Education, Intelligence, Experience and Wisdom

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These words are very useful, especially when talking about how much someone's opinion is worth.  Unfortunately, different people mean different things by them, so it's important to clarify their possible meanings.  (A great deal of disagreement can be traced to different people using terminology in different senses, so that when they disagree on a particular statement's truth, it is a semantic matter.)

An experience is something fairly clear: these are simply things that happen to you, including things that happen when you're around, regardless of whether you were actively involved.  For instance, you might be a witness to an unattended infant wandering into the path of a moving car.  Depending on one's mental equipment, various conclusions can be drawn from the experience, e.g.

• Don't wander into the path of a moving vehicle; you could get hurt.  [You might conclude this even if the child did not get hurt, if your earlier experiences suggest that the situation could have had a variety of outcomes.]
• Don't leave an infant unattended.
• If you see an unattended infant near a roadway, close your eyes, because you might see something distressful.
• If you see an unattended infant near a roadway, do something quick.

So, clearly, a single experience can be milked in many different ways, depending on all the other experience you have up to that point, to add to your Experience.

The word wisdom seemed somewhat threatening to me in my younger days, because it was always used to mean that I did not have it, whatever it was.  However, in retrospect, it would seem to mean simply assimilated experience.  Experience alone is not worth much if it isn't processed properly.  To someone who does not process experiences well, a given experience can only be useful under exactly the same circumstances.  A person with more developed processing abilities can get more out of the experience, and extrapolate its usefulness in many circumstances that are, on the face of it, widely different from the original experience.  So, two individuals with exactly the same experiences could acquire very different amounts of wisdom from them.

The older one gets, the wiser one is, assuming that the experiences do not contradict themselves.  In these days, as some readers will agree, the way a situation works out is very different from how they worked out when we were younger, so our wisdom doesn't seem to count for much.

For instance, when I was young, if you studied hard, did your own homework, did well in school, you were usually able to get a good position, and be happy in life.  The older I got, however, the more I saw good-for-nothings do brilliantly in life, at least some of the time.  Both sorts of people: those who worked hard for what they achieved, and those who simply sailed their way to success, were eager to boast that America was the Land of Opportunity, but of course, they meant very different things by it.

As I have said before, education is a process of conveying the wisdom of others to someone (the "student"), so that the student can quickly learn a large quantity of wisdom without needing to have the experiences personally.

Of all these words, intelligence is the most problematic.  One possible candidate for a definition is the ability to maximize the wisdom of experience(s).  The intelligent person can extract a lot of information from a little experience.

Another definition is: the ability to comprehend sophisticated ideas.  Do these two definitions mean the same thing?  This question amounts to the following: is it the case that, (i) if someone can maximize the wisdom of experiences, then they can comprehend sophisticated ideas, AND (ii) if they can comprehend sophisticated ideas, then they can maximize the wisdom of their experiences?

I think (ii) is fairly easy to accept, because if a person has assimilated a large number of sophisticated ideas, a given experience can be analyzed at a number of different levels, each of which provides more wisdom.  On the other hand, (i) seems difficult to conclude, at least to me.

Many of us know dogs, for instance, who will be very cautious crossing a street, especially if they were hit by a vehicle early in life (and survived the encounter).  We all know to avoid putting our fingers in a flame, if we tried it once.  We all know to avoid giving certain kinds of advice to certain kinds of people, if we've seen it tried once with poor results.  For example, I have tried to tell my students not to wait until just before the test to study for it.  (They have to study early, so that all the homework they're doing makes sense to them.  But it's no use, because many of their other subjects only require memorizing a certain amount of vocabulary.  Unfortunately, mathematics --which is what I teach-- is far removed from mere vocabulary.  It is skills, pattern recognition, observation.  You certainly have to remember a variety of procedures, and learn which ones to use in a given situation.  But students think that merely remembering the names of the procedures is 90% of what they need.)

Some authors I've read believe that birds are able to assimilate experiences in a certain limited way, so that they avoid routes and choices that did not work out in past years, and choose ones that did.  Mammals, on the other hand, seem to look more for motives and attitudes, and base their choices on the personalities involved.  This may be a very wild generalization.