Re: Intelligence and wisdom

From: Gordon Worley (redbird@rbisland.cx)
Date: Tue Jul 16 2002 - 12:44:29 MDT


On Tuesday, July 16, 2002, at 01:52 PM, James Higgins wrote:

> Intelligence + knowledge/experience * time = wisdom

Time is involved, but not in the sense you're thinking. Time is
important in the "I can only think so fast" sense, not the "I've been
around the world and back again" sense. You are only thinking about
accumulating wisdom the hard way: you do the wrong thing and try to
formulate a negative to that which is right. The `easy' way (this kind
of thinking it's really easy, just the process is easier and faster than
the hard way) is to be able to think rationally and reason your way to
wise choices. As it turns out, this way gets more right answers faster
(still limited by time in the sense that I mentioned). The equation you
proposed should look more like this (in Smalltalk/Obj-C like syntax):

wisdom = [your_mind intelligentThoughtWithKnowledge: your_knowledge
experience: (your_experience + vicarious_experience) forTime: t];

:-)

The only issue with time is spending time thinking about things that,
upon drawing conclusions, will make you wiser.

To be fair, though, I obtain wisdom both ways.

As for this being adolescent egoism, I don't think there's much that can
be said to dissuade you of that position. I understand why you think
that way, but it's wrong to think that wisdom is necessarily correlated
with age, though it often is. As Eli suggested, demonstrating wisdom
goes a lot further than claiming to be wise towards proving wiseness to
someone (of course if you're wise enough you know that it doesn't matter
what most people think of you and act on it, but I digress).

--
Gordon Worley                     `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty
http://www.rbisland.cx/            said, `it means just what I choose
redbird@rbisland.cx                it to mean--neither more nor less.'
PGP:  0xBBD3B003                                  --Lewis Carroll


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:40 MDT