Notes

[1] Gauss was supposedly asked this when he was 10. Instead of laboriously 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 get the 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. But while this is certainly an important relationship between wisdom and intelligence, it's not the distinction between them. Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, and intelligence can help in deciding what to do with the solutions.

[3] In judging both intelligence and wisdom we have to factor out some knowledge. People who know the combination of a safe will be better at opening it than people who don't, but no one would say that 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 where do we draw the line?

Perhaps the solution is to discount knowledge that at some point has a sharp drop in utility. For example, understanding French will help you in a large number of situations, but its value drops sharply as soon as no one else involved knows French. Whereas the value of understanding vanity would decline more gradually.

The knowledge whose utility drops sharply is the kind that has little 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 distinguish 1956 from 1957 Studebakers.

[4] People seeking some single thing called "wisdom" have been fooled by grammar. Wisdom is just knowing the right thing to do, and there are a hundred and one different qualities that help in that. Some, like selflessness, might come from meditating in an empty room, and others, like a knowledge of human nature, might come from going to drunken parties.

Perhaps realizing this will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds wisdom in so many people's eyes. The mystery comes mostly from looking for something that doesn't exist. And the reason there have historically been so many different schools of thought about how to achieve wisdom is that they've focused on different components of it.

When I use the word "wisdom" in this essay, I mean no more than whatever collection of qualities helps people make the right choice in a wide variety of situations.

[5] Even in English, our sense of the word "intelligence" is surprisingly recent. Predecessors like "understanding" seem to have had a broader meaning.

[6] There is of course some uncertainty about how closely the remarks attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. I'm using these names as we use the name "Homer," to mean the hypothetical people who said the things attributed to them.

[7] Analects VII:36, Fung trans.

Some translators use "calm" instead of "happy." One source of difficulty here is that present-day English speakers have a different idea of happiness from many older societies. Every language probably has a word meaning "how one feels when things are going well," but different cultures react differently when things go well. We react like children, with smiles and laughter. But in a more reserved society, or in one where life was tougher, the reaction might be a quiet contentment.

[8] It may have been Andrew Wiles, but I'm not sure. If anyone remembers such an interview, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

[9] Confucius claimed proudly that he had never invented anything—that he had simply passed on an accurate account of ancient traditions. [Analects VII:1] It's hard for us now to appreciate how important a duty it must have been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the group's accumulated knowledge. Even in Confucius's time it still seems to have been the first duty of the scholar.

[10] The bias toward wisdom in ancient philosophy may be exaggerated by the fact that, in both Greece and China, many of the first philosophers (including Confucius and Plato) saw themselves as teachers of administrators, and so thought disproportionately about such 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.