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ajqtrz
Chef - loquacious Old Dog
Found a quote on a thread I thought interesting. Something like: "Go boldly where no one has gone before, but leave a path." Was wondering what the point would be if everyone took this advice? Since no one would ever follow another's path, everyone would have to invent an new way to get from point A to point B. Since there are limited paths to any goal, eventually no one would get there. So, your best bet is to take one somebody else has already laid out.
As usual while wisdom is usually garbed in eloquence, the clothing is more a correlation than a cause.
All of which brings me to the subject at hand. Wisdom is the collected experience of others applied to current situations to reach a goal. It's wise if it works, and not so much if it fails. Formal wisdom is one of the two forms of knowledge, the other being our own singular experiences and the sense of things we draw from them (which may be considered a form of wisdom, again, if it works). So what does it mean to be wise? It doesn't mean you run around with a long beard (if your are a man) and flowing robes as if you are Saint Wise Guy or something. It means paying attention to the what other's have learned. You are on the planet with more than seven billion others, and just as many have gone before you. And while most do not write down what they have experienced and the lessons learned from those experiences, millions have done so. That's the collective wisdom of our species.
Now that collected wisdom falls into three categories of understanding. First, there is the anecdotal. These are the stories we tell. They may be carefully crafted or merely reflect the sense we have of something. "My mom smoked for eighty years and never had a problem" is an anecdotal story. It is presented as wisdom since it presents a behavior ("My mom smoked for eighty years" and a conclusion is implied (that it will never be a problem). Much argument is presented as anecdotal evidence and anecdotal evidence is what most people use to make decisions in their daily lives. But of course, the limited data set means reality may not be as simple as the anecdote presents.
The second category of understanding is more reliable and at it's highest forms, leads to the scientific method. This is, in essence, the collection and categorization of anecdotes. At the least reliable end of this type of understanding are the testimonies of the experienced. The service repair person, as he or she gains experience, becomes more reliable as a predictor of success than the less experienced. Experience in a particular endeavor means your own, personal, sense of the endeavor becomes honed to the point where you intuitively understand the endeavor more than a person just starting out. As you move from the personal experience to the recording and categorization of that experience (which is what companies do to discover "expert knowledge") you move to the highest form of this kind of understanding, the scientific analysis of data. From the data collected you develop, sometimes complex, theories of why experiences are as they are -- in other words why a situation ends up the way it does -- and from that we move to the third category of understanding.
Ideally the third category of understanding, the integration and control, category, results in our making decision more likely to get us to where we are going than not. Ideally. However, since many of these understandings are dependent upon previous assumptions (some call them "world views") often the "wisdom" derived in this stage is predicated on the assumptions more than collected and analyzed experience. Or to put it another way" we tend to conclude after the experiment what we figured was the conclusion before the experiment. This is more a problem the more complex the subject of our examination. Scientific studies ferret out specific relationships between variables they are very good for doing that. Explaining those relationships in broader categories -- i.e. theories about the entire spectrum of things -- usually get it wrong in the long run though it may take decades to figure it out.
In conclusion, an observation and a question. Obviously, the three categories overlap and are somewhat just "one way to slice the pie." On the other hand, they all move from the individual sense we all have of things, to a more cultural one and from that to a measured and carefully constructed one. Which do you think leads to finding a better path from point A to point B? How do you use it?
AJ
As usual while wisdom is usually garbed in eloquence, the clothing is more a correlation than a cause.
All of which brings me to the subject at hand. Wisdom is the collected experience of others applied to current situations to reach a goal. It's wise if it works, and not so much if it fails. Formal wisdom is one of the two forms of knowledge, the other being our own singular experiences and the sense of things we draw from them (which may be considered a form of wisdom, again, if it works). So what does it mean to be wise? It doesn't mean you run around with a long beard (if your are a man) and flowing robes as if you are Saint Wise Guy or something. It means paying attention to the what other's have learned. You are on the planet with more than seven billion others, and just as many have gone before you. And while most do not write down what they have experienced and the lessons learned from those experiences, millions have done so. That's the collective wisdom of our species.
Now that collected wisdom falls into three categories of understanding. First, there is the anecdotal. These are the stories we tell. They may be carefully crafted or merely reflect the sense we have of something. "My mom smoked for eighty years and never had a problem" is an anecdotal story. It is presented as wisdom since it presents a behavior ("My mom smoked for eighty years" and a conclusion is implied (that it will never be a problem). Much argument is presented as anecdotal evidence and anecdotal evidence is what most people use to make decisions in their daily lives. But of course, the limited data set means reality may not be as simple as the anecdote presents.
The second category of understanding is more reliable and at it's highest forms, leads to the scientific method. This is, in essence, the collection and categorization of anecdotes. At the least reliable end of this type of understanding are the testimonies of the experienced. The service repair person, as he or she gains experience, becomes more reliable as a predictor of success than the less experienced. Experience in a particular endeavor means your own, personal, sense of the endeavor becomes honed to the point where you intuitively understand the endeavor more than a person just starting out. As you move from the personal experience to the recording and categorization of that experience (which is what companies do to discover "expert knowledge") you move to the highest form of this kind of understanding, the scientific analysis of data. From the data collected you develop, sometimes complex, theories of why experiences are as they are -- in other words why a situation ends up the way it does -- and from that we move to the third category of understanding.
Ideally the third category of understanding, the integration and control, category, results in our making decision more likely to get us to where we are going than not. Ideally. However, since many of these understandings are dependent upon previous assumptions (some call them "world views") often the "wisdom" derived in this stage is predicated on the assumptions more than collected and analyzed experience. Or to put it another way" we tend to conclude after the experiment what we figured was the conclusion before the experiment. This is more a problem the more complex the subject of our examination. Scientific studies ferret out specific relationships between variables they are very good for doing that. Explaining those relationships in broader categories -- i.e. theories about the entire spectrum of things -- usually get it wrong in the long run though it may take decades to figure it out.
In conclusion, an observation and a question. Obviously, the three categories overlap and are somewhat just "one way to slice the pie." On the other hand, they all move from the individual sense we all have of things, to a more cultural one and from that to a measured and carefully constructed one. Which do you think leads to finding a better path from point A to point B? How do you use it?
AJ