What makes a person seem wise?

https://theconversation.com/what-makes-a-person-seem-wise-global-study-finds-that-cultures-do-differ-but-not-as-much-as-youd-think-238808

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

27 66 2 years ago

theconversation.com

082349872349872• 2 years ago

the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50294-0

"Dimensions of wisdom perception across twelve countries on five continents"

andai• 2 years ago

Wisdom is thinking before acting, and socio-emotional awareness

ADHD and autism got me acting unwise...

jbs789• 2 years ago

IQ + EQ

Shocker…

Suppose that comment reflects low awareness of the HN community

irrational• 2 years ago

Maybe it is stereotypical, but I would score high on IQ but abysmally low on EQ. So, I have no chance of ever being considered wise.

prewett• 2 years ago

EQ is definitely learnable. Over twenty years I've gone from clueless to perceptive if I'm paying attention. Unfortunately, in familiar groups where I feel emotionally safe, I tend not to pay the attention as much and just enjoy myself, and then I say things without thinking through how other people might perceive them.

adamc6• 2 years ago

The good news is that EQ will go up with life experience if 1) you care about it, and 2) you pay attention.

Caring is a big part because it motivates you to pay attention and act on what you learn. (Not caring can also be beneficial -- it makes it much easier to just focus on the technical parts. As with everything, there are trade-offs.)

asoneth2• 2 years ago

As a metaphor I'd suggest that (Wis = IQ * EQ) might be more accurate -- it is difficult for someone with low emotional awareness to make up the difference with intelligence alone, just as it is difficult for someone of low intelligence to become wise with nothing but high emotional awareness.

adamc6• 2 years ago

I like that. It's a good metaphor. But I think you can be wise without being clever (having a high IQ).

In my mind, people mostly ask different kinds of questions when they are looking for wisdom. They want to know how to make their marriage work, or how to have a happy life, not the most efficient way to sort a list. And those questions tend to benefit from both a greater EQ, and extensive life experience.

Of course, there is such a thing as a "wise old engineer", but even there, what people are usually looking for aren't the technical details, but distilled experiential wisdom -- the "how to get started with so many unknowns" or "how do I navigate the treacherous politics of" or "how can I build a career when the things I'm gaining expertise in will be irrelevant in 10 years?" questions.

disjunct• 2 years ago

Carl Jung vindicated

thefaux• 2 years ago

I have come to find high intelligence, low wisdom a very scary combination.

caseyy2• 2 years ago

Can you give some examples?

lukan2• 2 years ago

That could evolve into a political flamewar very fast ..

gr3ml1n• 2 years ago

SBF was the first that popped into my mind.

a_e_k• 2 years ago

The famous "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" line from Jurassic Park comes to mind.

oceanplexian• 2 years ago

I don’t think that simply grabbing people from a handful of countries somehow cancels out groupthink from the data, which is more likely to affect perceptions of wisdom. Especially when information on who to trust is constantly pushed by globalist media organizations.

Take COVID for example, the WHO was universally portrayed as wise. The world went along with their conclusions but Sweden, South Korea and large parts of the US obviously didn’t, despite having little in common culturally. My conclusion is that perceptions of wisdom are more a function of the media than they are any particular culture or nationality.

DiscourseFan5• 2 years ago

Wisdom here is not something that is specifically outlined in discourse but pointed towards through a constellation of qualities observed by a random set of individuals

whoChumpedwho2• 2 years ago

a feature of ignorance compounded by exclusive english/outglish. other languages counter insincerity with high effectiveness.

DiscourseFan5• 2 years ago

I suppose often its better to have conviction than wisdom, since sometimes you need to make a leap into the abyss.

racl101• 2 years ago

There's value in following people with strong conviction who are decisive in certain situations. Like a battlefield, for example.

On the other hand, delusional cult leaders also have strong conviction but it doesn't pay to drink their kool aid.

DiscourseFan5• 2 years ago

One must make a choice regardless. Getting a job and working for a corporation your whole life is not very different from following a cult leader insofar as it becomes the limit of your social imagination (although a good wage is more compelling). You have to make these gambles some times in your life.

encoderer2• 2 years ago

Wisdom is the size of your context window. Simply: how much are you considering when you make your decisions.

jrflowers• 2 years ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sJNK4VKeoBM

adamc6• 2 years ago

I don't think that is true.

I think wisdom has a lot more with paying attention, being self-reflective, and accumulating experience, as well as caring about the questioner. A wide context window at the moment of the question doesn't help much if you haven't noticed and reflected.

encoderer2• 2 years ago

Yeah reflection is important but I would consider that a quality of intelligence.

w10-1• 2 years ago

The methodology seems to assume what it is trying to prove with the predefined dimensions being measured.

Another methodology might be attribution: provide a number of stories and ask readers to assess whether actions were due to wisdom, enlightened self-interest, social norms, etc.

Also, stories of Socrates and others long have presented wisdom as a kind of foolishness for outing others’ ignorance or failing to assert one’s own interest in games of mutual self-interest. So a follow-on question for each story would be whether wisdom really led to the best course of action.

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

Time. People who were right in retrospect seem wiser than those who were not.

Obviously this is a fallible standard but it's pretty much all we've got.

atomicnature3• 2 years ago

My definition of wisdom (after many years of study & consideration): "Getting desirable results most of the time for themselves AND most people around them throughout their lives"

The most important aspect of wisdom to me is "making it work" in many areas, in many situations, for yourself and others - throughout your life.

_bramses• 2 years ago

An active reading habit (of books) is one of the most reliable ways to achieve wisdom. Why?

- Books require a "Goldilocks" amount of sustained, slow effort given to one topic. Not too costly to pursue that it is a bodily harm risk, but not trivial either in terms of time and attention investment. This slows down the frenetic nature of a mind that latches onto heuristics.

- By being exposed to different well-formed ideas (especially if you disagree) widens perspective in ways lived experience can't. A reader is uniquely exposed to ideas from other times in human history, from people who are long gone.

- A reader develops a practical trust in themselves, particularly in that they know they take auto didacticism seriously, and won't shy away from intellectual challenges, which the world presents constantly. As such, they make better judgements.

People often think that being booksmart is having your head filled with useless facts, but this is almost opposite from reality.

taylorlapeyre• 2 years ago

Yes! I often put it like this: education/reading is about formation, not just information.

adamc6• 2 years ago

I think this makes sense, because, in general, wisdom requires gathering experience and reflecting on it (well in advance of any questions). Reading is an activity that promotes that.

microflash• 2 years ago

People often think that being booksmart is having your head filled with useless facts, but this is almost opposite from reality.

Indeed. Reading a lot of books does not mean things are retained by mind for a faithful recall. In fact, a lot of detail is lost during the course of reading and afterward. The things that stick are what relate to our experiences, beliefs or aspirations.

freefaler• 2 years ago

My personal hunch is that the more you read, the better your model of reality is. If you have an interest to a particular time/topic and you've read almost all you can find about it you have a better understanding of "something" from a different point of views. Like read all about a particular event in WW2 from all the sides and on different levels (military, economy, social, political). A term coined by Mortimer Adler is "Syntopical Reading", but by deeply exploring a simple concept you can build your knowledge on how the world works.

Several benefits from deeply knowing a limited subject: - when you listen people who are "well known" talking stupid shit about a topic you understand that the info you're getting is not always that high and you need to check multiple sources (if you need to make a decision) - you understand complexity better and "survival" bias - you can even bet for fun on a prediction market when you see a stupid narrative getting puffed up (I've made around 1k after the CrowdStrike bet that it wasn't a "hack")

But the biggest win is to put more knowledge on your "tree" you've grown from a simple subject to related areas. This mental skill is applicable in almost all complex situations and this might be related to "the wisdom" you're talking about.

The downside is the more you know, the more cynical you get with your sources :)

wenc3• 2 years ago

I think reading is necessary but insufficient for wisdom.

Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It does provide leverage in that way.

However syntopical reading isn’t sufficient to produce good work. Mortimer Adler himself tried doing it (I believe the Syntopicon was a product of syntopical reading) but those works never did well and were soon forgotten.

Books encode canonical knowledge and this works in established domains but in a domains without much existing knowledge, taking action in perturbing the world actually produces more useful knowledge.

This is why in these spaces it’s important to test ideas in reality and learn from them, rather than only constructing mental models. (We should strive to do both instead of the just latter)

Action often produces more information than reading alone. Having ideas is often the easy part — executing on them is the hard part. If Mortimer Adler actually had some gauge on the market before pursuing the very ambitious multi year effort of producing the Synopticon, he might have produced something noteworthy (which he did with the much smaller experiment “How to read a book.”

To me, wisdom isn’t about thinking rightly (which is what rationalists hold) but about being able to make good decisions with good judgment.

glimshe• 2 years ago

Reading is very important, but hardly sufficient. One problem with over reliance on books is that your world view will be molded by your reading list. You correctly pointed out the importance of reading material you disagree with, but there are often many contradictory ways to disagree with any specific world view.

Books must be mixed with a close relationship to people and the world. The world itself can be seen as the "ultimate book", thus the importance of the so-called "school of life".

I would never follow someone whose wisdom was built solely or mostly by reading books.

No education is complete, or even half complete, without a thorough and direct exposure to different cultures, countries and their people.

FrameworkFred• 2 years ago

TLDR; the answer is knowing how and when to use AWK ;)

wenc3• 2 years ago

It sounds like the topic is perceived wisdom (“what makes a person seem wise?”) rather than actual (practical) wisdom which is good use of knowledge and experience to make good decisions.

I say this because I know folks who seem wise (perceived as high IQ and EQ) but lack judgment, because they are working off models of the world that does not comport with reality, so their utterings do not work in real life. Wisdom isn’t about batting a thousand of course but wisdom is about always allowing reality be the teacher.

Many people who present as wise are academics and gurus and they sound really good on podcasts but don’t have much empiricism and experience doing hard things.

Ironically people who are reflective and have gone through the crucible of running a business (or doing something with a lot of headwinds) end up being actually wiser because they have to deal with world (and its flaws) as is, not as they think it should be.

Stonebraker is an opinionated figure in the database world but he has started so many companies and have dealt with the realities of how people use databases that his judgement (which could still be wrong by the way) would carry more weight than a pure database researcher who says all the right things.

atomicnature3• 2 years ago

Excellent point. That's why the truly wise people use "results" in terms of judging wisdom. If your thought is coherent, when you put it to practice - it works. And if it works - the desired result is produced. Doesn't mean all thoughts that lead to practical desirable results are borne of wisdom, but empirical success is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

wenc3• 2 years ago

Right. I read a ton of business books in my day, many of them with great ideas, but when I came across Andy Grove’s High Output Management, it just hit different. Andy Grove being former CEO of Intel spoke from experience actually doing hard things, whereas many of the other books were written by people who were peddling wisdom to sell books. Not bad wisdom, just untested and not generalizable.

Working Backwards is another book full of practical wisdom that has actually been battle tested.

extasia• 2 years ago

Wisdom is taking your own advice.

Words that I’ve found easier to accept the value of than to extoll. Trying is the first step to failing I guess;)

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

I know someone of whom it is said "hen never takes anyone's advice but hens own, and it is invariably wrong".

Hen is in hens 60s and would be homeless except for the charity of his aged (and otherwise estranged) parent.

lo_zamoyski• 2 years ago

What makes a person seem wise is less interesting than what causes a person to be wise.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/

LinuxAmbulance2• 2 years ago

That's an excellent article on the subject!

zoogeny• 2 years ago

As a bit of introspection, based on their metrics, I am unwise. I have the bad habit of thinking/acting before I deeply think. I also tend to disregard the thoughts/feelings of others when I believe the decision to be made is one that ought to be determined by facts/logic/rationality.

These are both weaknesses that I've identified and tried to work on. I've made the most progress on the second (considering the thoughts/feelings of others). The first is a really difficult one for me since I find that hesitation is also a major problem. The balance between acting quickly and acting carefully is difficult.

However, I think a stronger take-away from this study was: "Real wisdom, according to our study, is about finding a balance between thoughtful reasoning, social understanding, and emotional awareness." I believe that the balance between things is the key to wisdom. The people I consider most unwise are those who have a one-size-fits-all approach to everything.

akomtu• 2 years ago

It depends on the school of thought, but the common explanation is that wisdom is knowledge of Truth backed with experience. Not the kind of truth about irrelevant things, but the Truth about the nature of life. And it must be backed with experience, for it's one thing to know the map and a completely different thing to have trodden that path on the map.

A selfish person cannot be wise. He may know conceptually the important truth that all life is interconnected, but having never experienced that connectedness, he easily forgets this truth when his personal interests are at stake. Someone who is poisoning the river for personal gain using his power and knowledge cannot be wise because he doesn't see the whole picture in which this river returns to what he drinks and thus he is poisoning himself. Once he becomes wise, he also stops caring about himself, for that's the only rational choice in the light of wisdom.

LinuxAmbulance2• 2 years ago

Seem wise? Knowing the most useful answer to a given question someone has, being right 95% of the time or more, not making statements on subjects one has no understanding of.

A great story I once heard was someone asking a wise man how they became so wise, and they answered "If someone asked me what color my socks were, I'd look at my socks before answering." E.g., taking more than the normal amount of care to give a correct answer.

Actually being wise? Much harder to tell from the outside.

What makes a person seem wise?

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