When were you smarter than everyone else?

Was there an instance when everybody else believed something and only you were smart enough to realise how dumb it was?

Here's an example in my life.

When I was 16 at school a lecturer came to the school and said "today I am going to teach you all time magaement". Then he wrote a sum on the board and said "if you make 15 more minutes a day and multiply that by 365 look at all the extra time you will have. You could just set the alarm clock 15 minutes earlier".

People thought that it was the best thing since Moses crossed the Red Sea.

But I was having second thoughts. What if you spent 20 minutes each day thinking about what to do with your 15 minutes? Yoiu could go *backwards* by 5 minutes. And what is the quality of 15 minutes anyway? You are better off having 1/10 of that net extra time in one consecutive block.

Yet for the next week school teachers with all these dee -grees were walking around saying "I never knew what an extra 15 minutes a day could do. That's astonishing".

I even came up with a name for all of this:

the number cult: the worship of numbers without concern for human factors or context. The number is a golden calf. It needs a temple.

Are you trying to be ironic?