What is wisdom? How does is it differ from intelligence? It’s not necessarily only the hoary head that automatically opens one up to earning the seat at the table of wisdom. It can occur at any time in the course of one’s life, although it is most evident in one’s back-nine timeline of their allotted period of animus, and is largely due to a warehouse full of plain old life experience.
Those who’ve led more of a long and sheltered life may also gain in wisdom, more often than not due to an ability to remember the totality of their experiences, and possess a great facility in the recall thereof. And those who are younger and have not yet experienced the full exposure to life’s milestones of unforgettable events have a gift for spatial abstraction which frequently conjure the descriptive phrase, of “being wise beyond one’s years.”
So it’s not only age; it’s not automatic.
I would suggest that wisdom is indeed borne of a life full of experience, certainly, but there’s much more to it than only the experiential. More specifically, it emanates from a combination of the ability to apprehend, tame, and then master both types of logic. It also helps in conjunction with good memory imprinting, at least.
There are two types of logic we’ll discuss here, the most popular of which can be understood by the thrilling tales of Sherlock Holmes, any flavor of the CSI television programs, or simply by playing a few games of Clue. Of course, my dear Watson, I’m referring to Deductive Logic, the ability to gather a set of more or less objective facts, and by process of elimination of the impossible circumstances from that set of those items to arrive at a logical conclusion. Elementary.
This is all well and good, however is more suited to what has happened, and not necessarily to what will happen in the future. Sure, it’s great at solving puzzles, and only constitutes a portion of the other type of logic. The other type is Inductive Logic, which is not as cut and dry as Deductive reasoning, yet when honest assessment and critical thinking skills are applied, its intuitive nature can yield amazing predictive qualities.
Where deductive logic is more digital in nature, inductive logic is more analog by comparison, dealing more with probabilities based upon a vast array of many simple deductive fact sets. Those who display superior wisdom usually have the ability to draw from that vast array of their personal experience, sometimes seemingly unrelated on the surface, and then gauge, through the application of more abstract reasoning, and arrive at probabilities of each of multiple possible outcomes. It’s certainly not an exact science, as it is subject to the biases of the thinker and based upon his or her experience imprinting. These biases must also be as generalized and sanitized as possible, and as such held to a higher level of personal scrutiny.
The truth is, Inductive reasoning, while must be used in tandem with the deductive type of past events, really shines when speaking of likely future outcomes. In business, proper application would call it Risk/Benefit analysis; in lay terms a Pro/Con list; in potentially dangerous situations fight or flight, but in affairs of the heart it’s nigh impossible to eliminate personal bias, and frequently renders less reliable results.
Good inductive reasoning skills beget what we call wisdom, especially when all available facts, historical recall, and the like are present, and when personal bias is held in check. It does not automatically yield a correct prognosis, as in rearward-looking deductive reasoning, but the good wisdom and advice that bubbles up to the top of the probability scale carries the day more frequently than not.
My dad used to tell me he was in on three different “fixed” horse races in his lifetime. On the first two of them he won a lot of money; on the last one the horse failed to cooperate, and he lost a bundle. He gained a certain degree of wisdom after that, and thereafter permanently “adjusted” his future betting strategy, let’s say. I’ve known several pro horse race handicappers who make their living at it. Each has had an astounding talent for crunching incredibly huge fields of data, thus it can rightly be said that they have this gift of wisdom called “horse sense.” Their built in analytical minds coupled with eidetic memories is absolutely astonishing.
This is why those wizened ones can accurately offer nuggets of wisdom, they have the capability to measure humongous data sets and boil it all down to a logical probable outcome.
Stiall, at the end of the day, sometimes the horse just fails to cooperate.