This post examines the virtue of wisdom. It mostly explores what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than highlighting my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn more. I hope it will help people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

Singing the praises of wisdom at LessWrong has a bringing coals to Newcastle feel to it. After all, isn’t this community all about working hard and passionately to hack through the jungle of bias, illusion, and ignorance in search of the hidden temple of Athena?

I was tempted to skip wisdom and research some other virtue instead. But I’m hoping that by exploring wisdom as-a-virtue I can illuminate some facets of it that otherwise receive less attention here.

Two varieties of wisdom

Two senses of wisdom are commonly found in virtue traditions:

1. phrónēsis, or “practical wisdom” (sometimes translated “prudence”), which concerns knowing how the world works, and reasoning well about how to pursue goals effectively (and about which goals are worth pursuing—which sometimes gets separated out into “conative wisdom”^[1]). Phrónēsis is about particular cases.
2. philosophy, which concerns a more comprehensive understanding of “what it’s all about,” whether or not there seems to be a way to make practical use of that understanding. Philosophy is about generalities and commonalities and rules.

They are both important: Phrónēsis without philosophy can make you merely clever; while without phrónēsis, philosophy can leave you with your head in the clouds, unable to bring your wisdom down to earth where you can make it matter.

“The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men?—if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?” ―Thoreau^[2]

Philosophy is also sometimes considered an important end in itself. Aristotle thought it was the richest and most satisfying activity for people to engage in, and reasoned that it was the pastime of the gods.^[3]

The person with the virtue of wisdom habitually and regularly prioritizes thinking and behaving wisely. This raises the question: why wouldn’t you? You might at first think that the only reason you would think or behave unwisely is because you believe mistakenly that you are being wise.

That is one way you can go astray: you might understand the wise course of action based on the sort of situation you are in, but mistakenly believe you are in some other sort of situation; or vice-versa, you might understand the situation you are in well enough, but be mistaken about how to confront situations of that sort wisely. But people are also deflected from wisdom by being overwhelmed by emotions like fear or anger, or by sensations like pleasure or pain. For this reason, virtues like courage, endurance, self-control, and temperance can come to the assistance of wisdom.

Wisdom in psychology

One version of the modern psychological discipline of wisdom science apparently sees wisdom based on two “foundational pillars”: moral grounding and meta-cognition.^[4] For example, the Toronto Wisdom Task Force (2019) coalesced around a definition of wisdom as “morally-grounded excellence in social-cognitive processing”:^[5]

Another (the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm) defines the nature of wisdom this way:^[6]

• Wisdom addresses important and difficult questions and strategies about the conduct and meaning of life.
• Wisdom includes knowledge about the limits of knowledge and the uncertainties of the world.
• Wisdom represents a truly superior level of knowledge, judgment, and advice.
• Wisdom constitutes knowledge with extraordinary scope, depth, measure, and balance.
• Wisdom involves a perfect synergy of mind and character, that is, an orchestration of knowledge and virtues.
• Wisdom represents knowledge used for the good or well-being of oneself and that of others.
• Wisdom is easily recognized when manifested, although difficult to achieve and to specify.

Diversify your perspectives

A psychological intervention that is supposed to boost wisdom is for a person to imagine themselves in conversation with a wise person (that is, to mentally simulate a person that they consider wise) about some problem or issue.^[7]

You can also apparently improve or at least diversify your perspective on your life by deliberately reflecting on your day using third-person pronouns to describe your actions (e.g. “Dear Diary: today he edited an article on wisdom for LessWrong”).^[8]

Socrates was of the opinion that the only way one can reliably approach wisdom is by means of a philosophically-oriented dialog in which one participant makes positive assertions of possibly-wise ideas and the other questions their weak points.^[9] Am I wrong to hope that an LLM Socrates will soon be available with which (with whom?) we can hone our wisdoms whenever we have the time?

Wisdom and mistakes

A popular belief is that we gain wisdom (or gain it most effectively) by learning from our mistakes.

“Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.” ―Hannah Arendt^[10]

On the other hand, learning from other people’s mistakes may be more prudent (#LFMF!). LessWrong is in part a collection of dead-ends marked by warning signs, pointing out the mistakes in reasoning that others have been waylayed by.

But you typically learn other people’s mistakes from other people’s failures, which may leave your own artisanal mistakes unchallenged. If you can strap on your theories and go into battle with reality until you lose,^[11] you are more likely to discover and shed your worst theories. This takes courage, confidence, industriousness, and a willingness to fail and to admit failure.

Wisdom and age

Wisdom is popularly associated with age. This is one way it is distinguished from intelligence, which (by some measurements) typically peaks in early adulthood. That said, children and young people who are “wise beyond their years” are also a common trope, and metrics of wisdom designed by psychologists fail to find the expected correlations between wisdom and age.^[12]

Wisdom is often described as a sort of perspective that benefits from a wider or longer familiarity with the variety of things life tosses up.^[13] (See also: Moderation, Balance, and Harmony.) A wise person looks at the big picture. Where an intelligent person may be the first to say “I know how we can solve problem χ” a wise person will notice “χ is not the problem that needs our focus.”

Another way intelligence and wisdom are sometimes contrasted is when intelligence is considered as an individual skill of mental agility, but wisdom as a collective and long-term project of cultural assimilation. Individuals may develop intelligence on their own as intelligent animals, but they tap into wisdom by intelligently observing and reflecting on the institutions, aphorisms, proverbs, myths, customs, exemplars, and so forth that previous generations have assembled.

There is some evidence that people use life experiences to test the validity of proverbial wisdom, and then, as we age and our mental agility drops, we are able to use the most reliable of those pithy heuristics to supplement our intellects and to thereby remain more capable.^[14]

Surfing less unwisely

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” ―Shakespeare^[15]

At least since Socrates, wisdom has been associated with epistemic humility. The “LessWrong” name itself nods at that tradition: To be more wise, assume that you are wrong, try to figure out where and how, patch that up as best you can, lather, rinse, repeat. Don’t be too proud of the nuggets of wisdom you have dug up, but occasionally peer into the vast voids of ignorance, the blank spaces on the map. Imagine those things that could be true that would mean utterly overthrowing most of what you currently suspect to be true. Don’t become attached to your best guesses or too inclined to round off a high probability into a certitude, but always prefer reality to your favorite hypothesis.

Wisdom seems to have less to do with arriving on the firm ground of confident understanding, and more to do with learning to surf the unstable edge of profound uncertainty: neither clinging to the barely-buoyant flotsam of belief nor being pulled out into a sea of nihilism by a undertow of skepticism.

Mystical vs. rational wisdom techniques

To understand and navigate the world around us, we try to systematize, to find regularities, to discover cause-and-effect relationships, and so forth. We create a map, using our knowledge of the territory that we have passed through, to help us anticipate the territory we are to enter. By extrapolating from suggestive patterns in the world, our maps can illuminate things we do not experience directly, and can suggest places to look to discover more than we might have stumbled upon on our own. Habits of rational thinking help us keep our maps from misrepresenting the territory, and warn us of where our maps might be misleading even when they are as accurate as we can make them.

Mystical^[16] wisdom techniques suggest a different way to go about it: rather than just improving your map and your map-reading, take some time also to look directly at the territory and improve the quality of your vision. The advantage of this approach is that you lose the compression artifacts and other errors that come from trying to reconstruct the territory from the map. A disadvantage is that while maps can sometimes be shared, visions have to be turned into maps before they can be—and by the time you have turned your vision into a map, there may be little to recommend it over maps arrived at through other methods.

See also

• “What wisdom is” by TsviBT (LessWrong 14 Nov. 2023)

1. ^{^}

   “[T]he man who is wise does not merely know how to do good things such as looking after his children well, or strengthening someone in trouble, but must also want to do them.… ¶ Wisdom… is, therefore, partly to be described in terms of apprehension, and even judgement, but since it has to do with a man’s attachments it also characterizes his will.”

   ―Philippa Foot “Virtues and Vices” Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1978)

2. ^{^}

   H.D. Thoreau, “Life Without Principle” The Atlantic Monthly (1863) 

3. ^{^}

   Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅹ.7

4. ^{^}

   Igor Grossmann “The science of wisdom” Psyche 15 October 2020.

   More recently I have seen another, somewhat similar two-part division into “socio-emotional awareness” (involving “caring for others, active listening, and the ability to navigate complex and uncertain social situations”) and “reflective orientation” (involving “logic, rationality, control over emotions, and the application of past experiences”) [Maksim Rudnev & Igor Grossman “Wisdom is a virtue, but how do we judge if someone has it?” Psyche 21 October 2024]

5. ^{^}

   I. Grossman, et al. “The Science of Wisdom in a Polarized World: Knowns and Unknowns” Psychological Inquiry (2020) [table paraphrased from its Appendix]

6. ^{^}

   P.B. Baltes & U.M. Staudinger “Wisdom: A Metaheuristic (Pragmatic) to Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence” American Psychologist, 2000 (Appendix A)

7. ^{^}

   U.M. Staudinger & P.B. Baltes “Interactive Minds: A Facilitative Setting for Wisdom-Related Performance?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1996).

   The researchers asked subjects to come up with a response to some realistic dilemma. They then used five criteria for judging how wise the response was (factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, life-span contextualism, value relativism, and recognition/management of uncertainty). In one of the experimental conditions they asked subjects to “think[] by themselves about what other people whose advice they find useful might say to the problem at hand” before they responded. They found that this boosted the wisdom of the responses (indeed, as much as in a second experimental condition in which the subject actually consulted a person whose advice they trusted in real life).

8. ^{^}

   I. Grossman, et al. “Training for Wisdom: The Illeist Diary Method” PsyArXiv (2020)

9. ^{^}

   Agnes Callard Open Socrates (2025)

10. ^{^}

    Hannah Arendt, “Isak Dinesen” Men in Dark Times (1968)

11. ^{^}

    @Eliezer Yudkowsky “Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points” LessWrong 5 October 2007

12. ^{^}

    Christopher Peterson & ‎Martin E. P. Seligman Character Strengths and Virtues (2004) pp. 189–190

13. ^{^}

    Grossman et al. (2020) call it “Perspectival Meta-Cognition” and include among its components consideration of diverse perspectives, epistemic humility, balancing different viewpoints, and context adaptability.

14. ^{^}

    P.B. Baltes & A.M. Freund “SOC-related knowledge about lifespan development: It’s in the proverbs” (1999) as discussed in Baltes & Staudinger (2000)

15. ^{^}

    William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act Ⅴ scene 1 (Touchstone)

16. ^{^}

    In the sense of “involving or having the nature of an individual’s direct subjective communion with God or ultimate reality” (“Mystical” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.)