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!
