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Comment by jbs789 | Hacker News Reader

IQ + EQ

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As a metaphor I'd suggest that (Wis = IQ * EQ) might be more accurate -- it is difficult for someone with low emotional awareness to make up the difference with intelligence alone, just as it is difficult for someone of low intelligence to become wise with nothing but high emotional awareness.

I like that. It's a good metaphor. But I think you can be wise without being clever (having a high IQ).

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 you can be wise without being clever (having a high IQ).

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.

I think of cleverness as a measure of how quickly or effectively you can solve a new-to-you problem. Which I think is utterly different from wisdom, which is mostly about reflecting and drawing inferences from experiences.

Maybe it is stereotypical, but I would score high on IQ but abysmally low on EQ. So, I have no chance of ever being considered wise.

EQ is definitely learnable. Over twenty years I've gone from clueless to perceptive if I'm paying attention. Unfortunately, in familiar groups where I feel emotionally safe, I tend not to pay the attention as much and just enjoy myself, and then I say things without thinking through how other people might perceive them.

How does one learn to think about the emotional “room temperature” before they speak?

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.

simply pausing before speaking, even for a second, has done wonders for me... you can gain a little more time with a well placed "hmmm" occasionally

That's a hard question to answer, because I do it automatically, 100% of the time. For me it's probably a result of childhood trauma (and maybe a high degree of empathy).

I suspect most people learn to do it as the result of bad experiences. As with many things, that's more likely in childhood.

The good news is that EQ will go up with life experience if 1) you care about it, and 2) you pay attention.

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.)

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