What makes a person seem wise?

The good news is that EQ will go up with life experience if 1) you care about it, and 2) you pay attention.

Caring is a big part because it motivates you to pay attention and act on what you learn. (Not caring can also be beneficial -- it makes it much easier to just focus on the technical parts. As with everything, there are trade-offs.)

That's a hard question to answer, because I do it automatically, 100% of the time. For me it's probably a result of childhood trauma (and maybe a high degree of empathy).

I suspect most people learn to do it as the result of bad experiences. As with many things, that's more likely in childhood.

It sounds like the topic is perceived wisdom (“what makes a person seem wise?”) rather than actual (practical) wisdom which is good use of knowledge and experience to make good decisions.

I say this because I know folks who seem wise (perceived as high IQ and EQ) but lack judgment, because they are working off models of the world that does not comport with reality, so their utterings do not work in real life. Wisdom isn’t about batting a thousand of course but wisdom is about always allowing reality be the teacher.

Many people who present as wise are academics and gurus and they sound really good on podcasts but don’t have much empiricism and experience doing hard things.

Ironically people who are reflective and have gone through the crucible of running a business (or doing something with a lot of headwinds) end up being actually wiser because they have to deal with world (and its flaws) as is, not as they think it should be.

Stonebraker is an opinionated figure in the database world but he has started so many companies and have dealt with the realities of how people use databases that his judgement (which could still be wrong by the way) would carry more weight than a pure database researcher who says all the right things.

Wisdom is taking your own advice.

Words that I’ve found easier to accept the value of than to extoll. Trying is the first step to failing I guess;)

This will probably sound ridiculous, but I can't get over the fact that he was playing Dota 2 for years, thousands of games played and was still in bronze league. I consider RTS games like this a proxy for intelligence, and while it isn't a perfect proxy due to it also requiring hand dexterity / mechanical skill / some arbitrary memorization, I do still think it's a good indicator that there was something off with him mentally.

You should passively improve with the amount of games he had under his belt, even if you put no conscious thought into why it is that you're losing or what you could be doing better. He performed at a level which is what, the lowest 10% or 20% of players? Many of whom were probably new to the game because most people will climb in rank over time.