Wisdom vs. Intelligence
I just read an interesting article by the prolific Paul Graham. If you’ve never heard of him, you might like a lot of his essays. He’s a programmer by trade, but that doesn’t make him an out of touch geek. He is thoughtful and creative and often compares the works of computer hackers to painters and other artists. He has now turned his attention to the differences between wisdom and intelligence. Here’s a quote from the article:
Recipes for wisdom, particularly ancient ones, tend to have a remedial character. To achieve wisdom one must cut away all the debris that fills one’s head on emergence from childhood, leaving only the important stuff. Both self-control and experience have this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own nature and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively. That’s not all wisdom is, but it’s a large part of it. Much of what’s in the sage’s head is also in the head of every twelve year old. The difference is that in the head of the twelve year old it’s mixed together with a lot of random junk.
The path to intelligence seems to be through working on hard problems. You develop intelligence as you might develop muscles, through exercise. But there can’t be too much compulsion here. No amount of discipline can replace genuine curiosity. So cultivating intelligence seems to be a matter of identifying some bias in one’s character—some tendency to be interested in certain types of things—and nurturing it. Instead of obliterating your idiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel for the truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling into a tree.
That’s just a taste. Read the whole article here. He’s not saying that wisdom is bad, necessarily. He’s just exploring the implications for teaching wisdom and intelligence. Thoughtful guy. I’d call him wise AND intelligent. :-)
I’m not making my title’s statement lightly. I’ve been very impressed with Apple’s ability to keep focused on the consumers in the world of digital media purchases. There’s a lot of talk of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and how to use it to make sure people get paid for their artwork. Do some quick research on