tries using spherical coordinates — the resulting integral develops a nasty singularity at φ = 0, and you’d need to use a bunch of annoying substitutions to tame it. ***Footnotes have the computation spelled out for the curious.

So the moral of the story is: If you’re struggling with a problem, try changing your setting which can help change your perspective. Sometimes the right framework makes an impossible-looking challenge become surprisingly manageable. But as it is with coordinate systems (diffeomorphisms), it is with friends (reference groups): “…choose, but choose wisely,” said the Grail Knight.

Keeping Up with the Goldsmiths

You think keeping up with the Jones is tough? Try the Goldsmiths, Subramanians, Changs or Korhonens (yes, I had to look up that last one). So should you just try to raise kids around a bunch of Tam Brams, Jews, and Fins? Get super smart, high EQ, lateral thinkers. Maybe throw in some Norwegians for athletics? Probably not feasible, but it wouldn’t be bad if you had the chance. Social engineering is probably the only way to really influence your kids from middle school onwards. Some study that says by high school, parental influence maxes out at around 30%. The other 70% is split between their friends and TikTok, with TikTok gaining ground every day.

Possible Algorithm

First, I wouldn’t go out and cut ties with your three dumbest, lowest achieving friends. Though if that one friend who’s still talking about his high school football glory days 20 years later happens to drop off your radar, maybe you have an argument not to feel bad.****

1. Figure out what you’re naturally inclined to. What do you do when no one is looking. If the answer is “scroll TikTok,” we have bigger problems.
2. Figure out what you would like to be doing. And what level. Hint: Netflix binging is not a career path.
3. Find affinity groups and attach to them.
4. Be comfortable being the dumbest person in the room. It’s liberating once you embrace it.
5. Find something they want that you have that they don’t have. Fair exchange. Turns out being funny is a surprisingly valuable social currency.

If you want to be happy, follow Taleb’s advice in to move into a neighborhood where you are the richest. Sure, it takes a little emotional fortitude, but if you want to upgrade yourself, move into a neighborhood where you are the dumbest.

Book suggestions

• How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg. Get comfortable with being uncertain. Turns out admitting you don’t know everything is actually a superpower.
• Factfulness by Hans Rosling. And learn to stick to facts vs. marketing. The world is better than you think, despite what your doom-scrolling suggests.
• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Understanding the role of chance in life and markets. You’re not as smart as you think when things go well, nor as dumb as you feel when they don’t.

Other Books

Not suggested reading (especially if you’ve made it this far) but maybe worth reading a high fidelity ChatGPT summary of:

• Mindset by Carol Dweck. The difference between fixed and growth mindsets in achievement. Your brain is a muscle. Exercise it.
• Range by David Epstein. Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Jack of all trades, master of none? Not so fast!
• Race at the Top by Natasha Warikoo. When immigrant ambition meets elite education, the result is cramped apartments, sky-high SAT scores, and Tiger Parents outmaneuvering the system.

Footnotes

Putnam vs. IMO
** Some argue the solutions require more ingenuity since the math is all elementary — pretty much limited to 8th grade level knowledge.

Changing coordinate systems to simplify computation
*** Assuming you don’t just cheat and just pretend to integrate but use good ol’ fashion analytical geometry and reasoning — it’s just a couple of cylinders and conic sections, then here’s what you have:

Cartesian coordinates:

V = ∫∫∫ 1 dz dy dx

We need to determine the bounds. The first constraint tells us we’re in a region between two circles in the xy-plane, with radii 3 and 9. For each point (x,y) in this annular region, z ranges from 0 to √(x² + y²).

So our triple integral becomes:

V = ∫∫ [∫₀^√(x² + y²) 1 dz] dy dx
= ∫∫ √(x² + y²) dy dx

Now we need to integrate over the annular region 9 ≤ x² + y² ≤ 81. This gets messy:
V = ∫₍ₓ₎ ∫_{y: 9≤x²+y²≤81} √(x² + y²) dy dx

The integration bounds for y depend on x, and we get:
V = ∫₍ₓ₎ ∫_{-√(81-x²)}^{√(81-x²)} √(x² + y²) dy dx

But wait — we need to ensure x² + y² ≥ 9, so the actual bounds become even more complex. This is getting unwieldy fast!

Now switch to cylindrical coordinates where:

x = r cos θ, y = r sin θ, z = z, dV = r dr dθ dz

Our region becomes:

3 ≤ r ≤ 9 (from the constraint 9 ≤ x² + y² ≤ 81)
0 ≤ θ ≤ 2π (full rotation)
0 ≤ z ≤ r (since z ≤ √(x² + y²) = r)

The triple integral is now:

V = ∫₀^{2π} ∫₃^₉ ∫₀^r r dz dr dθ
= ∫₀^{2π} ∫₃^₉ r² dr dθ
= 2π ∫₃^₉ r² dr
= 2π [r³/3]₃^₉
= 2π (⁹³/3–³³/3)
= 468π (cubic units)

Easy peasy.

Asian American vs. White families
**** There’s some interesting coverage of social engineering by immigrants in Race at the Top by Natasha Warikoo. She investigates how Asian American and white parents and students navigate the competitive environment of affluent suburban high schools in pursuit of elite college admissions. The book contrasts the groups’ differing approaches, noting that many Asian American families emphasize quantifiable academic achievements and specific extracurriculars, while white families may prioritize a more holistic development and worry about student stress levels. Ultimately, Warikoo analyzes how race, class, and cultural definitions of success shape parenting strategies, student experiences, and the reproduction of inequality within these high-achieving settings. It doesn’t make my book recommendations but it’s an interesting take. Asians are jamming into pidgeon boxes called apartments in fancy towns like Lexington, MA in order to level up and go to top flight schools.

College is definitely worth it
*****There’s an understandable but not useful narrative that’s been floating around that fancy educations aren’t worth the money, that you can get an MIT education without going to MIT, etc. Or even that college in general is a waste of time? I don’t think so. If you can afford it (time and money), it’s one of the best investments you can make in yourself. When/where else will you have four years just to explore? Depending on the university, the most important reason is the reference group you get. If you finish 18.001 online. Congratulations. But taking it in a room with four other IMO medalists levels you up in a way you couldn’t imagine. In any case, instrumentalization of education is indeed a worrying trend. Life is long, study, gain understanding and enjoy.