# Is It Worth Being Wise?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Paul Graham]] - Full Title: Is It Worth Being Wise? - Category: #articles - Summary: Intelligence and wisdom may seem related, but they have distinct qualities in decision-making abilities. Wisdom often comes from experience, while intelligence can involve problem-solving skills. Understanding their differences can help us navigate decision-making in various situations. - URL: http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html ## Highlights - 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? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvqf600nssdf8vknjmn35g)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefawv6hnnkxxh5b4790zykb)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefaxyys5923ssk21jmt57br)) - "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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefayx3k5jccppqycjm6v6pp)) - The distinction is similar to the rule that one should judge talent at its best and character at its worst. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefazc6fcemvhz8nrsbb7a6z)) - nearly anyone can learn to be a good swimmer, but to be an Olympic swimmer you need a certain body type. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keftzgqtyxy6gy67y93j2m8g)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv2q7v42feqr7y2j5q6kdy)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv3th0ngwsn6fph0wgw9kx)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv47f4m82d1kj1wf8nr9zb)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv61hsj0s9afkt2kjrt1v2)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv51tga7gkjdeycsk4mrry)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv5efpqxa8qpw2xx09fcb2)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv6z7fa97dekhmw6dfbfpw)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv786zf8q6wv8yswcc5xan)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv9c78m6m4zpmv6mq5b33m)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefv9t2kkads5gzrgjwm3624)) - The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of years of momentum behind it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvcwja5f7v34h8pra5y6w6)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvfghgvsp07menkc9ererd)) - remedial ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvgeeexsstz98421ezjet3)) - Note: remedial (adjective): intended to correct or improve a deficiency; serving as a cure or corrective measure 🛠️🌿 - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvhf4dqvg423cvzwmkxm13)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvg6a917z2emhd2p6f482e)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvjatpfezjne09wefbt5j0)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvjkvnxpmwfjwths3v9z8s)) - The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvjsb50tm8mh484fgvg6sz)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvkregvnx3zh3wkhtsz7sw)) - (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.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvm1jfxze3n458r0gtbqm5)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvme1vwqpmasme3whqc0r5)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvnp4y2pv8by8j5hqfxc7z)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kefvp1g4z6mvnpj8ww60ag53))