The Difference Between Wisdom and Intelligence
What is the difference between wisdom and intelligence? I see this question often on Quora along with any number of wildly different explanations. None of them quite did it for me really. If you are simply curious or perhaps in the market for a relatively simple and intuitive explanation to tell these two apart then I hope the short story and unspecific example below do the trick!
“A Child in a Forest — You”
You open your eyes for the first time and find yourself standing deep in a dark forest that is wholly unfamiliar to you. In your hands, you have a flashlight and a notebook. You also have a backpack with most of the things you need to survive for any amount of time.
The Flashlight — Intelligence
To start, everyone gets a slightly different flashlight. The brightness of your flashlight is analogous to intelligence. If it is brighter, then you will be able to see more of the forest floor and underbrush at any instant. Without any significant context, your intelligence understands the differences and similarities between the things you sense around you. You may not know what you are looking at but you can tell them apart. This is abstract pattern discernment. Telling two patterns apart is your most basic abstraction engine and it is what I like to call your, “instantaneous abstraction ability”.
The Handbook — Wisdom
As you move around the forest floor looking for anything or anyone, you mindlessly jot down notes about relative positions, you draw terrible doodles and you bookmark a detailed drawing of the berries you ate that made you wish you were dead and so on. Moving around and taking any amount of notes of your surroundings and experiences is information in time and space. Converting that trivia into useful information in other contexts or noticing patterns between people, events, and places is your “contextual abstraction ability”.
Summary
- Abstraction — Is a suite of tools that aid us in discovering patterns and is the hallmark of human cognition (IMHO). All of those tools can be improved with conscious effort as well as subconsciously over time.
- Context — Is a unique time/timeframe and or place. This idea is used to help classify abstraction tasks. Good for organizing your notebook.
All information seems to be composed of some simple or complex pattern(s). Abstraction here is simply pattern-recognition or extracting the structure that is embedded in any information.
While both intelligence and wisdom are abstraction tasks, they are separated largely because the group of problems that involve pattern recognition in time and space (wisdom) is significantly more difficult than noticing patterns that are staring right back at you in the face (intelligence).
Looking at it this way helps explain why someone thought it was a good idea to create two categories in the first place as well as why they are difficult to tell apart.
Wisdom, Intelligence, and The Cellphone Problem…
Picking on no one in particular… Maybe you have encountered someone or are someone that regularly misplaces their/your phone. This one is for you.
Act I: It’s Gone
As you move around the house, absent a search technique, you perform an instantaneous abstraction task each time your eyes hit a surface in search of your $900+ portable supercomputer. In these, sometimes panicked moments, you are generally not looking for your phone directly. That would take waay too long. Instead, you are looking for something rough like a vague or abstract idea of a rectangle that must meet the criteria of being sufficiently contrasted from the background it is laying on. I know some of you already see the flaws in this method and we both know that these pitfalls come from experience (we’ll get to wisdom next)… It is probably not until the 3rd or 4th pass around the house before you allow your instantaneous abstraction ability to work at full power by letting your eyes rest on any surface long enough to make out most of the features of your solidly black phone.
Act II: Technique Management
Changing your technique 10 minutes into your search might be an example of basic wisdom. It makes some sense to break down wisdom, or contextual abstraction, into “levels” of difficulty to give an idea about how difficulty scales in time and space. Unfortunately, just like you are your own worst enemy by misplacing your phone for the 100th time in the first place, you are still your own worst enemy by not bothering to track your own behavior and at least attempt to be a little bit more predictable to your future self. Going back to the woods, wisdom requires that child to not only bust out the handbook and take notes (mental accounting), but to also occasionally go over those notes to summarize any findings. Thinking about your recording and synthesis technique means you are solidly approaching the metacognition abstraction layer!
Intermission: Abstraction Complexity
With instantaneous abstraction or intelligence, everything you need to solve a problem is right there in front of you. Your problem and solution exist in the mostly 2D frame in front of you. Wisdom is much harder because the simplest case involves noticing and comparing patterns that exist between 4D frames (3D space+1D Time). For the same amount of noise and or scrambling of your pattern of interest, you can see that wisdom exhibits at least exponential complexity (x²) over problems sitting right in front of you.
To bring it home, imagine playing around with a small amount of playdough in the shape of a triangle. Hollow or not it doesn’t matter. No scrambling or warping of the triangle pattern and it is easy to see that it is a triangle. If you fold your playdough triangle symmetrically it becomes warped but you would be able to easily unwind it in your mind and accurately guess at the original shape. A non-symmetrical fold would probably be a bit more difficult and multiple non-symmetrical folds would quickly stump you.
Act III: To Be or Not to Be a Computer/Data Scientist
Now, if there are no more than say, 23 possible locations in your house where your little supercomputer could be and perhaps only 6 or 7 predictor variables like time of day, malicious children, benevolent SO’s and etc… it may require a nerdy friend, several lifetimes of data and access to a quantum computer to really gain any ground on optimizing your search efforts and technique.
Congratulations, you have successfully outdone yourself. It is certainly worthwhile to challenge yourself, however, without okay-ish mental accounting and informative summaries of past performance on much simpler tasks, you might not realize that you are giving yourself a problem that computer scientists have already put on the back burner until quantum computing comes of age.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try it. I’m just saying you should work your way up to it. Or, find a benevolent SO that is nice enough to keep the black rectangle program running in the background.
I definitely avoided a few rabbit holes along the way. If you saw one please ask and I would be happy to make this metaphor more of a headache! Thanks!
