wisdom vs. intelligence

This was from my RWL #240. 

 I’ve been thinking about the difference between intelligence and wisdom lately. My childhood looked a lot like Stranger Things, less the monsters. My buddies and I were deeply into Dungeons and Dragons - we definitely were not the cool kids. When you roll up a character (by rolling dice to determine their traits), you rolled separately for the character’s intelligence and wisdom. The difference was always somewhat vague to me - I felt that wisdom was just a weak shadow of intelligence - essentially redundant, certainly less interesting. My friends were all pretty intelligent - I can confirm this some forty years later by looking at what they have accomplished. But I can also confirm that none of us at that time had very high wisdom scores. I think we have all grown in our wisdom, which is nice to see. I do not see wisdom and intelligence as the same thing now.

I think of intelligence as an engine in a car - it is potential that gets you places, helps you figure things out, helps you accomplish your goals. More intelligent people can get from (metaphorical) point A to point B more easily than people with less intelligence. Wisdom, however, is like a map. If you’ve been around for a while, you almost certainly know smart people who have made terrible decisions with their lives. A whole lot of them reside in our prisons. With the map of wisdom, you can also get from point A to point B sometimes even more quickly, often with less pain. Sometimes with the map of wisdom, you realize you don’t want to go to point B at all, but instead point Q, and so you can skip all of the intervening stops and just go straight to your goal. A little wisdom can save you from having to do a lot of driving around. 

In my first career in the Army, and in my second career in academia, I have had the chance to meet many incredibly intelligent people. Many of them have been much smarter than me. Many of them have been wiser than me as well. But those two things do not necessarily go hand in hand. Not all intelligent people are wise, and not all wise people are especially intelligent (though I have to say, there is an overlap - it’s hard to be a wise idiot). When you meet a very intelligent person the first effect is often, wow! This person sees through things so much faster than me! It’s pretty easy to perceive intelligence. As you get to know them, and find out something about their life, you start to get a sense of their wisdom as well. A good many intelligent people I know have had successful careers, but unsuccessful personal lives (referring back to the Clay Christenson video from last week). I think wise people seem to just make good decisions, as if they had to put no thought into it at all. They just make the right choices and keep on heading toward success. 

I think wisdom has two sources - experience and tradition. An intelligent person has an advantage on the experience side - they can more quickly learn from mistakes - or perhaps go on to make even more, different mistakes. But hopefully with an accumulation of experience comes an understanding of the map to success. This is why older people have an advantage in wisdom - they have simply had the opportunity to experience more. Tradition (in the form of social institutions such as religion, culture) offers up a map. But tradition, at least in the United States, is in some sense like a shelf in a gas station - there are many traditions from which one can choose, and thus many maps. A good map can save you a lot of pain (and driving around). But one has to choose which map, and then we are back to experience and intelligence. Traditions are usually the distillation of other people’s experiences. Do your likely experiences match up with what was done before? You won’t know all the mistakes that were made to arrive at the tradition because they have been discarded, and only the answer remains. Sometimes the world changes, and maps get to be out of date. When this happens, I think then we have to fall back on deeper traditions - traditions that address more fundamental axioms, and then experiment with experience to rebuild. 

What is nice about wisdom is it allows you to put aspects of your life on autopilot. For example, I was really interested in investing when I was younger. I read everything I could, and tried a whole bunch of different approaches. I wasted a lot of money and time and eventually arrived at a pretty simple strategy that I have been following for the better part of 25 years now (it’s buy and hold index funds, by the way). It’s worked out pretty well, and once I settled on that strategy, I had more time to pursue other ends that made me happier. I think wisdom works like that. Wise people have simple rules that allow them to focus on what is important. I am not saying here that I am particularly wise - I happen to have one simple rule that has worked pretty well. I won’t offer up my life as a paragon of wisdom. I’m still working on the rest. But I do try to convey some of these bits to my kids - my children and my students. 

Thanks for indulging this thought - let me know what you think about the difference or connection between intelligence and wisdom - I’d like to hear!

RWL #237 - “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.”

from the newsletter:

I came across this quote that is (almost certainly apocryphally) attributed to St. Francis: “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.” This is perhaps the best leadership advice I can think of. You have to replace “Gospel” with your organization’s mission, but otherwise, it’s perfect (unless your mission is to preach the Gospel, in which case no substitutions are necessary!). We used to attend a church in Texas that used the phrase, “Be the church”, to mean let your actions speak as much as your words. In reality, actions speak much more loudly than words, especially when the words and the actions aren’t aligned. A useful, simple variation on this phrase would be, “Preach leadership at all times. Use words if necessary.” 

I see mentorship as a key function of leadership. Mentorship, especially in coaching mode, often requires words. While a good mentor acts as an exemplar, it is often necessary for the mentor to explain what s/he is doing to the protégé. It is often necessary to “use words” when pointing out to a protégé where the protégé is going wrong. But the words and deeds have to line up, as I said above. This is what makes this Franciscan-spirited quote so useful. There is a fundamental truth there, even if the Saint himself did not say this.

the rest is here: https://markbonica.substack.com/p/rwl-237

RWL 235 - unbundling education

 

College tuition and fees have risen 900% since 1982, while the CPI (a broad measure of inflation) has only risen 180%. 

 

In this week's RWL I talk about unbundling college and credentialism. Check it out here:

 

https://markbonica.substack.com/p/rwl-235?r=9tum8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy 

What is economics?

One of the things I told myself I would do once tenure came through was to take some time for reflection and reading. I just finished an excellent set of essays by one of my professors from my PhD program, Pete Boettke. His book is called, The Struggle for a Better World. Pete was an energetic and passionate lecturer and has an incredible breadth of knowledge about history, philosophy, and economics. His blog is here. 

One of the essays included in his collection is called, Don't Be a "Jibbering Idiot": Economic Principles and the Properly Trained Economist. How can you not want to read an essay that includes the phrase "jibbering idiot" in the title? It has to be good, right? Well, it is. Below is an excerpt from the article in which Boettke defines economics from the George Mason University perspective.

Economics properly done is an invitation to inquiry, and the principles constitute a golden key that unlocks the deepest mysteries of the human experience. We live in a world of scarcity, and as a result, individuals must choose. In choosing, individuals face trade­offs, and in negotiating those trade­offs, they need aids to the human mind to guide them. Prices serve this guiding role, profits lure them, losses discipline them, and all of that is made possible due to an institutional environment of property, contract, and consent. These are the basic principles from which we work in economics. Economic analysis relies neither on any notion of hyper rational actors myopically concerned with maximizing monetary rewards, nor on postulating perfectly competitive markets. It relies simply on the notion that fallible yet capable human beings are striving to better their situations, and in so doing, they enter into exchange relations with others. Atomistic individualism and mechanistic notions of the market are, as Buchanan has stressed, nonsensical social science. Instead, economics as a social science is about exchange relations and the institutions within which those relationships are formed and carried out.

I love that he called economics an "invitation to inquiry", which is what drew me to the field. What I learned at Mason, with Boettke and others, was the rest of the paragraph. That economics is about individuals making decisions under scarcity within an institutional framework. GMU economists are not shy about making institutional comparisons and declaring which is better (spoiler alert: free markets are almost always better, but need to an institutional context of private property and enforceable contract).  I'm hoping to return to my economic roots a bit more now that I have the freedom to do so.

RWL 234 - advice to your 20-something self.

This week's newsletter is all about advice to your younger self. I'd asked readers of RWL to share the advice they would give their 20-something self. I received 16 responses which I analyzed using a qualitative approach, then produced an analysis which is linked to in the newsletter, and included links to pieces that explore the topic, too.

Check it out here:

 https://markbonica.substack.com/p/rwl-234 

day 1 of being a tenured professor

Last week I was told I had officially been approved for promotion to associate professor and granted tenure. I wrote about how emotional this was for me in my RWL Newsletter here, so I'm not going to gush on again. I am moved by all the support I have received on the socials - even from some folks I don't know. 

So I am the proverbial dog who has caught the car, and the question is, "Now what?"

Well, one thing is I have decided to bring back this blog. I'm planning to write about some of my teaching efforts and ideas, maybe share some raw thoughts on research, and talk about my efforts to help build my department, college, and university. So hopefully it will be of some interest to someone, but at least it will be a place for me to reflect and work out in public some of my thoughts and maybe get some feedback.

Being a professor you have three functions: teaching, service, and research. So a few thoughts about going forward:

Teaching

I'm still teaching primarily at the undergraduate level, though I have been working for several years with some executive leadership training for physicians. I've shifted away from teaching the management sequence over the last two years, which I have mixed feelings about. I was feeling a bit burned out with those classes, so it's good to get a break. But I also miss them because they were an opportunity to really engage with the students. I continue to teach the finance sequence and feel like I've achieved a solid level of comfort with those classes. I have taught health econ a couple of times, but will be handing that off to a new colleague next year who is a "real" economist (i.e., he actually does research in economics whereas I do not). I taught a health systems class this summer and hope to continue that next year. That is a fun class because it's pretty basic, but also very high level - you get to talk about the overall system, rather than get down in the weeds (for example, trying to explain how an encounter converts into a bill using the RBRVS). I also picked up the pre- and post-practicum courses for the major as part of taking on the internship program (more in service). I will be working to stand up an MHA program in the near future (more in service). This may allow me to teach at the graduate level again, which I would love to do. 

Going forward, in the near-term, my main goal is to improve my delivery of the pre- and post-practicum courses. They're a little shapeless at this point, and I want to make them more meaningful and engaging (while also recognizing that they are 1 and 2 credits respectively).

I also want to continue to think about how I can create more open educational resources (OER). I really want to be able to create more resources for colleagues in the field and for people who want to learn, and be able to give them away. So I'll be talking more about that as I go on.

Service

The thing that takes up the bulk of my energy right now is the internship. Our department requires a 400-hour internship between junior and senior years, though during COVID we have truncated the hours dramatically (only 60 hours in the field during 2020, 120 during 2021). I took over the internship in March of 2020, literally just a week before the University went into lockdown. Talk about a baptism by fire. Almost all of the internships that had been scheduled were canceled that year. I spent from March through December trying to get all of the students placed. The last one finished his internship just in time for graduation. All of the calling and begging for the class of '20 paid off for the class of '21. Even though there was still significant uncertainty going into the spring, I was ultimately able to place all 35 of our students for the summer, and 31/35 landed paying opportunities and well over 120 hours of experience. I am looking forward to normalcy for the summer of '22 and continuing to grow and improve the quality of experiences the students get during their internships. I am tremendously grateful to our preceptors and partner organizations who are hosting our students. It was a leap of faith for many of them to take students. 

I mentioned above that I am hoping to stand up an MHA program. The department had an MHA program 20 years ago, but for various reasons it was allowed to go dormant. My work with the physician leadership program has convinced me that there is a need in our community (broadly defined) for a high-quality program focused on providers. So that is my next major task.

I continue to be engaged with professional organizations - especially ACHE and HFMA. I will take on the education chair for the Northern New England Healthcare Executives chapter in '22. I'm also working with the local HFMA chapter and I am considering maybe getting involved with MGMA, though that has been difficult due to scheduling challenges. 

Research

This is where "dog catches car" really comes in. I think I did some interesting research during my pre-tenure period, and if you step back and squint a bit, you can see how it mostly hangs together in a general theme of human resource development (HRD). I continue to be passionate about the HRD topics, especially mentorship and leadership development, broadly lumped under a careers umbrella. To me this a micro perspective for my larger question, which I think is how to create a free and prosperous society. I think meaningful work is critical for human flourishing, and if we want to be free, we need to help each other reach for our maximum potential. The macro perspective of a free and prosperous society is still of real interest to me. What does that mean? How do we shape the social institutions that constitute our environment to help individuals reach their maximum potential? This is where I think I want to spend more time, and where I might use some of the flexibility I now have as a result of getting tenure. 

I've been reading several political economy books and really feeling my original economics training waking back up and wanting to come back out and play. Healthcare is largely about knowledge and uncertainty, and the insights from the Austrian school seem particularly well suited for thinking about the field. Having just taught Health Systems again has really brought that back into view for me. I thought I might pursue such a track when I wrote USING THE MANY-TO-MANY CAPABILITIES OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR PUBLIC HEALTH COMMUNICATION. So we'll see. I'd like to think about how to bring my economics training back into use. Since I'm not a technician like most health economists, I'll need to find a different approach. 

I'm excited to continue to grow as a researcher, and having caught the car, I am worried that I will do what every tenure committee fears - just lay down and bask in the freedom, rather than embrace it and do more.

**

That's a review of what I'm thinking on my first day on this side of tenure. I don't want to get comfortable. I want to keep chasing cars and keep growing. Otherwise, what was the point?

Suffering vs. Happiness

Are happiness and suffering two opposites of the same continuum, or are they actually two different scales?

This question hit me as I have been listening to some of Jordan Peterson's philosophical work ( http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/02/jordan_peterson.html ). One of the comments he made is that every major philosophical system holds as a basic tenet that life is full of suffering, and that the goal of a healthy life is not to seek to be happy but to be free of suffering (I may be misquoting him slightly, but I am willing to embrace this statement as my own, regardless).

By way of example, Peterson talks about Buddhism's Four Noble Truths, the first of which is "life is suffering", and the second of which is "suffering is caused by attachment". I would add, in a similar vein, that Stoicism holds suffering arises from the desire to control that which is beyond our control. In both systems, one seeks to achieve peace and enlightenment by letting go of that which is beyond our control and recognizing the illusion of permanence. Both systems seek contentment rather than happiness.

I heard a lecture a few months ago (I wish I could find it) where the speaker talked about emotions as being like a compass for our behavior. Happy, sad, anger, joy are all emotions that change with circumstances. One does not mindlessly pursue happiness any more than one drives mindlessly north. Sometimes to get to where you want to go, you have to drive south.

So what I am thinking about is the idea that happiness and suffering are not on the same continuum. Happiness, at least as it is conceived in 2018 in the US, is a temporary state. It is an emotion that comes and goes the way a compass dial turns. Happy/sad is probably the right scale. This should be contrasted with contentment/suffering, which are existential conditions. I am making a point that emotional states like happy/sad are like the weather - on any given day we might have rain or sun, but the next day could (and probably will be) different. Contrast this with existential states which are more like climates. To be content or suffering is a long lasting pattern, like temperate, arid, tropical, etc.

A person who works toward wisdom is a person who builds in his soul a pleasing climate. In Hawaii there are occasionally cold days and occasionally hot and uncomfortable days, but there are few of them. Mostly the weather in Hawaii is a pleasant 80 degrees. Contentment is more than just freedom from suffering. I think one can achieve contentment while still have a degree of suffering. I think we can look at people on hospice who make peace with death achieve contentment even as they face death. Perhaps then, contentment is also not on the same scale suffering? I think contentment is linked to meaning, and thus one can both suffer and be content. More to ponder.

I ask my students during the first day of my Management I class, which comes at the beginning of their junior year of college typically, what a good life looks like. One of the most common responses is "to be happy." But I think they actually mean, "to be content". I think their sentiment is correct, but they lack an understanding of what they mean.

The pursuit of happiness in 2018, as opposed to the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness, is a hedonic treadmill. To get to happiness, one must always covet one more thing - one more car, one more vacation, one more lover. This is the poisonous desire the Buddhists warn against, and it is the desire for things one cannot control that the Stoics warn against. The blind following of the compass in the direction of happiness inevitably leads to suffering rather than contentment.

I think it is a mistake to put happiness and suffering on the same scale. Happiness is a temporary emotion; suffering is existential. I am unsure whether I put suffering and contentment on the same scale, but I think it is closer to truth.