I don't know if I would say "smarter" than oneself, so much as with diverse perspectives and types of intelligence and a willingness to fully apply themselves in discourse. A lot of people are just lazy. Leaving them aside, I think it profits us less to talk to people who are better at the same type of intelligence we are strongest in than to discourse with people who see the world differently.

I could say A LOT about that idea, but let me give you just one example.

Many years ago I lived in Bali, Indonesia. I rented a house in the rice fields that I found after just 3 days there. It was lovely, but it had no hot water. I developed friendships with other Westerners living there and discovered that all their houses had hot water. So then I was on a mission to find a new house in the area that had hot water.

I put the word out among my friends and would occasionally be told of a house I should go see that was up for rent and had hot water. For a year I kept going to see such houses, only to be told ultimately that the house was no longer available. I started thinking there was some sort of racial discrimination at play, since that was the only thing I could see that was different about me and my friends telling me about the more modern houses and having them themselves.

It was probably a decade later that it hit me that I was trying to understand the situation through an American lens, but it didn't fit the situation. In America, landlords will compete for tenants. If three houses sit empty on the same block, unless renter demand is many times the pool of available units, the landlords will compete with lowered prices, free weeks, or various perks to try to get the tenant rental income for themselves. Not so in Bali.

What was happening was that I was renting from a village elder. In retrospect, I saw that each interview would take a turn once they asked me where I lived and I told them. They wanted me as a tenant right up until they realized they would have to take a tenant from a village elder in order to do so. Then they had absolutely no interest. It is something they would never do. Maybe because of loyalty or maybe fear, because the village elders hold the power there, but either way they would not rent to one of Bapak Sadri's tenants.

Now a Balinese person could have explained this to me had I understood enough to even raise the issue with them. The person might not be nearly as intelligent as me when it comes to the ability to analyze such a situation, solve for X, or utilize any of the forms of intelligence I've received extensive training in. But they hold a type of cultural wisdom that is incredibly valuable to me.

The situation itself taught me to see my own filters, to see the assumptions of my culture and realize there was another way of assuming what is reasonable. This to me is the most useful type of learning. It's why I'm always searching Steemit for posts from new people, often talking about things I don't normally write about myself.

Nice to meet you.