About Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom

I’ve been thinking about expertise lately. Two great resources that helped expand some of my thinking on this were Kathy Sierra’s talk Making Badass Developers and Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow.

An interesting idea that shows up in both Sierra’s talk and Kahneman’s book is that true experts develop a deep intuition about their skill; they are able to make decisions, assessments, and judgements without consciously thinking.

I believe that developing this intuition is a requirement (among others) to truly become an expert in a particular field. I tend to associate this intuition with wisdom.

Here are a few definitions I’ve found useful:

• Knowledge: How much information you hold, or how much you know about something
• Intelligence: The ability to acquire and apply knowledge; I would also include the ability to predict outcomes based on that knowledge.
• Wisdom: The ability to make sound judgments and decisions based on accumulated knowledge and experience.

From these definitions, I can see a clear progression: you build intelligence by acquiring knowledge, and over time, through experience, you develop wisdom.

Something else that stands out to me: there’s no inherent virtue (or corruption) in knowledge or intelligence. Knowledge is simply information, and intelligence is the skill of acquiring and applying it. Wisdom, however, seems to carry a moral weight. It’s sound. It’s the ability to judge well. It radiates a sense of responsibility.

Finally, you can’t manufacture wisdom just by accumulating more knowledge. Wisdom only comes through experience and time. That’s probably why we’ve long associated old age with wisdom—and why you can’t turn into an expert simply by reading a book.