When you say “values”, do you mean instrumental values, or do you mean terminal values? If the former then the answer is simple. This is what we spend most of our time doing. Will tweaking my diet in this way cause me to have more energy? Will asking my friend in this particular way cause them to accept my request? Etc. This is as mundane as it gets.
If the latter, the answer is a bit more complicated, but really it shouldn’t be all that confusing. As agents, we’re built with motivation systems, where out of all possible sensory patterns, some present to us as neutral, others as inherently desirable, and the last subset as inherently undesirable. Some things can be more desirable or less desirable, etc., thus these sensory components each run on at least one dimension.
Sensory patterns that present originally as inherently neutral may either be left as irrelevant (these are the things put on auto-ignore, which are apt to make a return to one’s conscious awareness if certain substances are taken, or if careful introspection is engaged in), or otherwise acquire a ‘secondary’ desirability or undesirability via being seen to be in causal connection with something that presents as inherently one way or the other, for example finding running enjoyable because of certain positive benefits acquired in the past from the activity.
Thus to discover one’s terminal values, one must simply identify these inherently desirable sensory patterns, and figure out which ones would top the list as ‘most desirable’ (in terms of nothing other than how it strikes one’s perception). A good heuristic for this would be to see what other people consider enjoyable or fun, and then try it, and see what happens, but at the same time making sure to disambiguate any identity issues from the whole thing, such as sexual hangups making one unable to enjoy something widely considered to have one of the strongest effects in terms of ‘wanting to engage in this behavior because it’s so great’—sexual or romantic interaction.
But at the most fundamental, there’s nothing to the task of figuring out one’s terminal values other than simply figuring out what sensory patterns are most ‘enjoyable’ in the most basic sort of way imaginable, on a timescale sufficiently long-term to be something one would be unlikely to refer to as ‘akrasia’. Even someone literally physically unable to experience certain positive sensory patterns, such as someone with extremely low libido because of physiological problems, would most likely qualify as making a ‘good choice’ if they engage in a course of action apt to cause them to begin to be able to experience these sensory patterns, such as that person implementing a particular lifestyle protocol likely to fix their physiological issues and bring them libido to a healthy level.
It gets somewhat confusing when you factor in the fact that the sensory patterns one is able to experience can shift over time, such as libido increasing or decreasing, or going through puberty, or something like that, along with factoring in akrasia, and other problems that make us seem less ‘coherent’ of agents, but I believe all the fog can be cut through if one simply makes the observation that sensory patterns present to us as either neutral, inherently desirable, or inherently undesirable, and that the latter two run on a dimension of ‘more or less’. Neutral sensory patterns acquire ‘secondary’ quality on these dimensions depending on what the agent believes to be their causal connections to other sensory patterns, each ultimately needing to run up against an ‘inherently motivating’ sensory pattern to acquire significance.
As far as I can tell, “wisdom” is just a word that refers to the sort of knowledge that (1) defines the person being described as high status, and (2) is the result of extensive experience. When I imagine someone as “wise”, I think of the person looking rather eminent, and most likely sort of old simply because long stretches of experience require long stretches of living—that is being at least somewhat old.
Many people we would label as “smart” make decisions we end up labeling “stupid”. This doesn’t seem very remarkable. When I think of the word “smart”, what comes to mind is a comparatively high mental ability in certain subjects, or someone who’s demonstrated a comparatively high likelihood of coming to interesting insights, or getting good at something requiring strong mental ability, such as chess. Someone meeting that criteria making a decision we end up calling “stupid” seems no more interesting than someone we call “athletic” getting injured.
You’re saying these people—those who we would be likely to label as “smart”, yet sometimes make decisions we would likely call “stupid”—what they’re missing is “wisdom”. This makes it sound like ‘wisdom’ is some sort of component they’re missing, as if this insight would put us on some sort of useful quest, analogous to being told that the way by which to open this box we want to open is “to find the key, which is somewhere in this house” (a clue).
Well, I would rephrase what you’re saying as the completely unremarkable observation that someone we would likely call “smart”, if they were to make a series of stupid decisions, we would probably be unlikely to call them “wise”. This is a fact about how we employ English words, nothing more. Part of the meaning of “wise” seems to be consistency. Someone erratic, yet “smart”, we would be unlikely to refer to by the word “wise”. I don’t see how this observation could generate any useful hypotheses pertaining to building FAI, or anything like that. As it doesn’t seem to concern anything but definitions, the only application to FAI would, as far as I can tell, be one of suggesting which FAI to call “wise”, and which to not—a rather uninteresting conversation indeed.
Here I just want to point out that although you transitioned to this sentence as if it was part of your general point, it should be mentioned that although the grammar may suggest that “wisely” in “choose wisely” is a conjugation of “wisdom” or “wise”, it seems to be a slightly different word. ‘Choosing wisely’ just seems to be choosing based on calm, rational deliberation, like in telling someone to “choose wisely” one is suggesting they not be hasty. It doesn’t seem to suggest anything pertaining to extensive experience, or anything like that, as the words “wise” and “wisdom” do.
Call me pedantic, but I’m just trying to show how slippy words can be, and the sort of care that’s necessary to not get sucked into shuffling around words to no real purpose.
You mean calling someone “smart” doesn’t mean it would be tautological to call them “wise”, as in the classic example of calling someone a “bachelor” meaning it would be a tautology to call them an “unmarried man”? Yeah, that much is obvious. Wisdom seems to suggest consistency, but plenty of people we call “intelligent” are rather erratic in certain respects, to no contradiction of that label. Again, I see no interesting insight here. We’re still just discussing English-language conventions.
Yeah, because consistency is a component of the common definition of “wise”. We trust people we would consider consistent more than those we wouldn’t label with that word.
Again, there is an equivocation going on with this sort of transition. Although related in meaning, and sharing the same sequence of characters, the word “wise” in the question “was it wise of him” seems to be of a different meaning than the word “wise” in referring to Aaron as a “wise elder”. The question “was it wise of him” seems no more than just asking whether it was a good idea, whereas the idea of being a “wise elder” seems to be about his experience, etc. Again the definitions are just being moved around in a word shuffle that doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.
I don’t know, ones that make them more consistent? Or ones that signal higher social status, or allow them to react more calmly when confronted with shocking situations? As with the rest of your post, you seem to be just asking questions about definitions, or making statements about how we use certain words. I can’t seem to find any real, useful content in your post. It seems like no more than an exercise in messing around with definitions, masquerading as being in some way insightful.