What makes a person seem wise?
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- Books require a "Goldilocks" amount of sustained, slow effort given to one topic. Not too costly to pursue that it is a bodily harm risk, but not trivial either in terms of time and attention investment. This slows down the frenetic nature of a mind that latches onto heuristics.
- By being exposed to different well-formed ideas (especially if you disagree) widens perspective in ways lived experience can't. A reader is uniquely exposed to ideas from other times in human history, from people who are long gone.
- A reader develops a practical trust in themselves, particularly in that they know they take auto didacticism seriously, and won't shy away from intellectual challenges, which the world presents constantly. As such, they make better judgements.
People often think that being booksmart is having your head filled with useless facts, but this is almost opposite from reality.
Indeed. Reading a lot of books does not mean things are retained by mind for a faithful recall. In fact, a lot of detail is lost during the course of reading and afterward. The things that stick are what relate to our experiences, beliefs or aspirations.
Several benefits from deeply knowing a limited subject: - when you listen people who are "well known" talking stupid shit about a topic you understand that the info you're getting is not always that high and you need to check multiple sources (if you need to make a decision) - you understand complexity better and "survival" bias - you can even bet for fun on a prediction market when you see a stupid narrative getting puffed up (I've made around 1k after the CrowdStrike bet that it wasn't a "hack")
But the biggest win is to put more knowledge on your "tree" you've grown from a simple subject to related areas. This mental skill is applicable in almost all complex situations and this might be related to "the wisdom" you're talking about.
The downside is the more you know, the more cynical you get with your sources :)
Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It does provide leverage in that way.
However syntopical reading isn’t sufficient to produce good work. Mortimer Adler himself tried doing it (I believe the Syntopicon was a product of syntopical reading) but those works never did well and were soon forgotten.
Books encode canonical knowledge and this works in established domains but in a domains without much existing knowledge, taking action in perturbing the world actually produces more useful knowledge.
This is why in these spaces it’s important to test ideas in reality and learn from them, rather than only constructing mental models. (We should strive to do both instead of the just latter)
Action often produces more information than reading alone. Having ideas is often the easy part — executing on them is the hard part. If Mortimer Adler actually had some gauge on the market before pursuing the very ambitious multi year effort of producing the Synopticon, he might have produced something noteworthy (which he did with the much smaller experiment “How to read a book.”
To me, wisdom isn’t about thinking rightly (which is what rationalists hold) but about being able to make good decisions with good judgment.
Books must be mixed with a close relationship to people and the world. The world itself can be seen as the "ultimate book", thus the importance of the so-called "school of life".
I would never follow someone whose wisdom was built solely or mostly by reading books.
No education is complete, or even half complete, without a thorough and direct exposure to different cultures, countries and their people.
Another methodology might be attribution: provide a number of stories and ask readers to assess whether actions were due to wisdom, enlightened self-interest, social norms, etc.
Also, stories of Socrates and others long have presented wisdom as a kind of foolishness for outing others’ ignorance or failing to assert one’s own interest in games of mutual self-interest. So a follow-on question for each story would be whether wisdom really led to the best course of action.
I think the same counts for a certain presidential candidate. A lot of people say he is just dumb but personally I think he has to be pretty intelligent to get to where he is.
The reason the world mostly works is because we all mostly trust each other. A relative handful of assholes and bullies will easily find ways to take advantage of that trust, but that doesn't make them intelligent.
You should passively improve with the amount of games he had under his belt, even if you put no conscious thought into why it is that you're losing or what you could be doing better. He performed at a level which is what, the lowest 10% or 20% of players? Many of whom were probably new to the game because most people will climb in rank over time.
That said, it's totally fine to play a videogame without any desire to be good at it.
More importantly studies on chess show that a tiny amount of skill (<10%) is explained by intelligence. I see no reason that MOBAs would be much higher, as in chess they are likely mostly memorization and practice.
And all the intrigues and backstabbing behind the scenes?
The most important aspect of wisdom to me is "making it work" in many areas, in many situations, for yourself and others - throughout your life.
"Dimensions of wisdom perception across twelve countries on five continents"
I say this because I know folks who seem wise (perceived as high IQ and EQ) but lack judgment, because they are working off models of the world that does not comport with reality, so their utterings do not work in real life. Wisdom isn’t about batting a thousand of course but wisdom is about always allowing reality be the teacher.
Many people who present as wise are academics and gurus and they sound really good on podcasts but don’t have much empiricism and experience doing hard things.
Ironically people who are reflective and have gone through the crucible of running a business (or doing something with a lot of headwinds) end up being actually wiser because they have to deal with world (and its flaws) as is, not as they think it should be.
Stonebraker is an opinionated figure in the database world but he has started so many companies and have dealt with the realities of how people use databases that his judgement (which could still be wrong by the way) would carry more weight than a pure database researcher who says all the right things.
Working Backwards is another book full of practical wisdom that has actually been battle tested.
These are both weaknesses that I've identified and tried to work on. I've made the most progress on the second (considering the thoughts/feelings of others). The first is a really difficult one for me since I find that hesitation is also a major problem. The balance between acting quickly and acting carefully is difficult.
However, I think a stronger take-away from this study was: "Real wisdom, according to our study, is about finding a balance between thoughtful reasoning, social understanding, and emotional awareness." I believe that the balance between things is the key to wisdom. The people I consider most unwise are those who have a one-size-fits-all approach to everything.
A selfish person cannot be wise. He may know conceptually the important truth that all life is interconnected, but having never experienced that connectedness, he easily forgets this truth when his personal interests are at stake. Someone who is poisoning the river for personal gain using his power and knowledge cannot be wise because he doesn't see the whole picture in which this river returns to what he drinks and thus he is poisoning himself. Once he becomes wise, he also stops caring about himself, for that's the only rational choice in the light of wisdom.
A great story I once heard was someone asking a wise man how they became so wise, and they answered "If someone asked me what color my socks were, I'd look at my socks before answering." E.g., taking more than the normal amount of care to give a correct answer.
Actually being wise? Much harder to tell from the outside.
Obviously this is a fallible standard but it's pretty much all we've got.
Words that I’ve found easier to accept the value of than to extoll. Trying is the first step to failing I guess;)
Hen is in hens 60s and would be homeless except for the charity of his aged (and otherwise estranged) parent.
ADHD and autism got me acting unwise...
Shocker…
Suppose that comment reflects low awareness of the HN community
In my mind, people mostly ask different kinds of questions when they are looking for wisdom. They want to know how to make their marriage work, or how to have a happy life, not the most efficient way to sort a list. And those questions tend to benefit from both a greater EQ, and extensive life experience.
Of course, there is such a thing as a "wise old engineer", but even there, what people are usually looking for aren't the technical details, but distilled experiential wisdom -- the "how to get started with so many unknowns" or "how do I navigate the treacherous politics of" or "how can I build a career when the things I'm gaining expertise in will be irrelevant in 10 years?" questions.
I think it depends on how you define "clever". Does knowledge of things like how to sort a list correlate with cleverness?
I know wise people who don't have formal education, but I'd still consider them exceedingly clever.
I built a wood shed many years ago. I looked up the recommended roof slope and used trigonometry to calculate the angles of my cuts. The next time I made one, someone with more wisdom showed me that you could simply assemble a flat roof with joists sticking out both sides, raise one side until it seems right, and then run a circular saw vertically along the side to create a neat edge.
My mind doesn’t work that way so I’m curious. Does one pause before every sentence and play out a little scenario in their head of how people will respond?
It would do me so much good to improve in this area.
I suspect most people learn to do it as the result of bad experiences. As with many things, that's more likely in childhood.
Caring is a big part because it motivates you to pay attention and act on what you learn. (Not caring can also be beneficial -- it makes it much easier to just focus on the technical parts. As with everything, there are trade-offs.)
On the other hand, delusional cult leaders also have strong conviction but it doesn't pay to drink their kool aid.
I think wisdom has a lot more with paying attention, being self-reflective, and accumulating experience, as well as caring about the questioner. A wide context window at the moment of the question doesn't help much if you haven't noticed and reflected.
Take COVID for example, the WHO was universally portrayed as wise. The world went along with their conclusions but Sweden, South Korea and large parts of the US obviously didn’t, despite having little in common culturally. My conclusion is that perceptions of wisdom are more a function of the media than they are any particular culture or nationality.
If that were true, then it wouldn’t be possible to translate between all languages.
There are conditions of possibility of language use that are universal, even if they do not appear in any given language. But one also expresses themselves other than in words, like in artworks, and this expression often has the same force as language: in fact, the expression itself precludes language and if words are used it is only as a means. Affective history, upon which words move, is that condition of possibility for expression.