How does “wisdom” differ from “experience”?

Question

Can “wisdom” be precisely defined, and if so, how does it differ from “experience”, given that it may be considered to grow with age, yet one may also consider young people wise and old people unwise?

Answer 1

Wisdom involves recognizing situations as similar to those you've seen before or heard about, and on that basis, predicting the likely outcome or understanding how best to deal with it.

Wisdom often deals with social and political situations. How is this person going to treat me? Will I be better off quitting this job? How should I speak to this person so they understand me? What's going to happen to my country? Is this a dangerous street to walk down? How can I make my wife happy?

Wisdom often deals with personal choices and virtues. Should I buy an insurance policy with this TV? Should I sue this person? Should I yell at this cashier? Do I just have to be patient here? Will this company treat its customers well or exploit them? Am I just deceiving myself?

Wisdom includes knowledge that is broadly applicable to many situations. For instance, "if something changes or you try something new, mistakes and accidents are more likely during the settling-in period." "When evaluating an extraordinary claim, beware of cherry picking bias." "If something is fully optimized for desirable criterion A, then it's probably not as optimized for desirable criterion B." "Initial cost estimates are usually too optimistic." "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure."

Wisdom is distinguished from intelligence. Cognitive speed, short term memory, vocabulary, creativity - these traits may be useful for attaining wisdom, but they are not themselves wisdom. Wisdom is accumulated, crystallized knowledge, independent of how quickly or adroitly you think.

Wisdom is distinguished from mere factual information. Knowing all the state capitals is not wisdom. Wisdom can draw on factual information, but it necessarily involves a kind of "fuzzy" future prediction, not just factual certainty. Wisdom has to be generally useful for navigating life.

Do people get wiser with age? In many ways, of course everyone gets wiser; they gain more experience, which they can apply to new situations. But cognitive function also declines with age, which can lead to poor judgment and a lack of wisdom, such as being taken in by scams or conspiracy theories. Also, the world changes over time, which can lead to past experiences no longer being as helpful in navigating it. So it depends on the person.

Answer 2

I once heard a pastor illustrate the difference between knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. He was going through the book of Proverbs, which has these terms everywhere. The way he illustrated it stuck with me:

1. The mother tells her little daughter, "Don't touch the iron, it will burn you." The daughter now has knowledge.
2. The mother leaves the room, and the little girl touches the iron anyway. She feels the hot burn. Now she has understanding.
3. The next time the mother leaves the room, the little girl thinks, "Mama told me not to touch the iron; I know it would be bad for me to do it; and so I won't touch it." Now she has wisdom.

Answer 3

Wisdom, it seems to me, usually means meta-level smarts. You don't simply have knowledge, but you know how to and when to apply it. You're aware of exceptions and contingenies. Can a youth be wise? Sure. Can an old fool exist? Sure. But the longer you live, the greater the chance that you learn things at a meta-level. You've experienced applying knowledge, heuristics and skills in a wider range of situations. You've has more potentional opportunity to have caught on to a lot of exceptions and assumptions. You've had time to see second level patterns, to see your own weaknesses, to have noticed anomolies. There's no guarantee, but I think chances go up.

Answer 4

The oracle of Delphi, as all old fools know, declared Socrates the most wise of men.

In Socrates' own words, as related in Plato's Apology

Well, Chaerephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all his doings, and he went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether - as I was saying, I must beg you not to interrupt - he asked the oracle to tell him whether there was anyone wiser than I was, and the Pythian prophetess answered that there was no man wiser.

When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the god mean? and what is the interpretation of this riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom, small or great.

And I swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear! - for I must tell you the truth - the result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that some inferior men were really wiser and better.

And so he goes to the power brokers, and to the poets, the artisans and workmen, and everywhere makes new enemies by trying to see if, perhaps, they are wiser than he is.

This investigation has led to my having many enemies of the worst and most dangerous kind, and has given occasion also to many calumnies, and I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name as an illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go my way, obedient to the god, and make inquisition into the wisdom of anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and this occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god.

So, it appears, wisdom -- ironically -- does not manifest itself in having but in lacking; not in knowledge, but in questioning; not in anything we can grasp and hold, but in hunger for something that remains elusive. (Hungering, grasping and pointing seem to be basic metaphors that pervade all epistemologies - and, as each new-born knows, hunger comes first.) But curiosity and questioning can be dangerous (for the one who is unwise enough like Socrates to make himself a public pest). To tolerate all this, a little bit of humor and irony also seem necessary ("by the dog, I swear!").

It's not possible to not admire Socrates and his ironies in the face of (avoidable) death. But perhaps he was just a little too smug about it? Lao-zi has a somewhat less smug and more down-to-earth view of wisdom:

Wise souls don't hoard;
the more they do for others the more they have,
the more they give the richer they are.
The Way of heaven profits without destroying.
Doing without outdoing
is the Way of the wise.

(Ursula K. Le Guin translation, "Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching", 1997)

(For an interesting take on Daoist paradoxical epistemology, see Brook Ziporyn's The minimally discernible position. It also explicitly mentions, in passing, "hunger" as a crucial metaphor. In Why this text matters he tries to explain this in a perhaps more accessible way.)

Answer 5

Intelligence is the ability to determine how to do something.

Wisdom is the ability to determine whether to do something.

They are independent attributes. Having spent time around engineers and scientists, I can think of entirely too many anecdotes and classic jokes which illustrate the difference.

Experience and knowledge inform the application of both, so age can bring better application of either. Also, personality and situation affect whether people bother to apply them; having a strength or weakness is separate from exhibiting it.

Advanced age or misinformation can cause a decrease in either or both. And teenagers are demonstrably, and medically, not in their right minds and are likely to react impulsively rather than wisely or intelligently, so getting past that period of massive neural rewiring often increases both.

So I'm afraid the answer to the question as posed is: sometimes. It is often true at the practical level, but this is not guaranteed.

There's no fool like an old fool, except for a young fool.

Answer 6

The difference between experience and wisdom is the same as the difference between knowledge and understanding. We can know/experience a tremendous amount of information without being able to 'see' how it fits together. The ability to see how things fit together — see what they mean, beyond seeing what they are — is a skill that must be developed over time, with conscious effort and reflection. It's rare for a young person to be properly wise, because young people are self-assured idealists: they are confident that what they know is true, and they rarely have had the time or reason to develop the knack for questioning their own preconceptions. When their preconceptions are confronted, they tend to get confused or disoriented, which is only the starting point for developing the skills of reflection.

Older people generally have developed some elements of wisdom, at least within certain specific domains, because over time most people are forced to confront the limitations of their own preconceptions. This forced broadening of understanding leaves its mark. Interestingly, we're less likely to find wise people among the powerful and wealthy, because power and wealth insulate such people from contradictions to their world view that would force them to reflect. But age by itself is no guarantor of wisdom in its full sense because most people don't take the conscious effort to confront their own worldviews, and so never develop the requisite skills.

There's a myth that Siddhartha (later Gautama Buddha) was raised in a palace where he was only allowed to see and interact with people who were young, beautiful, and healthy. Then one day as an adult he left the palace and saw people who were old, sick, ugly, bent by labor, enslaved, dying, etc. That sudden discovery of something that most of us grow up with as children was such a shock to his worldview that it sent him down the road to enlightenment. But we can easily imagine another Siddhartha who would have experienced that shock and retreated in disgust to his idyllic palace, never growing in understanding at all. That's the nature of this; one must choose.

Answer 7

This question applies to everyone, but at the same time is understood by very few. Wisdom is a journey. It grows as you travel. But what kind of travel through life develops personal wisdom?

Most people don't really travel that far and by 30–35 years old their wisdom stops developing. Their views and understanding are pretty static and do not change much for the rest of their lives.

But for other people, their wisdom, their understanding of themselves, of the world around them keeps developing, getting deeper, more universal.

Why is this difference, when this fork occurs that separates the majority with static wisdom from the minority with constantly growing wisdom? It is a difficult question. You can blame genes, society, cultural background, stressful and difficult environment.

Answer 8

My personal take is that wisdom is the ability to discover and apply the deeper principles that rule all facts.

For example, instead of stating that a politician is corrupt, a wise man would just say that "power corrupts". A wise football technical lead might know that victory is directly related to ball possession time, etc.

The ability to abstract life to its deeper principles makes things simple. If you know the principle, you can apply it in all cases. If not, you are forced to learn specific solutions for each specific case.

So, yes. Wisdom, for some, comes with age. For others, never.

Answer 9

IMO wisdom is knowledge which results from reflecting one's own experiences in life.

Such a combination presupposes

• some age to make sufficent experience,
• some research or at least education for the knowledge component
• and some rational capabilities to reflect and draw conclusions.

Answer 10

Wisdom does not comes with age it comes with asking "why?" and "how?". Ask enough times with enough resources and you'll gain plenty of it. Draw the incorrect conclusions and you'll be back to square one.

Answer 11

The basis of wisdom is based on observation, but the quality of observation is based on experience. Now, if our understanding of observation depends on the look of the observer, that is, the nature of things is determined by the look of the observer, it is completely consistent with wisdom and the opposite of this error.Those who acquire skills such youth have the ability to create great works, and age does not necessarily create success in experience.