genius vs wisdom — Tarik Yildirim

Genius maxes out upon birth and gradually diminishes. Wisdom displays the opposite dynamics. It is nonexistent at birth and gradually builds up until death. That is why genius is often seen as a potentiality and wisdom as an actuality. (Youth have potentiality, not the old.)

Midlife crises tend to occur around the time when wisdom surpasses genius. That is why earlier maturation correlates with earlier “mid” life crisis. (On the other hand, greater innate genius does not result in a delayed crisis since it entails faster accumulation of wisdom.)

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
- Pablo Picasso

Here Picasso is actually asking you to maintain your genius at the expense of gaining less wisdom. That is why creative folks tend to be quite unwise folks (and require the assistance of experienced talent managers to succeed in the real world). They methodologically wrap themselves inside protective environments that allow them to pause or postpone their maturation.

Generally speaking, the greater control you have over your environment, the less wisdom you need to survive. That is why wisest people originate from low survival-rate tough conditions, and rich families have hard time raising unspoiled kids without simulating artificial scarcities. (Poor folks have the opposite problem and therefore simulate artificial abundances by displaying more love, empathy etc.)

"Young man knows the rules and the old man knows the exceptions."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Genius is hypothesis-driven and wisdom is data-driven. That is why mature people tend to prefer experimental (and historical) disciplines, young people tend to dominate theoretical (and ahistorical) disciplines etc.

The old man can be rigid but he can also display tremendous cognitive fluidity because he can transcend the rules, improvise and dance around the set of exceptions. In fact, he no longer thinks of the exceptions as "exceptions" since an exception can only be defined with respect to a certain collection of rules. He directly intuits them as unique data points and thus is not subject to the false positives generated by operational definitions. (The young man on the other hand has not explored the full territory of possibilities yet and thus needs a practical guide no matter how crude.)

Notice that the old man can not transfer his knowledge of exceptions to the young man because that knowledge is in the form of an ineffable complex neural network that has been trained on tons of data. (Apprentice-master relationships are based on mimetic learning.) Rules on the other hand are much more transferable since they are of linguistic nature. (They are not only transferable but also a lot more compact in size, compared to the set of exceptions.) Of course, the fact that rules are transferable does not mean that the transfers actually occur! (Trivial things are deemed unworthy by the old man and important things get ignored by the young man. It is only the stuff in the middle that gets successfully transferred.)

Why is it much harder for old people to change their minds? Because wisdom is data-driven, and in a data-driven world, bugs (and biases) are buried inside large data sets and therefore much harder to find and fix. (In a hypothesis driven world, all you need to do is to go through the much shorter list of rules, hypotheses etc.)

The Hypothesis-Data duality highlighted in the previous section can be recast as young people being driven more by rational thinking vs. old people being driven more by intuitional thinking. (In an older blog post, we had discussed how education should focus on cultivating intuition, which leads to a superior form of thinking.)

We all start out life with a purely intuitive mindset. As we learn we come up with certain heuristics and rules, resulting in an adulthood that is dominated by rationality. Once we accumulate enough experience (i.e. data), we get rid of these rules and revert back to an intuitive mindset, although at a higher level than before. (That is why the old get along very well with kids.)

Artistic types (e.g. Picasso) tend to associate genius with the tabula-rasa intuitive fluidity of the newborn. Scientific types tend to associate it with the rationalistic peak of adulthood. (That is why they start to display insecurities after they themselves pass through this peak.)

As mentioned in the previous section, rules are easily transferable across individuals. Results of intuitive thinking on the other hand are non-transferable. From a societal point of view, this is a serious operational problem and the way it is overcome is through a mechanism called “trust”. Since intuition is a black box (like all machine learning models are), the only way you can transfer it is through a wholesome imitation of the observed input-outputs. (i.e. mimetic learning) In other words, you can not understand black box models, you can only have faith in them.

As we age and become more intuition-driven, our trust in trust increases. (Of course, children are dangerously trustworthy to begin with.) Adulthood on the other hand is dominated by rational thinking and therefore corresponds to the period when we are most distrustful of each other. (No wonder why economists are such distrustful folks. They always model humans as ultra-rationalistic machines.)

Today we vastly overvalue the individual over the society, and the rational over the intuitional. (Just look at how we structure school curriculums.) We decentralized society and trivialized the social fabric by centralizing trust. (Read the older blogpost Blockchain and Decentralization) We no longer trust each other because we simply do not have to. Instead we trust the institutions that we collectively created. Our analytical frameworks have reached an individualist zenith in Physics which is currently incapable of guaranteeing the reality of other peoples’ points of view. (Read the older blogpost Reality and Analytical Inquiry) We banished faith completely from public discourse and have even demanded God to be verifiable.

In short, we seem to be heading to the peak adulthood phase of humanity, facing a massive mid-life crisis. Our collective genius has become too great for our own good.

In this context, the current rise of data-driven technological paradigms is not surprising. Humanity is entering a new intuitive post-midlife-crisis phase. Our collective wisdom is now being encoded in the form of disembodied black-box machine-learning models which will keep getting more and more sophisticated over time. (At some point, we may dispense with our analytical models altogether.) Social fabric on the other hand will keep being stretched as more types of universally-trusted centralized nodes emerge and enable new forms of indirect intuition transfer.

Marx was too early. He viewed socialism in a human way as a rationalistic inevitability, but it will probably arrive in an inhuman fashion via intuitionistic technologies. (Calling such a system still as socialism will be vastly ironic since it will be resting on complete absence of trust among individuals.) Of course, not every decision making will be centralized. Remember that the human mind itself emerged for addressing non-local problems. (There is still a lot of local decision making going on within our cells etc.) The “hive” mind will be no different, and as usual, deciding whether a problem in the gray zone is local or non-local will be determined through a tug-of-war.

The central problem of ruler-ship, as Scott sees it, is what he calls legibility. To extract resources from a population the state must be able to understand that population. The state needs to make the people and things it rules legible to agents of the government. Legibility means uniformity. States dream up uniform weights and measures, impress national languages and ID numbers on their people, and divvy the country up into land plots and administrative districts, all to make the realm legible to the powers that be. The problem is that not all important things can be made legible. Much of what makes a society successful is knowledge of the tacit sort: rarely articulated, messy, and from the outside looking in, purposeless. These are the first things lost in the quest for legibility. Traditions, small cultural differences, odd and distinctive lifeways … are all swept aside by a rationalizing state that preserves (or in many cases, imposes) only what it can be understood and manipulated from the 2,000 foot view. The result, as Scott chronicles with example after example, are many of the greatest catastrophes of human history.

Tanner Greer - Tradition is Smarter Than You