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. [9] 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. [10] 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.
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.
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.
[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.