Is It Worth Being Wise?

[Is It Worth Being Wise?]

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| February 2007A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about
for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.
Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are
smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem
related. How?What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of
situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the
true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A
wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do.And yet isn't being smart also knowing what to do in certain
situations? For example, knowing what to do when the teacher tells
your elementary school class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100?
[1]Some say wisdom and intelligence apply to different types of
problems—wisdom to human problems and intelligence to abstract
ones. But that isn't true. Some wisdom has nothing to do with
people: for example, the wisdom of the engineer who knows certain
structures are less prone to failure than others. And certainly
smart people can find clever solutions to human problems as well
as abstract ones.
[2]Another popular explanation is that wisdom comes from experience
while intelligence is innate. But people are not simply wise in
proportion to how much experience they have. Other things must
contribute to wisdom besides experience, and some may be innate: a
reflective disposition, for example.Neither of the conventional explanations of the difference between
wisdom and intelligence stands up to scrutiny. So what is the
difference? If we look at how people use the words "wise" and
"smart," what they seem to mean is different shapes of performance.Curve"Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what to
do. The difference is that "wise" means one has a high average
outcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly
well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis
represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the
wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person
would have high peaks.The distinction is similar to the rule that one should judge talent
at its best and character at its worst. Except you judge intelligence
at its best, and wisdom by its average. That's how the two are
related: they're the two different senses in which the same curve
can be high.So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart
person knows what to do in situations where few others could. We
need to add one more qualification: we should ignore cases where
someone knows what to do because they have inside information.
[3]
But aside from that, I don't think we can get much more specific
without starting to be mistaken.Nor do we need to. Simple as it is, this explanation predicts, or
at least accords with, both of the conventional stories about the
distinction between wisdom and intelligence. Human problems are
the most common type, so being good at solving those is key in
achieving a high average outcome. And it seems natural that a
high average outcome depends mostly on experience, but that dramatic
peaks can only be achieved by people with certain rare, innate
qualities; nearly anyone can learn to be a good swimmer, but to be
an Olympic swimmer you need a certain body type.This explanation also suggests why wisdom is such an elusive concept:
there's no such thing. "Wise" means something—that one is
on average good at making the right choice. But giving the name
"wisdom" to the supposed quality that enables one to do that doesn't
mean such a thing exists. To the extent "wisdom" means anything,
it refers to a grab-bag of qualities as various as self-discipline,
experience, and empathy.
[4]Likewise, though "intelligent" means something, we're asking for
trouble if we insist on looking for a single thing called "intelligence."
And whatever its components, they're not all innate. We use the
word "intelligent" as an indication of ability: a smart person can
grasp things few others could. It does seem likely there's some
inborn predisposition to intelligence (and wisdom too), but this
predisposition is not itself intelligence.One reason we tend to think of intelligence as inborn is that people
trying to measure it have concentrated on the aspects of it that
are most measurable. A quality that's inborn will obviously be
more convenient to work with than one that's influenced by experience,
and thus might vary in the course of a study. The problem comes
when we drag the word "intelligence" over onto what they're measuring.
If they're measuring something inborn, they can't be measuring
intelligence. Three year olds aren't smart. When we describe one
as smart, it's shorthand for "smarter than other three year olds."SplitPerhaps it's a technicality to point out that a predisposition to
intelligence is not the same as intelligence. But it's an important
technicality, because it reminds us that we can become smarter,
just as we can become wiser.The alarming thing is that we may have to choose between the two.If wisdom and intelligence are the average and peaks of the same
curve, then they converge as the number of points on the curve
decreases. If there's just one point, they're identical: the average
and maximum are the same. But as the number of points increases,
wisdom and intelligence diverge. And historically the number of
points on the curve seems to have been increasing: our ability is
tested in an ever wider range of situations.In the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to have regarded
wisdom, learning, and intelligence as more closely related than we
do. Distinguishing between "wise" and "smart" is a modern habit.
[5]
And the reason we do is that they've been diverging. As knowledge
gets more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and the
distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper,
like a digital image rendered with more pixels.One consequence is that some old recipes may have become obsolete.
At the very least we have to go back and figure out if they were
really recipes for wisdom or intelligence. But the really striking
change, as intelligence and wisdom drift apart, is that we may have
to decide which we prefer. We may not be able to optimize for both
simultaneously.Society seems to have voted for intelligence. We no longer admire
the sage—not the way people did two thousand years ago. Now
we admire the genius. Because in fact the distinction we began
with has a rather brutal converse: just as you can be smart without
being very wise, you can be wise without being very smart. That
doesn't sound especially admirable. That gets you James Bond, who
knows what to do in a lot of situations, but has to rely on Q for
the ones involving math.Intelligence and wisdom are obviously not mutually exclusive. In
fact, a high average may help support high peaks. But there are
reasons to believe that at some point you have to choose between
them. One is the example of very smart people, who are so often
unwise that in popular culture this now seems to be regarded as the
rule rather than the exception. Perhaps the absent-minded professor
is wise in his way, or wiser than he seems, but he's not wise in
the way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be.
[6]NewFor both Confucius and Socrates, wisdom, virtue, and happiness were
necessarily related. The wise man was someone who knew what the
right choice was and always made it; to be the right choice, it had
to be morally right; he was therefore always happy, knowing he'd
done the best he could. I can't think of many ancient philosophers
who would have disagreed with that, so far as it goes."The superior man is always happy; the small man sad," said Confucius.
[7]Whereas a few years ago I read an interview with a mathematician

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