
The relationship between age and wisdom-related performance (1999) - arikr
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/016502599383739?journalCode=jbda
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ilovecaching
I've found that hardship seems to be the best at imparting wisdom. Several
years out of college I don't think I was very different from the day I
graduated, but then one day something happened to me and I was suicidally
depressed for months and experiencing immense amounts of pain every day. When
I came out the other side I was a different person.

People kept telling me: This is an opportunity. You can use it to grow if you
want. I think I did, and I think it taught me that as much as it sucked, I
gained something I would not have otherwise have had from the experience.

~~~
all2
Using your anecdote (and my own personal experience) I would venture a guess
that pain and suffering can change a willing person more than any other kind
of experience.

I spent a long time ignoring discomfort (pain-light) in my life. When I
started nosing into the discomfort, the pain, and the hard things, I started
to change. I had to be willing to do it, though, be willing to face that I was
wrong, acknowledging that even the criticisms I had of myself were wrong.

I have changed more in the last year than I have over the rest of my life. The
change has been huge.

------
ridgeguy
Anecdotal data point from one who's old, by chronological criteria.

I can't say I feel wiser than I was at 25 or 50. Different, definitely. I'm
still unclear what constitutes "wise".

But as I age, I increasingly see the degree to which phenomena are
interconnected, and the knock-on implications regarding complexity and
unanticipated consequences. It biases me to err in the direction of generosity
and empathy.

Still, it would feel good to know what "wise" is. Not sure I'd recognize it if
it bit me in the butt.

That said, go read Staudinger's paper (SciHub is your friend). Set a reminder
to rethink these issues everytime your age doubles. You'll be interested in
your results.

~~~
nske
>as I age, I increasingly see the degree to which phenomena are
interconnected, and the knock-on implications regarding complexity and
unanticipated consequences

I think the same reasons that we have to thank for that we also have to blame
for the fact that we are less easy to change our ways of modeling reality,
both at the lower and the higher levels as we become older. In some ways we
become more humble, in some other ways we are becoming more rigid. In practice
I guess we are becoming better in modeling the world around us in those areas
that have not changed too much, but at the same time we become less willing or
able to revise our models drastically or create new ones, which would be a
good thing in areas that have incurred some fundamental changes.

This accumulated "wisdom" often leads to choices and behaviors that cannot be
rationalized by those younger, but it can be tricky knowing when that's a case
of modeling a situation better and when it's a case of reading patterns that
did not exist or missing/underestimating some important variables.

I think it is exciting but also a bit scary to see these changes happening to
ourselves with age and trying to see how effectively we can identify and
compensate for their negative side through awareness!

------
czardoz
It's experience that matters. An elder person with less exposure to different
situations may not be able to offer good advice in general, but ask them about
their own specific niche on which they've spent a lot of time, and you'll be
amazed at the wisdom there.

~~~
craftyguy
I've definitely seen older folks who are so convinced that their specific
experiences are the only valid ones that they are unwilling to entertain
alternative (and sometimes better) experiences. I think experience is
important, but knowing when/where to apply it, and being willing to admit that
your experience may not be the best, is required.

~~~
beefsack
And I've definitely seen young people so convinced older people have it wrong
without understanding the nuance of situations. It's easy to give a simple
solution when you over-simplify the problem.

People need to be open minded to other people's experience and ideas. People
need to be mindful that the best course of action rarely lies at extremes and
having a broad understanding of a problem helps you arrive at a balanced
solution.

~~~
heavenlyblue
The problem is that the majority of elderly are as average as the majority of
youngsters. So finding ways to know which old people to listen to and which
ones have just had their 50 years of horseshit training and confidence
conditioning is hard. It’s a lesson in itself imo.

~~~
dasil003
The point is no one is average by definition. If you acknowledge the
contextuality of wisdom then you’ll find a lot more of it out there than if
you assume only a few elite outliers have useful knowledge and perspective.

~~~
heavenlyblue
I acknowledge the contextuality of wisdom but I also acknowledge that making
the same mistake 20 years in a row doesn't make you any wiser - it just makes
you find new ways to justify making them over and over again.

You don't seem to come from a poor background if you think that wisdom always
bring good.

Negative experiences spanning decades of your life will make you contempt with
the false truths. And you will never agree it's not the case because it's so
hard to believe all of your suffering was for nothing.

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voidhorse
Studies like this that try to pin or correlate a fundamentally changing,
social concept like wisdom with precise quantitative fixtures are idiotic.

No matter the qualifications the authors might make to ensure their definition
of wisdom is as empty and useless as that of a specific number, the grand
claim of the study makes it sound as if they hadn’t even grasped that
qualitative concepts are subject to change and depend upon the entire universe
of conditions that impinge upon the concept’s users.

What we mean by wisdom today in 2018 and what, for example, the ancient Greeks
or scholastics meant by wisdom is entirely different, such is the power,
history, and blurry bounds of the concept—and the point of studying these
concepts in such a quantitative fashion is refuted before it’s even made.

~~~
maxander
If you actually read, e.g., Socrates, you’ll find that his idea of wisdom is
actually pretty consistent with the typical Western view. There’s some
discrepancies, but the overall shape is the same. Look to Eastern cultures and
there’s far greater difference (and perhaps even less agreement on what words
should be translated as “wisdom,”) but there’s an obviously parallel concept.

Further, wisdom (like related “social” concepts) points at some thing or
pattern in the “objective” world. That thing/pattern/what-have-you is, at
least putatively, _there_ , and will be there as long as there are humans to
be wise/unwise- even if our idea of it is lost, and even if the idea was an
arbitrary division of the universe.

And even further, there’s nothing stopping these researchers from making an
operational criterion that matches the arbitrary definition of wisdom we have
_right now_ and finding something out about it. Even if humanity decides
tomorrow that wisdom should actually mean something entirely different,
knowledge about today’s “wisdom” was learnt.

~~~
voidhorse
Unless you can read ancient Greek, (which if so, I applaud you) you have to
keep in mind that you're not reading "Socrates" (well, in any case you aren't,
I assume you mean Plato, as Socrates never wrote anything), you're reading a
painstaking translation of Socratic ideas into a modern parlance which, as
vigilant and astute as the translators might be, is doubtless tinged with some
word choices, re-structurings, and other elements that move the text more or
less away from it's original form and meaning. In fact, these translation
choices are often crucial. My copy of _De Anima_ has a nice translator's
introduction that explains the difficult decision to translate the Ancient
Greek 'psyche' as "mind" even though it meant something much closer to "soul"
so that modern audiences would find the text more palatable. This is a crucial
gloss on the translation and radically modifies (or should) one's reading of
the text. Unfortunately very few people read translator's introductions.

So, I'm not so confident Socrate's conception of wisdom was so similar to
ours. In fact, I'd feel much more comfortable with the hypothesis that it
contained more dissimilarities, considering the material conditions Socrates
lived under were _radically_ different than our own—in fact we deal with a
whole region of concepts, historical events, and technologies Socrates could
have never considered. Yet his concept of wisdom is supposed to nearly
sufficiently cover ours? What of the commoner's practical 'wisdom' about
matters of economic success in a global market? Surely, you'd argue, that
isn't capital W wisdom—ah but then we're in the realm of philosophical debate
about what kind of wisdom we're talking about and what _really_ constitutes
wisdom in the proper sense (notice how this has absolutely nothing to do with
the inert misapplication of statistical analysis or scientific
experimentation).

I'm not disputing that wisdom points to something objective. I'm claiming that
the objective thing it points to is subject to the same movement of history,
and thus change, as anything else. That's not to say societies can't agree on
what the concept means, but it's necessarily fuzzy, and potentially even fuzzy
and ill defined within the confines of small groups. It is an interpretive
concept with an indeterminate reference (unless you're a nominalist that wants
to perform several painful acrobatic stunts to try and argue that it points to
something like "the collection of all referents participants assign to the
term wisdom in a given context C at a given time T." Somehow we don't often
find such analyses very interesting or useful).

I'd also argue it's not even _clear_ what wisdom means now. Just look at all
the different takes on it that have cropped up in this thread. Point is, you
can only begin to get at the meaning and the proper study of these concepts
dialectically (something Socrates excelled at, by the way), that is, through
discussion and holistic approaches that attempt to account for entire horizons
of meaning and social interaction. Taking a statistical approach to this
issue, sure, may give us an interesting little factoid we can whip out over
dinner, but we hardly walk away from the findings feeling we've actually
gained any knowledge about the _concept_. In this sense it is a _constituted_
objectivity—not something that inheres concretely in the world. It's
reference, so to speak, is necessarily indeterminate.

It hardly even has any utility. Assume it is true. Hardly anyone will much
appreciate an argument for or against a particular decision based on the idea
that the relationship between wisdom and age tapers off at 20. Furthermore,
it's so divorced from any context that to even bring it up would probably miss
the point of the issue and seem, as I said, idiotic.

~~~
lurcio
"the material conditions Socrates lived under were radically different than
our own"

Truly out of interest (i.e. not setting up an argument) - I'd be interested if
you could elaborate what you consider to be "radically" different.

~~~
watwut
Quickly on top of head, ignoring technological progress, philosophical
progress and history of 20-century.

1.) None of us has to become soldier and actually kill people to have the
right to vote and citizenship.

2.) My friends and students did not instituted tyrannical rule with help of
other state which would kill significant amount of citizens.

3.) There is small physical risk in my day to day life. Overwhelming majority
of people can read and we have no slaves. My risk to become slave is
essentially zero.

------
WheelsAtLarge
Wisdom is not something you get. It's something you learn.

I've met plenty of 75-year-olds+ that are just morons. Age is just a number
for them.

~~~
dbcurtis
It hits before 75. One of my friends, who is about 75, and I would say has
some wisdom, often says: "I have four children: three grown, and one that got
older."

Poor judgement know no age limits.

------
T-A
Heinlein knew it in 1973:

 _Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into
arrogant conceit._

Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love"

~~~
all2
This is off-topic, but some Heinlein quotes are gold. I grew up reading my
dad's pulp sci-fi collection and Heinlein's work has definitely influenced my
interests.

 _“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher
a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build
a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate,
act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization
is for insects.”_

------
chhs
Link to full PDF:
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publication/247779532_Older_and_Wiser_Integrating_Results_on_the_Relationship_between_Age_and_Wisdom-
related_Performance/links/00463529cfa9c536e7000000/Older-and-Wiser-
Integrating-Results-on-the-Relationship-between-Age-and-Wisdom-related-
Performance.pdf)

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asaph
How do they quantify and measure "wisdom"? I can't tell from the abstract and
that's all I can see from the provided link.

~~~
wpietri
Exactly my question. When I look at common definitions of it, they all have
some age-correlated feature, like experience. My first guess is that they're
using a definition that doesn't match the average-person understanding of the
term.

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PinkMilkshake
Maybe wisdom is like Pokemon, but instead of collecting cute cartoon animals
to abuse, you collect heuristics.

At one extreme, people go through life and pick up new mental models along the
way. At the other extreme are people who actively seek them out.

So age should bring wisdom, but not necessarily more than younger people.

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dlbucci
I can see this, but I feel like it would depend on the person. Some people
constantly learn and improve as they grow older and those people become wise
as their life goes on. Other people just do not ever learn, so why would they
be wise when they are old?

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bigwheeler
"You should listen to people that are older than you are. Even if they're
wrong, their wrong-ness is rooted in more information than you have."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaPqFI5-yWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaPqFI5-yWM)

------
Skunkleton
I guess I must be special then. I made lots of unwise decisions in my early
20s that I certainly would not make now in my early 30s.

------
jondubois
Most people definitely become wiser with age. Maybe the results are skewed
because millennials are a particularly wise generation which have to deal with
increasingly complex social, economic and environmental problems and this
forces them to think more and ask more questions. Also, the internet has given
millenials a big advantage in terms of finding information. It's not fair to
compare one generation with another completely different generation; we need
to track people from the same generation over a long period of time in order
to get meaningful results.

~~~
stretchwithme
I think it's because the wise live longer. Even if they are declining, the
average tends to stay the same.

Wisdom is mostly about paying attention and adapting, not all about
accumulating experience, as new things keep coming and rendering much of your
experience (with things, not with people) irrelevant. It's complicated.

~~~
Just_Smith
Why do you believe that the wise live longer? That seems a hasty conclusion to
come to, especially when the age you live to can be influenced by factors that
wisdom can't circumvent.

~~~
stretchwithme
I think wisdom helps you live your life successfully and avoid unnecessary
risks. And avoid Darwin awards. Not understanding how things work can get you
killed. Or you can die younger from smoking, drug abuse or not eating your
vegetables.

The alternative is thinking that choices don't affect how long you live and I
don't think that makes sense.

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jesuisuncaillou
Here is a link to the pdf, without having to pay sagepub :
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publication/247779532_Older_and_Wiser_Integrating_Results_on_the_Relationship_between_Age_and_Wisdom-
related_Performance/links/00463529cfa9c536e7000000/Older-and-Wiser-
Integrating-Results-on-the-Relationship-between-Age-and-Wisdom-related-
Performance.pdf)

------
Bulkington
Plus ça change, the better it has been said before:

In philosophy, anamnesis is a concept in Plato's epistemological and
psychological theory that humans possess innate knowledge (perhaps acquired
before birth) and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge
within us.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_\(philosophy\))

------
w8rbt
Doesn't wisdom come from experience? So, no matter how old you are, if you
have done something then you have experience doing it and you have some
insight and wisdom about it (whatever it is).

So a 20 year old who has driven the Rubicon Trail probably knows a lot more
about that than a 50 year old who has never done so.

~~~
ambivalents
Eh, I'd distinguish "wisdom" from "knowledge" in this example. This 20 year
old might know a lot more about this trail, and thus be "better" at driving
it, in a technical sense.

At the same time, a wise person would approach the undriven trail, and apply
what they have learned about driving, unfamiliar terrains, risk balancing,
etc. to the experience of driving it. Maybe they'd even decide, "Screw this,
I'm running late and want to go have some beer instead."

In the end, who did it better? Maybe it doesn't matter, but I see wisdom as
the ability to apply hard-won experience to novel situations.

~~~
FPGAhacker
It's still a good example though. I think maybe the difference here is wisdom
is more generically applicable than most knowledge, but it's still knowledge.

------
akman
IMO one of the most worthy goals technology should try to solve: shortcuts to
acquire wisdom

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keithnz
this might be a more interesting, and much more recent overview of wisdom,
measurements of wisdom, and what it all means ( including how it relates to
demographics )
[https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/73/8/13...](https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/73/8/1393/4769351)

------
devoply
Study from 1999.

~~~
quickthrower2
We've wised up since then.

------
jey
Can someone summarize their definition of "wisdom"?

~~~
Goladus
I can't. It isn't simple. And certainly to me, doesn't justify the catchy
"assumption-challenging" title of the paper, which appeals to an obviously
informal definition of the term.

===

In our work, we proceed from a theoretical conceptualisation of wisdom as
expert-level knowledge and judgement in the fundamental pragmatics of life.
Note that the term wisdom is reserved to denote only the highest levels of
performance. Lower performance levels are labelled as wisdom-related.
Knowledge (in its widest sense, cf. Polanyi, 1958) in the domain, fundamental
pragmatics of life, entails insights into the quintessential aspects of the
human condition and human life including its biological boundaries, cultural
conditioning, and intra- as well as interindividual variations. At the centre
of this body of knowledge and its application are questions concerning the
conduct, interpretation, and meaning of life (for a more detailed description
see Baltes et al., 1992; Staudinger & Baltes, 1994).

We have outlined a framework of five criteria (see Table 1) that can be used
to evaluate the quantity and quality of wisdom-related knowledge and judgement
contained, for instance, in individuals’ verbal responses to difficult and
uncertain problems of life. This approach to the psychological study of wisdom
received empirical support in a series of studies with regard to reliability
and some indication of predictive and external validity (Baltes, Staudinger,
Maercker, & Smith, 1995; Smith & Baltes, 1990; Smith, Staudinger, & Baltes,
1994; Staudinger, 1989; Staudinger, Smith, & Baltes, 1992; Staudinger, Lopez &
Baltes, 1997; Staudinger, Maciel, Smith & Baltes, 1998a).

===

An example of a test question is: "somebody gets a phone call from someone
about to commit suicide, what should they do?"

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cimmanom
How did they define and evaluate “wisdom”?

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oh_sigh
How do they measure how wise a person is?

