Thinking about the wise(1) people know (real people, not fictional), the property they seem to have in common that others lack is that they habitually reason with all of the data available to them, which includes data about their own habitual behavior and reasoning processes. They rarely if ever seem to have that experience of suddenly realizing that they’ve been doing or believing something which they already knew was the wrong thing to do or believe, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. That’s not to say that they’re always right, but when they’re wrong it’s easy to identify what data they’re missing, and when that data is supplied they self-correct quickly.
Wisdom, in this sense, is “seeing the forest despite the trees.” It relates to having a well-integrated mind.
By contrast, I seem to class as merely “intelligent” people who are able to reason effectively from a set of data to a justified conclusion, even if they have a habit of neglecting vast chunks of the data they have available. I know lots of intelligent people who apply their intelligence differentially to different domains—who are brilliant at math, for example, but hopeless at working machinery, or skilled engineers who can’t seem to figure out what pisses off their colleagues, or brilliant at developing working models of other people’s motivations but unable to make sense of a stock prospectus, etc. (The example of creationist scientists gets used a lot on this site as well.)
I suspect that wisdom in this sense is distinct from intelligence (EDIT: as an attribute of humans), but that I’m less likely to notice wisdom in an unintelligent person because there are so many implications of the data they have which are obvious to me but not them that it’s easy to assume they aren’t attending to that data in the first place. That’s just speculation, though. It’s true that the people who strike me as wise often also strike me as intelligent.
If I wanted to build a system that demonstrated wisdom in this sense, I don’t think I would do anything special… it’s likely to come for free as an emergent property of a well-designed intelligence. I suspect that “lack of wisdom” in humans is an artifact of our jury-rigged, evolved, confluence-of-a-million-special-purpose-hacks brains.
Conversely, if I wanted to increase wisdom (in this sense) in humans, I would probably focus my attention on attention. It seems to be associated with diffuse focus of attention. Which is consistent with my experience that fear, anxiety, obsession, addiction, and other cognitive patterns that focus attention tend to inhibit wisdom.
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1 - When I talk about people being wise here, I’m referring to those I intuitively class that way, and then reasoning backwards from that set to get at what the element that leads me to class them that way is. This is, of course, just an element of my own intuitive classification, I don’t mean to present it as some kind of universal definition for “wise” or anything like that. If it reflects your own use of the word as well, great; if not, that’s OK too.
Thinking about the wise(1) people know (real people, not fictional), the property they seem to have in common that others lack is that they habitually reason with all of the data available to them, which includes data about their own habitual behavior and reasoning processes. They rarely if ever seem to have that experience of suddenly realizing that they’ve been doing or believing something which they already knew was the wrong thing to do or believe, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. That’s not to say that they’re always right, but when they’re wrong it’s easy to identify what data they’re missing, and when that data is supplied they self-correct quickly.
Wisdom, in this sense, is “seeing the forest despite the trees.” It relates to having a well-integrated mind.
By contrast, I seem to class as merely “intelligent” people who are able to reason effectively from a set of data to a justified conclusion, even if they have a habit of neglecting vast chunks of the data they have available. I know lots of intelligent people who apply their intelligence differentially to different domains—who are brilliant at math, for example, but hopeless at working machinery, or skilled engineers who can’t seem to figure out what pisses off their colleagues, or brilliant at developing working models of other people’s motivations but unable to make sense of a stock prospectus, etc. (The example of creationist scientists gets used a lot on this site as well.)
I suspect that wisdom in this sense is distinct from intelligence (EDIT: as an attribute of humans), but that I’m less likely to notice wisdom in an unintelligent person because there are so many implications of the data they have which are obvious to me but not them that it’s easy to assume they aren’t attending to that data in the first place. That’s just speculation, though. It’s true that the people who strike me as wise often also strike me as intelligent.
If I wanted to build a system that demonstrated wisdom in this sense, I don’t think I would do anything special… it’s likely to come for free as an emergent property of a well-designed intelligence. I suspect that “lack of wisdom” in humans is an artifact of our jury-rigged, evolved, confluence-of-a-million-special-purpose-hacks brains.
Conversely, if I wanted to increase wisdom (in this sense) in humans, I would probably focus my attention on attention. It seems to be associated with diffuse focus of attention. Which is consistent with my experience that fear, anxiety, obsession, addiction, and other cognitive patterns that focus attention tend to inhibit wisdom.
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1 - When I talk about people being wise here, I’m referring to those I intuitively class that way, and then reasoning backwards from that set to get at what the element that leads me to class them that way is. This is, of course, just an element of my own intuitive classification, I don’t mean to present it as some kind of universal definition for “wise” or anything like that. If it reflects your own use of the word as well, great; if not, that’s OK too.