February 2007A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered aboutfor 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who aresmart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seemrelated. How?What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot ofsituations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about thetrue nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. Awise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do.And yet isn't being smart also knowing what to do in certainsituations? For example, knowing what to do when the teacher tellsyour elementary school class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100?[1]Some say wisdom and intelligence apply to different types ofproblems—wisdom to human problems and intelligence to abstractones. But that isn't true. Some wisdom has nothing to do withpeople: for example, the wisdom of the engineer who knows certainstructures are less prone to failure than others. And certainlysmart people can find clever solutions to human problems as wellas abstract ones. [2]Another popular explanation is that wisdom comes from experiencewhile intelligence is innate. But people are not simply wise inproportion to how much experience they have. Other things mustcontribute to wisdom besides experience, and some may be innate: areflective disposition, for example.Neither of the conventional explanations of the difference betweenwisdom and intelligence stands up to scrutiny. So what is thedifference? If we look at how people use the words "wise" and"smart," what they seem to mean is different shapes of performance.Curve"Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what todo. The difference is that "wise" means one has a high averageoutcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularlywell in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axisrepresented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of thewise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart personwould have high peaks.The distinction is similar to the rule that one should judge talentat its best and character at its worst. Except you judge intelligenceat its best, and wisdom by its average. That's how the two arerelated: they're the two different senses in which the same curvecan be high.So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smartperson knows what to do in situations where few others could. Weneed to add one more qualification: we should ignore cases wheresomeone knows what to do because they have inside information. [3]But aside from that, I don't think we can get much more specificwithout starting to be mistaken.Nor do we need to. Simple as it is, this explanation predicts, orat least accords with, both of the conventional stories about thedistinction between wisdom and intelligence. Human problems arethe most common type, so being good at solving those is key inachieving a high average outcome. And it seems natural that ahigh average outcome depends mostly on experience, but that dramaticpeaks can only be achieved by people with certain rare, innatequalities; nearly anyone can learn to be a good swimmer, but to bean Olympic swimmer you need a certain body type.This explanation also suggests why wisdom is such an elusive concept:there's no such thing. "Wise" means something—that one ison average good at making the right choice. But giving the name"wisdom" to the supposed quality that enables one to do that doesn'tmean such a thing exists. To the extent "wisdom" means anything,it refers to a grab-bag of qualities as various as self-discipline,experience, and empathy. [4]Likewise, though "intelligent" means something, we're asking fortrouble if we insist on looking for a single thing called "intelligence."And whatever its components, they're not all innate. We use theword "intelligent" as an indication of ability: a smart person cangrasp things few others could. It does seem likely there's someinborn predisposition to intelligence (and wisdom too), but thispredisposition is not itself intelligence.One reason we tend to think of intelligence as inborn is that peopletrying to measure it have concentrated on the aspects of it thatare most measurable. A quality that's inborn will obviously bemore convenient to work with than one that's influenced by experience,and thus might vary in the course of a study. The problem comeswhen we drag the word "intelligence" over onto what they're measuring.If they're measuring something inborn, they can't be measuringintelligence. Three year olds aren't smart. When we describe oneas smart, it's shorthand for "smarter than other three year olds."SplitPerhaps it's a technicality to point out that a predisposition tointelligence is not the same as intelligence. But it's an importanttechnicality, because it reminds us that we can become smarter,just as we can become wiser.The alarming thing is that we may have to choose between the two.If wisdom and intelligence are the average and peaks of the samecurve, then they converge as the number of points on the curvedecreases. If there's just one point, they're identical: the averageand maximum are the same. But as the number of points increases,wisdom and intelligence diverge. And historically the number ofpoints on the curve seems to have been increasing: our ability istested in an ever wider range of situations.In the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to have regardedwisdom, learning, and intelligence as more closely related than wedo. Distinguishing between "wise" and "smart" is a modern habit.[5]And the reason we do is that they've been diverging. As knowledgegets more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and thedistinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper,like a digital image rendered with more pixels.One consequence is that some old recipes may have become obsolete.At the very least we have to go back and figure out if they werereally recipes for wisdom or intelligence. But the really strikingchange, as intelligence and wisdom drift apart, is that we may haveto decide which we prefer. We may not be able to optimize for bothsimultaneously.Society seems to have voted for intelligence. We no longer admirethe sage—not the way people did two thousand years ago. Nowwe admire the genius. Because in fact the distinction we beganwith has a rather brutal converse: just as you can be smart withoutbeing very wise, you can be wise without being very smart. Thatdoesn't sound especially admirable. That gets you James Bond, whoknows what to do in a lot of situations, but has to rely on Q forthe ones involving math.Intelligence and wisdom are obviously not mutually exclusive. Infact, a high average may help support high peaks. But there arereasons to believe that at some point you have to choose betweenthem. One is the example of very smart people, who are so oftenunwise that in popular culture this now seems to be regarded as therule rather than the exception. Perhaps the absent-minded professoris wise in his way, or wiser than he seems, but he's not wise inthe way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be. [6]NewFor both Confucius and Socrates, wisdom, virtue, and happiness werenecessarily related. The wise man was someone who knew what theright choice was and always made it; to be the right choice, it hadto be morally right; he was therefore always happy, knowing he'ddone the best he could. I can't think of many ancient philosopherswho would have disagreed with that, so far as it goes."The superior man is always happy; the small man sad," said Confucius.[7]Whereas a few years ago I read an interview with a mathematicianwho said that most nights he went to bed discontented, feeling hehadn't made enough progress. [8]The Chinese and Greek words wetranslate as "happy" didn't mean exactly what we do by it, butthere's enough overlap that this remark contradicts them.Is the mathematician a small man because he's discontented? No;he's just doing a kind of work that wasn't very common in Confucius'sday.Human knowledge seems to grow fractally. Time after time, somethingthat seemed a small and uninteresting area—experimental error,even—turns out, when examined up close, to have as much init as all knowledge up to that point. Several of the fractal budsthat have exploded since ancient times involve inventing anddiscovering new things. Math, for example, used to be something ahandful of people did part-time. Now it's the career of thousands.And in work that involves making new things, some old rules don'tapply.Recently I've spent some time advising people, and there I find theancient rule still works: try to understand the situation as wellas you can, give the best advice you can based on your experience,and then don't worry about it, knowing you did all you could. ButI don't have anything like this serenity when I'm writing an essay.Then I'm worried. What if I run out of ideas? And when I'm writing,four nights out of five I go to bed discontented, feeling I didn'tget enough done.Advising people and writing are fundamentally different types ofwork. When people come to you with a problem and you have to figureout the right thing to do, you don't (usually) have to inventanything. You just weigh the alternatives and try to judge whichis the prudent choice. But prudence can't tell me what sentenceto write next. The search space is too big.Someone like a judge or a military officer can in much of his workbe guided by duty, but duty is no guide in making things. Makersdepend on something more precarious: inspiration. And like mostpeople who lead a precarious existence, they tend to be worried,not contented. In that respect they're more like the small man ofConfucius's day, always one bad harvest (or ruler) away fromstarvation. Except instead of being at the mercy of weather andofficials, they're at the mercy of their own imagination.LimitsTo me it was a relief just to realize it might be ok to be discontented.The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands ofyears of momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn't I havethe easy confidence winners are supposed to have? But that, I nowbelieve, is like a runner asking "If I'm such a good athlete, whydo I feel so tired?" Good runners still get tired; they just gettired at higher speeds.People whose work is to invent or discover things are in the sameposition as the runner. There's no way for them to do the bestthey can, because there's no limit to what they could do. Theclosest you can come is to compare yourself to other people. Butthe better you do, the less this matters. An undergrad who getssomething published feels like a star. But for someone at the topof the field, what's the test of doing well? Runners can at leastcompare themselves to others doing exactly the same thing; if youwin an Olympic gold medal, you can be fairly content, even if youthink you could have run a bit faster. But what is a novelist todo?Whereas if you're doing the kind of work in which problems arepresented to you and you have to choose between several alternatives,there's an upper bound on your performance: choosing the best everytime. In ancient societies, nearly all work seems to have been ofthis type. The peasant had to decide whether a garment was worthmending, and the king whether or not to invade his neighbor, butneither was expected to invent anything. In principle they couldhave; the king could have invented firearms, then invaded hisneighbor. But in practice innovations were so rare that they weren'texpected of you, any more than goalkeepers are expected to scoregoals. [9]In practice, it seemed as if there was a correct decisionin every situation, and if you made it you'd done your job perfectly,just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring isconsidered to have played a perfect game.In this world, wisdom seemed paramount. [10]Even now, most peopledo work in which problems are put before them and they have tochoose the best alternative. But as knowledge has grown morespecialized, there are more and more types of work in which peoplehave to make up new things, and in which performance is thereforeunbounded. Intelligence has become increasingly important relativeto wisdom because there is more room for spikes.RecipesAnother sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdomis how different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largelyfrom curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely fromcultivating them.Recipes for wisdom, particularly ancient ones, tend to have aremedial character. To achieve wisdom one must cut away all thedebris that fills one's head on emergence from childhood, leavingonly the important stuff. Both self-control and experience havethis effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your ownnature and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively.That's not all wisdom is, but it's a large part of it. Much ofwhat's in the sage's head is also in the head of every twelve yearold. The difference is that in the head of the twelve year oldit'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, throughexercise. But there can't be too much compulsion here. No amountof discipline can replace genuine curiosity. So cultivatingintelligence seems to be a matter of identifying some bias in one'scharacter—some tendency to be interested in certain types ofthings—and nurturing it. Instead of obliterating youridiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel forthe truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling intoa tree.The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart peopletend to be smart in distinctive ways.Most of our educational traditions aim at wisdom. So perhaps onereason schools work badly is that they're trying to make intelligenceusing recipes for wisdom. Most recipes for wisdom have an elementof subjection. At the very least, you're supposed to do what theteacher says. The more extreme recipes aim to break down yourindividuality the way basic training does. But that's not the routeto intelligence. Whereas wisdom comes through humility, it mayactually help, in cultivating intelligence, to have a mistakenlyhigh opinion of your abilities, because that encourages you to keepworking. Ideally till you realize how mistaken you were.(The reason it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not justthat one's brain is less malleable. Another probably even worseobstacle is that one has higher standards.)I realize we're on dangerous ground here. I'm not proposing theprimary goal of education should be to increase students' "self-esteem."That just breeds laziness. And in any case, it doesn't really foolthe kids, not the smart ones. They can tell at a young age that acontest where everyone wins is a fraud.A teacher has to walk a narrow path: you want to encourage kids tocome up with things on their own, but you can't simply applaudeverything they produce. You have to be a good audience: appreciative,but not too easily impressed. And that's a lot of work. You haveto have a good enough grasp of kids' capacities at different agesto know when to be surprised.That's the opposite of traditional recipes for education. Traditionallythe student is the audience, not the teacher; the student's job isnot to invent, but to absorb some prescribed body of material. (Theuse of the term "recitation" for sections in some colleges is afossil of this.) The problem with these old traditions is thatthey're too much influenced by recipes for wisdom.DifferentI deliberately gave this essay a provocative title; of course it'sworth being wise. But I think it's important to understand therelationship between intelligence and wisdom, and particularly whatseems to be the growing gap between them. That way we can avoidapplying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meantfor wisdom. These two senses of "knowing what to do" are moredifferent than most people realize. The path to wisdom is throughdiscipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selectedself-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic.And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the timeleads to discontentment.That's particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recentlytold me half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledgethat some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kindsof work, we can mitigate its effects. Perhaps we can box it up andput it away some of the time, instead of letting it flow togetherwith everyday sadness to produce what seems an alarmingly largepool. At the very least, we can avoid being discontented aboutbeing discontented.If you feel exhausted, it's not necessarily because there's somethingwrong with you. Maybe you're just running fast.Notes[1]Gauss was supposedly asked this when he was 10. Instead oflaboriously adding together the numbers like the other students,he saw that they consisted of 50 pairs that each summed to 101 (100+ 1, 99 + 2, etc), and that he could just multiply 101 by 50 to getthe answer, 5050.[2]A variant is that intelligence is the ability to solve problems,and wisdom the judgement to know how to use those solutions. Butwhile this is certainly an important relationship between wisdomand intelligence, it's not the distinction between them. Wisdomis useful in solving problems too, and intelligence can help indeciding what to do with the solutions.[3]In judging both intelligence and wisdom we have to factor outsome knowledge. People who know the combination of a safe will bebetter at opening it than people who don't, but no one would saythat was a test of intelligence or wisdom.But knowledge overlaps with wisdom and probably also intelligence.A knowledge of human nature is certainly part of wisdom. So wheredo we draw the line?Perhaps the solution is to discount knowledge that at some pointhas a sharp drop in utility. For example, understanding Frenchwill help you in a large number of situations, but its value dropssharply as soon as no one else involved knows French. Whereas thevalue of understanding vanity would decline more gradually.The knowledge whose utility drops sharply is the kind that haslittle relation to other knowledge. This includes mere conventions,like languages and safe combinations, and also what we'd call"random" facts, like movie stars' birthdays, or how to distinguish1956 from 1957 Studebakers.[4]People seeking some single thing called "wisdom" have beenfooled by grammar. Wisdom is just knowing the right thing to do,and there are a hundred and one different qualities that help inthat. Some, like selflessness, might come from meditating in anempty room, and others, like a knowledge of human nature, mightcome from going to drunken parties.Perhaps realizing this will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacredmystery that surrounds wisdom in so many people's eyes. The mysterycomes mostly from looking for something that doesn't exist. Andthe reason there have historically been so many different schoolsof thought about how to achieve wisdom is that they've focused ondifferent components of it.When I use the word "wisdom" in this essay, I mean no more thanwhatever collection of qualities helps people make the right choicein a wide variety of situations.[5]Even in English, our sense of the word "intelligence" issurprisingly recent. Predecessors like "understanding" seem tohave had a broader meaning.[6]There is of course some uncertainty about how closely the remarksattributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions.I'm using these names as we use the name "Homer," to mean thehypothetical people who said the things attributed to them.[7]Analects VII:36, Fung trans.Some translators use "calm" instead of "happy." One source ofdifficulty here is that present-day English speakers have a differentidea of happiness from many older societies. Every language probablyhas a word meaning "how one feels when things are going well," butdifferent cultures react differently when things go well. We reactlike children, with smiles and laughter. But in a more reservedsociety, or in one where life was tougher, the reaction might be aquiet contentment.[8]It may have been Andrew Wiles, but I'm not sure. If anyoneremembers such an interview, I'd appreciate hearing from you.[9]Confucius claimed proudly that he had never inventedanything—that he had simply passed on an accurate account ofancient traditions. [Analects VII:1] It's hard for us now toappreciate how important a duty it must have been in preliteratesocieties to remember and pass on the group's accumulated knowledge.Even in Confucius's time it still seems to have been the first dutyof the scholar.[10]The bias toward wisdom in ancient philosophy may be exaggeratedby the fact that, in both Greece and China, many of the firstphilosophers (including Confucius and Plato) saw themselves asteachers of administrators, and so thought disproportionately aboutsuch matters. The few people who did invent things, like storytellers,must have seemed an outlying data point that could be ignored.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston,and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
