The relationship between age and wisdom-related performance (1999)
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
People kept telling me: This is an opportunity. You can use it to grow if you want. I think I did, and I think it taught me that as much as it sucked, I gained something I would not have otherwise have had from the experience.
I spent a long time ignoring discomfort (pain-light) in my life. When I started nosing into the discomfort, the pain, and the hard things, I started to change. I had to be willing to do it, though, be willing to face that I was wrong, acknowledging that even the criticisms I had of myself were wrong.
I have changed more in the last year than I have over the rest of my life. The change has been huge.
I'm always thankful that I had a really hard time in high school and college (and spent a majority of my high school and college years working.)
I felt that when I graduated from college, I had a much easier time hunting for work than my peers. I also adjusted easily to startup hours, because they were still much less severe than the combined hours I had to put in for school on top of work to pay rent in college.
Not saying it’s ideal but trying to learn as much as you can when you’re in a hard place might help you out.
I can't say I feel wiser than I was at 25 or 50. Different, definitely. I'm still unclear what constitutes "wise".
But as I age, I increasingly see the degree to which phenomena are interconnected, and the knock-on implications regarding complexity and unanticipated consequences. It biases me to err in the direction of generosity and empathy.
Still, it would feel good to know what "wise" is. Not sure I'd recognize it if it bit me in the butt.
That said, go read Staudinger's paper (SciHub is your friend). Set a reminder to rethink these issues everytime your age doubles. You'll be interested in your results.
I think the same reasons that we have to thank for that we also have to blame for the fact that we are less easy to change our ways of modeling reality, both at the lower and the higher levels as we become older. In some ways we become more humble, in some other ways we are becoming more rigid. In practice I guess we are becoming better in modeling the world around us in those areas that have not changed too much, but at the same time we become less willing or able to revise our models drastically or create new ones, which would be a good thing in areas that have incurred some fundamental changes.
This accumulated "wisdom" often leads to choices and behaviors that cannot be rationalized by those younger, but it can be tricky knowing when that's a case of modeling a situation better and when it's a case of reading patterns that did not exist or missing/underestimating some important variables.
I think it is exciting but also a bit scary to see these changes happening to ourselves with age and trying to see how effectively we can identify and compensate for their negative side through awareness!
> Still, it would feel good to know what "wise" is.
I think that's a good partial definition of wisdom. I would add that at that point, life overall holds very few mysteries to you, people nor events in life don't shock-surprise you.
I don't think I'll ever consider myself wise :) Although sometime after 30 I started to see rather clear patterns in human behavior, what leads to what and what to (not) expect. So far all this experience is being reconfirmed over and over, with very few exceptions.
Sounds like textbook wisdom to me; a body of knowledge and experience you already have such that new information does not exist in isolation but is related to what you already know, allowing you to take knowledge and experience from past situations and phenomena and apply it to the new.
Unfortunately, there's a bunch of negative stuff that derives similarly - e.g. cheating - and, due to changing circumstances, the tradeoffs for all of it might not be in tune anymore - e.g. global consequences, intellectual property.
I always thought of wisdom as the knowledge/understanding required to live well.
People need to be open minded to other people's experience and ideas. People need to be mindful that the best course of action rarely lies at extremes and having a broad understanding of a problem helps you arrive at a balanced solution.
You don't seem to come from a poor background if you think that wisdom always bring good.
Negative experiences spanning decades of your life will make you contempt with the false truths. And you will never agree it's not the case because it's so hard to believe all of your suffering was for nothing.
While many people may have mature domain-specific skills in a niche or two, broad-spectrum contextual wisdom is much rarer.
Climate change and politics is enough to prove that experience alone counts for squat. :)
Which is why there are entire industries dedicated to making sure that the talking points they parroting don't inconvenience the political and financial interests of the stockholder class.
The myth that democracy and policy appear by magic out of a nation of proud independent thinkers who rationally weigh evidence on the basis of information, logic, and a solid liberal education is absolute nonsense. That's simply not how it works - and the media (and ad) industries know this. So does the political class.
They also know that it's important to maintain the illusion, because people are far more likely to argue - and vote - passionately from a position of pliably expedient ignorance if they believe they're sovereign sages, than if they understand that they've been conned and lied to.
The same applies to corporate culture. Every culture has its convenient mythologies and its hard reality. In some cultures the two are observably close, in others they might as well be on different planets.
But it's important to create and propagate a mythology so that everyone at least knows what they're supposed to be believe.
These narratives are usually unconscious, but they reliably shape actual behaviour far more than any rational assessment of reality does.
Millennials were children at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
Less common, but still happens, is companies having a role that delivers that ground hog day of the first year. Possibly more common in support than dev, but still exists and not exactly rare.
So experience alone counts for little. It's what was gained from that experience that matters. :)
I actually think you're just reflecting the currently vogue "common sense" view of carbs as the worst macronutrient. Neither this view, nor the view which produced the original food pyramid, is accurate. But saying the food pyramid has "killed literally millions" is incredibly hyperbolic. Starvation has killed literally millions. Cereals on the other hand, have literally been the most common dietary staples of most human diets for most of post-agricultural history.
> The first chart suggested to the USDA by nutritional experts in 1992 featured fruits and vegetables as the biggest group, not breads. This chart was overturned at the hand of special interests in the grain, meat, and dairy industries, all of which are heavily subsidized by the USDA.
Calling this the recommendation of the “scientific community” is ridiculous.
FWIW, I am not a climate change denier.
Edited: removed something that unintentionally sounded like an insult.
No matter the qualifications the authors might make to ensure their definition of wisdom is as empty and useless as that of a specific number, the grand claim of the study makes it sound as if they hadn’t even grasped that qualitative concepts are subject to change and depend upon the entire universe of conditions that impinge upon the concept’s users.
What we mean by wisdom today in 2018 and what, for example, the ancient Greeks or scholastics meant by wisdom is entirely different, such is the power, history, and blurry bounds of the concept—and the point of studying these concepts in such a quantitative fashion is refuted before it’s even made.
Further, wisdom (like related “social” concepts) points at some thing or pattern in the “objective” world. That thing/pattern/what-have-you is, at least putatively, there, and will be there as long as there are humans to be wise/unwise- even if our idea of it is lost, and even if the idea was an arbitrary division of the universe.
And even further, there’s nothing stopping these researchers from making an operational criterion that matches the arbitrary definition of wisdom we have right now and finding something out about it. Even if humanity decides tomorrow that wisdom should actually mean something entirely different, knowledge about today’s “wisdom” was learnt.
So, I'm not so confident Socrate's conception of wisdom was so similar to ours. In fact, I'd feel much more comfortable with the hypothesis that it contained more dissimilarities, considering the material conditions Socrates lived under were radically different than our own—in fact we deal with a whole region of concepts, historical events, and technologies Socrates could have never considered. Yet his concept of wisdom is supposed to nearly sufficiently cover ours? What of the commoner's practical 'wisdom' about matters of economic success in a global market? Surely, you'd argue, that isn't capital W wisdom—ah but then we're in the realm of philosophical debate about what kind of wisdom we're talking about and what really constitutes wisdom in the proper sense (notice how this has absolutely nothing to do with the inert misapplication of statistical analysis or scientific experimentation).
I'm not disputing that wisdom points to something objective. I'm claiming that the objective thing it points to is subject to the same movement of history, and thus change, as anything else. That's not to say societies can't agree on what the concept means, but it's necessarily fuzzy, and potentially even fuzzy and ill defined within the confines of small groups. It is an interpretive concept with an indeterminate reference (unless you're a nominalist that wants to perform several painful acrobatic stunts to try and argue that it points to something like "the collection of all referents participants assign to the term wisdom in a given context C at a given time T." Somehow we don't often find such analyses very interesting or useful).
I'd also argue it's not even clear what wisdom means now. Just look at all the different takes on it that have cropped up in this thread. Point is, you can only begin to get at the meaning and the proper study of these concepts dialectically (something Socrates excelled at, by the way), that is, through discussion and holistic approaches that attempt to account for entire horizons of meaning and social interaction. Taking a statistical approach to this issue, sure, may give us an interesting little factoid we can whip out over dinner, but we hardly walk away from the findings feeling we've actually gained any knowledge about the concept. In this sense it is a constituted objectivity—not something that inheres concretely in the world. It's reference, so to speak, is necessarily indeterminate.
It hardly even has any utility. Assume it is true. Hardly anyone will much appreciate an argument for or against a particular decision based on the idea that the relationship between wisdom and age tapers off at 20. Furthermore, it's so divorced from any context that to even bring it up would probably miss the point of the issue and seem, as I said, idiotic.
Having said that – once you learn about Ancient Greek and Roman civ, their culture, their mores, and what have you; once you learn the glosses for a number of key words and know the etymology of your average philosophical concepts and with a decent translation of Plato and Aristotle & co I think you're going to have a pretty accurate handle on things.
One of the interesting things about our era is that we don't as routine learn ancient Greek and Latin to read the classics. We've decided that's no longer necessary. I think that means that we're in a radically new era, a post-classical era – finally out their shadow. Tis another mark of the Age of Inflection as I call it.
Truly out of interest (i.e. not setting up an argument) - I'd be interested if you could elaborate what you consider to be "radically" different.
1.) None of us has to become soldier and actually kill people to have the right to vote and citizenship.
2.) My friends and students did not instituted tyrannical rule with help of other state which would kill significant amount of citizens.
3.) There is small physical risk in my day to day life. Overwhelming majority of people can read and we have no slaves. My risk to become slave is essentially zero.
Imprecise, subjective, splippery defintiions have been beyond useful science so often.
But it seems now the the best era yet to try and wrangle and quantify concepts there were previously too abstract for our methods.
I've met plenty of 75-year-olds+ that are just morons. Age is just a number for them.
Poor judgement know no age limits.
Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit.
Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love"
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
At one extreme, people go through life and pick up new mental models along the way. At the other extreme are people who actively seek them out.
So age should bring wisdom, but not necessarily more than younger people.
that rubbed me the wrong way
Wisdom is mostly about paying attention and adapting, not all about accumulating experience, as new things keep coming and rendering much of your experience (with things, not with people) irrelevant. It's complicated.
The alternative is thinking that choices don't affect how long you live and I don't think that makes sense.
I think this is false and based on nothing.
In philosophy, anamnesis is a concept in Plato's epistemological and psychological theory that humans possess innate knowledge (perhaps acquired before birth) and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us.
So a 20 year old who has driven the Rubicon Trail probably knows a lot more about that than a 50 year old who has never done so.
At the same time, a wise person would approach the undriven trail, and apply what they have learned about driving, unfamiliar terrains, risk balancing, etc. to the experience of driving it. Maybe they'd even decide, "Screw this, I'm running late and want to go have some beer instead."
In the end, who did it better? Maybe it doesn't matter, but I see wisdom as the ability to apply hard-won experience to novel situations.
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In our work, we proceed from a theoretical conceptualisation of wisdom as expert-level knowledge and judgement in the fundamental pragmatics of life. Note that the term wisdom is reserved to denote only the highest levels of performance. Lower performance levels are labelled as wisdom-related. Knowledge (in its widest sense, cf. Polanyi, 1958) in the domain, fundamental pragmatics of life, entails insights into the quintessential aspects of the human condition and human life including its biological boundaries, cultural conditioning, and intra- as well as interindividual variations. At the centre of this body of knowledge and its application are questions concerning the conduct, interpretation, and meaning of life (for a more detailed description see Baltes et al., 1992; Staudinger & Baltes, 1994).
We have outlined a framework of five criteria (see Table 1) that can be used to evaluate the quantity and quality of wisdom-related knowledge and judgement contained, for instance, in individuals’ verbal responses to difficult and uncertain problems of life. This approach to the psychological study of wisdom received empirical support in a series of studies with regard to reliability and some indication of predictive and external validity (Baltes, Staudinger, Maercker, & Smith, 1995; Smith & Baltes, 1990; Smith, Staudinger, & Baltes, 1994; Staudinger, 1989; Staudinger, Smith, & Baltes, 1992; Staudinger, Lopez & Baltes, 1997; Staudinger, Maciel, Smith & Baltes, 1998a).
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An example of a test question is: "somebody gets a phone call from someone about to commit suicide, what should they do?"
Wisdom =
- Context Recognition & Heuristics
- Knowledge Utilization
- Social / Interpersonal Context Recognition
- Emotional Intelligence & Control