What is the relationship between intelligence and wisdom?
My answer to that question changed after reading an outstanding essay by Paul Graham titled “Is it Worth being Wise?”.
Most people say that wisdom is something that comes from experiences while intelligence is something innate. This explanation is partially true, but it does not tell the whole story.
According to Graham ““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.”
Another interesting point is related to the fact that knowledge is being fractioned as our society evolves. If on ancient times one could be wise and smart contemporaneously, nowadays people are facing the need to choose between wisdom and intelligence (quite counter-intuitive right?).
Anyway, you can make your own conclusions by reading the paper here.
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WHAT kind of wise?
wise-ass?
wise-all-seeing?
wise-transcendent?
as someone commenting upon the original article pointed out…
being smart or wise enough to discern what is really going on may be painful and not productive because one can no longer “play the game”, in good conscience
for example: seeing why George Bush and his handlers have taken us into Iraq and soon Iran produces only pain and no alternative solutions…
so… if you are going to be wise… you better be REALLY WISE… wise enough to see the various levels of human drama for what they are.. and be able to simply laugh
I am not there yet (if ever)
that is an interesting perspective David.
it brings another dimension to the whole discussion of smart-wise relationship.