Are Wisdom and Rationality the same? If not, how are they different? Is one a subset of the other? Or does each have parts that aren't contained in the other?
Rationality is about cognitive algorithms, that either improve your map-territory correspondence or help you achieve your goals. We also have notions like Rationality is Systematized Winning.
To me it feels like wisdom partially overlaps with rationality and part of it isn't captured by rationality. I also have the sense that I want to cultivate and have both wisdom and rationality, but where I can articulate what I mean by rationality as I did above, I can't quite do so for wisdom in a way that clearly distinguishes it from rationality.
I can't find an answer to the question "under what rare circumstances can you not deflate the word 'wise' out of a sentence?" which Eliezer asks about the word 'rational'.
Some extensional observations about wisdom that might help grok an intensional description.
- The Bible contains wisdom, but not rationality. Many other stories have that property as well.
- Wisdom seems to have something to do with experience.
- "Intelligence is knowing how to win the game. Wisdom is knowing which game to play in the first place". This suggests wisdom has something to do with reflection.
So, what sentence can the word 'wise' not be deflated from? What is Wisdom, and how is it different from Rationality?
Eliezer wrote https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46qnWRSR7L2eyNbMA/the-lens-that-sees-its-flaws about the awareness of your own cognitive biases and limitations, and potentially correcting them or at least accounting for them, but it is still the hardest part of rationality: noticing he existence, in the words of the late unlamented Donald Rumsfeld, Unknown Unknowns. Intuitively understanding the limitations of your own mind and where they lie, and correcting for them as much as possible, even though they remain blind spots, is what feels to me like wisdom. The blind spots can be logical or emotional. The latter is what most of the LW regulars tend to forget or miss. Successfully combining logic and emotion probably gets you half-way to being wise. The next step is actually practicing it and internalizing it, so that one can see the problems and notice the good solutions as well as the bad ones, and being able to tell the difference without having to evaluate everything consciously and laboriously.
Tangentially related and potentially helpful: one time I wanted to see if I could create a psychometric test of wisdom, so I first wanted to collect a bunch of examples of cases that need wisdom. I did this by asking some people if they had problems in their life where they needed wisdom. Here were some responses:
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For some food for thought on this question, see:
from the LessWrong Notes on Virtues sequence.