Here's an equation I invented to describe wisdom: wisdom = (knowledge + experience) / age Notice how this equation takes into account your age. That's because I'm measuring wisdom relative to how efficient you are able to use the knowledge and the expeirence you have. Thus, if you are a very old person, but with the same level of knowledge of a teenager, your wisdom level would be lower. If you are a toddler, and your knowledge and experience are that of a teenager, your wisdom level would be very high. Discuss.
It's not the amount of knowledge and experience that matters, it's the ways that it is implemented in real life situations.
Age is a linear function of time. Knowledge and experience are both more complex functions of time. So the equation needs a little simplification, you've got time in both the numerator and denominator of the fraction. Your hypothesis is that a younger person must be wiser than an older person with the equivalent knowledge and experience. You apparently assume that the older person, having taken longer to acquire the same formal and informal learning, must be lazy, unintelligent, or handicapped in some other way such as economically, culturally, or stranded on a desert island. And that this handicap will detract from the person's ability to achieve wisdom. Detract from it so severely that even the advantage of many extra years to work on it will not allow him or her to catch up. This line of reasoning is suspect. Consider that perhaps the most common handicap to knowledge and experience throughout the world is gender. Assume for the sake of argument that we settle on some arbitrary quantitative unit of measurement for these things. Are we to believe that in a place like rural Afghanistan, a fifty-year-old illiterate, untraveled woman cannot be as wise as a twenty-five-year-old man? You also have to factor in maturity somehow. No matter how much knowledge a thirteen-year-old has absorbed and how much experience he has been exposed to, not one in a million has the physiological, psychological and emotional development to process those acquisitions into what we would recognize as the wisdom to be a leader or mentor. As we progress into the milieu of older adolescents there are certainly some very mature teenagers and some very immature adults. The range of their Wisdom Quotients will overlap. But age-related factors like hormones, attention span, patience and ability to ignore discomfort have an effect. I believe these need to be worked into the equation. Empirical observation suggests that the passage of time correlates positively with wisdom. The effect could be slighter than we older people believe from our subjective experience, but it's counterintuitive to say that it is negative.
I love your posts Fraggle... I agree. So how do you think we could quantify wisdom? (Please remember I'm an accountant and I like quantifying things that are usually qualified... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ) ... (like scorecards management accountant use, for example... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! )
I'm an ex-accountant so we may not have much common ground here. Although upon graduation I defected into DP (as it was known when people weren't referring to it as "IBM"), which may be even worse. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! At the very least I would define wisdom as a vector rather than a scalar. We could start by identifying its dimensions. Personal and family level vs. community level: those certainly seem like independent variables with a perfect zero correlation. Intuition vs. reasoning. Independent or negatively correlated? What else? Judgment, creativity, leadership...
Wisdom is totally reliant on ' positive feedback' without that wisdom does not exist Imagine a village full of idiots and a single 'wise man'. The idiots consider the wise man to be as much an idiot as they, so the wise man is not known or recognised as wise, his words are unheeded, he is ignored. There is no discussion re his wisdom. HE of course KNOWS he is wise, BUT then so do all the idiots know THEY themselves are wise. So Wisdom is totally reliant on ' positive feedback' without that wisdom does not exist In other words assuming someone is 'wise' depends upon your own level of understanding and intelligence. .
Hi Brent, good to see you. You sound MUCH better (read better Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!.
The meaning of the word 'wisdom' is relative... it is something created by our minds and you may have a certain view on what the word wisdom means, someone else can have a very different idea.
wisdom has a lot to do with just taking a moment to evaluate the situation and not let yourself simply be guided by your emotions... in my opinion. also, some degree of intelligence is needed to make the right decisions, if making the right decisions is how you define wisdom...