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February 2007  
  
A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25
years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see
they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise.
And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How?  
  
What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm
not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to
figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the
right thing to do.  
  
And yet isn't being smart also knowing what to do in certain situations? For
example, knowing what to do when the teacher tells your elementary school
class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100?   
  
Some say wisdom and intelligence apply to different types of problems—wisdom
to human problems and intelligence to abstract ones. But that isn't true. Some
wisdom has nothing to do with people: for example, the wisdom of the engineer
who knows certain structures are less prone to failure than others. And
certainly smart people can find clever solutions to human problems as well as
abstract ones.   
  
Another popular explanation is that wisdom comes from experience while
intelligence is innate. But people are not simply wise in proportion to how
much experience they have. Other things must contribute to wisdom besides
experience, and some may be innate: a reflective disposition, for example.  
  
Neither of the conventional explanations of the difference between wisdom and
intelligence stands up to scrutiny. So what is the difference? 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 to do. The
difference is that "wise" means one has a high average outcome across all
situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is,
if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis
the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph
of the smart person would have high peaks.  
  
The distinction is similar to the rule that one should judge talent at its
best and character at its worst. Except you judge intelligence at its best,
and wisdom by its average. That's how the two are related: they're the two
different senses in which the same curve can be high.  
  
So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart person
knows what to do in situations where few others could. We need to add one more
qualification: we should ignore cases where someone knows what to do because
they have inside information.  But aside from that, I don't think we can
get much more specific without starting to be mistaken.  
  
Nor do we need to. Simple as it is, this explanation predicts, or at least
accords with, both of the conventional stories about the distinction between
wisdom and intelligence. Human problems are the most common type, so being
good at solving those is key in achieving a high average outcome. And it seems
natural that a high average outcome depends mostly on experience, but that
dramatic peaks can only be achieved by people with certain rare, innate
qualities; nearly anyone can learn to be a good swimmer, but to be an 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 is on average good at making
the right choice. But giving the name "wisdom" to the supposed quality that
enables one to do that doesn't mean 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.   
  
Likewise, though "intelligent" means something, we're asking for trouble if we
insist on looking for a single thing called "intelligence." And whatever its
components, they're not all innate. We use the word "intelligent" as an
indication of ability: a smart person can grasp things few others could. It
does seem likely there's some inborn predisposition to intelligence (and
wisdom too), but this predisposition is not itself intelligence.  
  
One reason we tend to think of intelligence as inborn is that people trying to
measure it have concentrated on the aspects of it that are most measurable. A
quality that's inborn will obviously be more convenient to work with than one
that's influenced by experience, and thus might vary in the course of a study.
The problem comes when we drag the word "intelligence" over onto what they're
measuring. If they're measuring something inborn, they can't be measuring
intelligence. Three year olds aren't smart. When we describe one as smart,
it's shorthand for "smarter than other three year olds."  
  
**Split**  
  
Perhaps it's a technicality to point out that a predisposition to intelligence
is not the same as intelligence. But it's an important technicality, 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 same curve, then
they converge as the number of points on the curve decreases. If there's just
one point, they're identical: the average and maximum are the same. But as the
number of points increases, wisdom and intelligence diverge. And historically
the number of points on the curve seems to have been increasing: our ability
is tested in an ever wider range of situations.  
  
In the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to have regarded wisdom,
learning, and intelligence as more closely related than we do. Distinguishing
between "wise" and "smart" is a modern habit.  And the reason we do is that
they've been diverging. As knowledge gets more specialized, there are more
points on the curve, and the distinction 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 were really recipes for wisdom
or intelligence. But the really striking change, as intelligence and wisdom
drift apart, is that we may have to decide which we prefer. We may not be able
to optimize for both simultaneously.  
  
Society seems to have voted for intelligence. We no longer admire the sage—not
the way people did two thousand years ago. Now we admire the genius. Because
in fact the distinction we began with has a rather brutal converse: just as
you can be smart without being very wise, you can be wise without being very
smart. That doesn't sound especially admirable. That gets you James Bond, who
knows what to do in a lot of situations, but has to rely on Q for the ones
involving math.  
  
Intelligence and wisdom are obviously not mutually exclusive. In fact, a high
average may help support high peaks. But there are reasons to believe that at
some point you have to choose between them. One is the example of very smart
people, who are so often unwise that in popular culture this now seems to be
regarded as the rule rather than the exception. Perhaps the absent-minded
professor is wise in his way, or wiser than he seems, but he's not wise in the
way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be.   
  
**New**  
  
For both Confucius and Socrates, wisdom, virtue, and happiness were
necessarily related. The wise man was someone who knew what the right choice
was and always made it; to be the right choice, it had to be morally right; he
was therefore always happy, knowing he'd done the best he could. I can't think
of many ancient philosophers who would have disagreed with that, so far as it
goes.  
  
"The superior man is always happy; the small man sad," said Confucius.   
  
Whereas a few years ago I read an interview with a mathematician who said that
most nights he went to bed discontented, feeling he hadn't made enough
progress.  The Chinese and Greek words we translate as "happy" didn't mean
exactly what we do by it, but there'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's day.  
  
Human knowledge seems to grow fractally. Time after time, something that
seemed a small and uninteresting area—experimental error, even—turns out, when
examined up close, to have as much in it as all knowledge up to that point.
Several of the fractal buds that have exploded since ancient times involve
inventing and discovering new things. Math, for example, used to be something
a handful of people did part-time. Now it's the career of thousands. And in
work that involves making new things, some old rules don't apply.  
  
Recently I've spent some time advising people, and there I find the ancient
rule still works: try to understand the situation as well as 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. But I 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't get enough done.  
  
Advising people and writing are fundamentally different types of work. When
people come to you with a problem and you have to figure out the right thing
to do, you don't (usually) have to invent anything. You just weigh the
alternatives and try to judge which is the prudent choice. But _prudence_
can't tell me what sentence to write next. The search space is too big.  
  
Someone like a judge or a military officer can in much of his work be guided
by duty, but duty is no guide in making things. Makers depend on something
more precarious: inspiration. And like most people who lead a precarious
existence, they tend to be worried, not contented. In that respect they're
more like the small man of Confucius's day, always one bad harvest (or ruler)
away from starvation. Except instead of being at the mercy of weather and
officials, they're at the mercy of their own imagination.  
  
**Limits**  
  
To 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 of years of
momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn't I have the easy confidence
winners are supposed to have? But that, I now believe, is like a runner asking
"If I'm such a good athlete, why do I feel so tired?" Good runners still get
tired; they just get tired at higher speeds.  
  
People whose work is to invent or discover things are in the same position as
the runner. There's no way for them to do the best they can, because there's
no limit to what they could do. The closest you can come is to compare
yourself to other people. But the better you do, the less this matters. An
undergrad who gets something published feels like a star. But for someone at
the top of the field, what's the test of doing well? Runners can at least
compare themselves to others doing exactly the same thing; if you win an
Olympic gold medal, you can be fairly content, even if you think you could
have run a bit faster. But what is a novelist to do?  
  
Whereas if you're doing the kind of work in which problems are presented to
you and you have to choose between several alternatives, there's an upper
bound on your performance: choosing the best every time. In ancient societies,
nearly all work seems to have been of this type. The peasant had to decide
whether a garment was worth mending, and the king whether or not to invade his
neighbor, but neither was expected to invent anything. In principle they could
have; the king could have invented firearms, then invaded his neighbor. But in
practice innovations were so rare that they weren't expected of you, any more
than goalkeepers are expected to score goals.  In practice, it seemed as if
there was a correct decision in every situation, and if you made it you'd done
your job perfectly, just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from
scoring is considered to have played a perfect game.  
  
In this world, wisdom seemed paramount.  Even now, most people do work in
which problems are put before them and they have to choose the best
alternative. But as knowledge has grown more specialized, there are more and
more types of work in which people have to make up new things, and in which
performance is therefore unbounded. Intelligence has become increasingly
important relative to wisdom because there is more room for spikes.  
  
**Recipes**  
  
Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom is how
different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish
qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.  
  
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.  
  
The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be
smart in distinctive ways.  
  
Most of our educational traditions aim at wisdom. So perhaps one reason
schools work badly is that they're trying to make intelligence using recipes
for wisdom. Most recipes for wisdom have an element of subjection. At the very
least, you're supposed to do what the teacher says. The more extreme recipes
aim to break down your individuality the way basic training does. But that's
not the route to intelligence. Whereas wisdom comes through humility, it may
actually help, in cultivating intelligence, to have a mistakenly high opinion
of your abilities, because that encourages you to keep working. Ideally till
you realize how mistaken you were.  
  
(The reason it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not just that one's
brain is less malleable. Another probably even worse obstacle is that one has
higher standards.)  
  
I realize we're on dangerous ground here. I'm not proposing the primary goal
of education should be to increase students' "self-esteem." That just breeds
laziness. And in any case, it doesn't really fool the kids, not the smart
ones. They can tell at a young age that a contest where everyone wins is a
fraud.  
  
A teacher has to walk a narrow path: you want to encourage kids to come up
with things on their own, but you can't simply applaud everything they
produce. You have to be a good audience: appreciative, but not too easily
impressed. And that's a lot of work. You have to have a good enough grasp of
kids' capacities at different ages to know when to be surprised.  
  
That's the opposite of traditional recipes for education. Traditionally the
student is the audience, not the teacher; the student's job is not to invent,
but to absorb some prescribed body of material. (The use of the term
"recitation" for sections in some colleges is a fossil of this.) The problem
with these old traditions is that they're too much influenced by recipes for
wisdom.  
  
**Different**  
  
I deliberately gave this essay a provocative title; of course it's worth being
wise. But I think it's important to understand the relationship between
intelligence and wisdom, and particularly what seems to be the growing gap
between them. That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to
intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. These two senses of "knowing
what to do" are more different than most people realize. The path to wisdom is
through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected
self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And
while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to
discontentment.  
  
That's particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recently told me
half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledge that some amount
of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work, we can mitigate its
effects. Perhaps we can box it up and put it away some of the time, instead of
letting it flow together with everyday sadness to produce what seems an
alarmingly large pool. At the very least, we can avoid being discontented
about being discontented.  
  
If you feel exhausted, it's not necessarily because there's something wrong
with you. Maybe you're just running fast.  
  
  
  
  
  
**