Wisdom and challenging God

I was chatting with a friend[1] the other day and he told me of two interesting quotes by Emperor Izaro from the game Path of Exile[2].

I.

The first was,

“Wisdom is the offspring of suffering and time.”

This sounds pretty deep and is doubtless true in some cases, but I don’t think it’s true that only suffering can bring wisdom. Sometimes it’s perspicacity and time that leads to wisdom. I guess suffering helps to drive the message home, to make sure you don’t forget it—in remembering the pain and wanting to avoid its repetition, you end up sounding wise when urging restraint or caution.

We played around with a few others, trying to disambiguate the terms,

Skill

Something that a person does or can do.

Talent

A skill at which one can become adept because practice is quickly rewarded with improvement. It’s not necessarily inborn, although it can appear so because one notices the quick progress much more than the time that is put in. The owner of the talent tends to put in the time because it’s so quickly rewarding.

Intelligence

The talent of being able to acquire, analyze, and organize knowledge. There is an innate/inborn limit for everyone.

Discipline

The ability to focus on a chosen task.

Knowledge

The mass of information and correlations inherent in a person or body of work (e.g., Wikipedia or the entire Internet). For people, knowledge grows over time at a rate proportional to intelligence and discipline. Available knowledge depends on the situation and communication medium. When discussing live, then one’s knowledge is limited to immediate recall; when discussing in an asynchronous exchange, one can rely on vague memory and lookups in references to bolster in-cranium knowledge. In either case, one has to have experienced the information to even know that it might exist or to have gained the wisdom to know to look for it, even if it’s existence is only suspected.

Experience

Lessons learned by having lived, either physically (getting out and doing things) or mentally (reading, absorbing). Experience can be gained second-hand—e.g., through books—but first-hand experience is probably more important. Experience, when combined with intelligence, can lead to wisdom.

Wisdom

That which arises when knowledge and experience are combined for a long enough time. It is the ability to predict likelihoods with accuracy. It is the ability to employ effortless empathy. It is the removal of prejudice. It is being aware that context is part of knowledge. It is being interested in the context that leads to a difference of opinion. It is not being afraid to have been wrong. It is not being afraid to be wrong again. It is knowing that right and wrong are murky. It is the application of knowledge without the filter of ego.

So, the tl;dr would be:

• Knowledge = (Intelligence + Discipline) * Time
• Wisdom = (Knowledge + Experience) * Time

II.

Another of Emperor Izaro’s quotes is,

“Where the weapons remain, a new enemy will simply take the place of the old.”

That one reminded him of a statement a friend of his had once made about the U.S. having a military budget “big enough to challenge God.”

After a bit of toying about, we’d formed,

“The U.S. is a bully, a simpleton, no more than a child mentally, with a giant chip on its shoulder and a military budget big enough to challenge God.”

It’s definitely not alone, but it’s definitely the biggest one.