It's far more complicated than that. The maxim doesn't model a world where everyone has a smarts score, and everyone knows what everyone else's score is. That's

It's far more complicated than that. The maxim doesn't model a world where everyone has a smarts score, and everyone knows what everyone else's score is. That's not how the world works. What it's really saying is that if you believe that you are the smartest person in the room, and you are there just to teach, as you have little to learn, that you need to be in a room where you really believe you have a lot to learn from the others there. This is true regardless of how much better, or worse, you happen to be. I sure have seen rooms where almost everyone thought they were the smartest person in the room, and others where nobody thought they were the smartest. A common problem in startups is that you end up building the first room, when you really need to be building the second.