Earlier quoted context omitted.
SBF was the first that popped into my mind.
SBF doesn't strike me as "highly intelligent" in the least.
I don’t think there’s any friendly way to say this, but that might have more to do with you.
What makes a person seem wise?
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a metaphor I'd suggest that (Wis = IQ * EQ) might be more accurate -- it is difficult for someone with low emotional awareness to make up the difference with intelligence alone, just as it is difficult for someone of low intelligence to become wise with nothing but high emotional awareness.
I like that. It's a good metaphor. But I think you can be wise without being clever (having a high IQ). In my mind, people mostly ask different kinds of questions when they are looking for wisdom. They want to know how to make their marriage work, or how to have a happy life, not the most efficient way to sort a list. And those questions tend to benefit from both a greater EQ, and extensive life experience. Of course…
> I think you can be wise without being clever (having a high IQ).
I think it depends on how you define "clever". Does knowledge of things like how to sort a list correlate with cleverness?
I know wise people who don't have formal education, but I'd still consider them exceedingly clever.
I built a wood shed many years ago. I looked up the recommended roof slope and used trigonometry to calculate the angles of my cuts. The next time I made one, someone with more wisdom showed me that you could simply assemble a flat roof with joists sticking out both sides, raise one side until it seems right, and then run a circular saw vertically along the side to create a neat edge.
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#43An active reading habit (of books) is one of the most reliable ways to achieve wisdom. Why? - Books require a "Goldilocks" amount of sustained, slow effort given to one topic. Not too costly to pursue that it is a bodily harm risk, but not trivial either in terms of time and attention investment. This slows down the frenetic nature of a mind that latches onto heuristics. - By being exposed to different well-formed id…
> People often think that being booksmart is having your head filled with useless facts, but this is almost opposite from reality.
Indeed. Reading a lot of books does not mean things are retained by mind for a faithful recall. In fact, a lot of detail is lost during the course of reading and afterward. The things that stick are what relate to our experiences, beliefs or aspirations.
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#44Wisdom is the size of your context window. Simply: how much are you considering when you make your decisions.
I don't think that is true. I think wisdom has a lot more with paying attention, being self-reflective, and accumulating experience, as well as caring about the questioner. A wide context window at the moment of the question doesn't help much if you haven't noticed and reflected.
Yeah reflection is important but I would consider that a quality of intelligence.
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#45What makes a person seem wise is less interesting than what causes a person to be wise.
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#46Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#47As a bit of introspection, based on their metrics, I am unwise. I have the bad habit of thinking/acting before I deeply think. I also tend to disregard the thoughts/feelings of others when I believe the decision to be made is one that ought to be determined by facts/logic/rationality.
These are both weaknesses that I've identified and tried to work on. I've made the most progress on the second (considering the thoughts/feelings of others). The first is a really difficult one for me since I find that hesitation is also a major problem. The balance between acting quickly and acting carefully is difficult.
However, I think a stronger take-away from this study was: "Real wisdom, according to our study, is about finding a balance between thoughtful reasoning, social understanding, and emotional awareness." I believe that the balance between things is the key to wisdom. The people I consider most unwise are those who have a one-size-fits-all approach to everything.
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
He got hired by Jane Street, that's a very high bar.
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 hi…
Nope. Some folks start bad at, say, chess and stay bad, or will regress back down to 800 ELO. Perhaps they do not care, or their bad moves have become habitual, they are just playing to fill the time. Or maybe injury, pain, or mental health problems mean stagnation or decline. Maybe they are busy thinking about other things instead? That being said, the narrative of "up and to the right" for progress is a common mythology these days. Maybe that mythology needs questioning when something does not behave the way it "should".
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
He got hired by Jane Street, that's a very high bar.
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 hi…
It was League, not DOTA. It's a MOBA, not an RTS. IIRC he was in the bottom 15% or so.
That said, it's totally fine to play a videogame without any desire to be good at it.
More importantly studies on chess show that a tiny amount of skill (<10%) is explained by intelligence. I see no reason that MOBAs would be much higher, as in chess they are likely mostly memorization and practice.
Re: What makes a person seem wise?
#50It depends on the school of thought, but the common explanation is that wisdom is knowledge of Truth backed with experience. Not the kind of truth about irrelevant things, but the Truth about the nature of life. And it must be backed with experience, for it's one thing to know the map and a completely different thing to have trodden that path on the map.
A selfish person cannot be wise. He may know conceptually the important truth that all life is interconnected, but having never experienced that connectedness, he easily forgets this truth when his personal interests are at stake. Someone who is poisoning the river for personal gain using his power and knowledge cannot be wise because he doesn't see the whole picture in which this river returns to what he drinks and thus he is poisoning himself. Once he becomes wise, he also stops caring about himself, for that's the only rational choice in the light of wisdom.