RWL #240
intelligence and wisdom, and other stuff
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Week 2 is in the books. I’m enjoying being back in the classroom and getting to know this year’s juniors and reconnecting with the seniors.
I’ve been thinking about the difference between intelligence and wisdom lately. My childhood looked a lot like Stranger Things, less the monsters. My buddies and I were deeply into Dungeons and Dragons - we definitely were not the cool kids. When you roll up a character (by rolling dice to determine their traits), you rolled separately for the character’s intelligence and wisdom. The difference was always somewhat vague to me - I felt that wisdom was just a weak shadow of intelligence - essentially redundant, certainly less interesting. My friends were all pretty intelligent - I can confirm this some forty years later by looking at what they have accomplished. But I can also confirm that none of us at that time had very high wisdom scores. I think we have all grown in our wisdom, which is nice to see. I do not see wisdom and intelligence as the same thing now.
I think of intelligence as an engine in a car - it is potential that gets you places, helps you figure things out, helps you accomplish your goals. More intelligent people can get from (metaphorical) point A to point B more easily than people with less intelligence. Wisdom, however, is like a map. If you’ve been around for a while, you almost certainly know smart people who have made terrible decisions with their lives. A whole lot of them reside in our prisons. With the map of wisdom, you can also get from point A to point B sometimes even more quickly, often with less pain. Sometimes with the map of wisdom, you realize you don’t want to go to point B at all, but instead point Q, and so you can skip all of the intervening stops and just go straight to your goal. A little wisdom can save you from having to do a lot of driving around.
In my first career in the Army, and in my second career in academia, I have had the chance to meet many incredibly intelligent people. Many of them have been much smarter than me. Many of them have been wiser than me as well. But those two things do not necessarily go hand in hand. Not all intelligent people are wise, and not all wise people are especially intelligent (though I have to say, there is an overlap - it’s hard to be a wise idiot). When you meet a very intelligent person the first effect is often, wow! This person sees through things so much faster than me! It’s pretty easy to perceive intelligence. As you get to know them, and find out something about their life, you start to get a sense of their wisdom as well. A good many intelligent people I know have had successful careers, but unsuccessful personal lives (referring back to the Clay Christenson video from last week). I think wise people seem to just make good decisions, as if they had to put no thought into it at all. They just make the right choices and keep on heading toward success.
I think wisdom has two sources - experience and tradition. An intelligent person has an advantage on the experience side - they can more quickly learn from mistakes - or perhaps go on to make even more, different mistakes. But hopefully with an accumulation of experience comes an understanding of the map to success. This is why older people have an advantage in wisdom - they have simply had the opportunity to experience more. Tradition (in the form of social institutions such as religion, culture) offers up a map. But tradition, at least in the United States, is in some sense like a shelf in a gas station - there are many traditions from which one can choose, and thus many maps. A good map can save you a lot of pain (and driving around). But one has to choose which map, and then we are back to experience and intelligence. Traditions are usually the distillation of other people’s experiences. Do your likely experiences match up with what was done before? You won’t know all the mistakes that were made to arrive at the tradition because they have been discarded, and only the answer remains. Sometimes the world changes, and maps get to be out of date. When this happens, I think then we have to fall back on deeper traditions - traditions that address more fundamental axioms, and then experiment with experience to rebuild.
What is nice about wisdom is it allows you to put aspects of your life on autopilot. For example, I was really interested in investing when I was younger. I read everything I could, and tried a whole bunch of different approaches. I wasted a lot of money and time and eventually arrived at a pretty simple strategy that I have been following for the better part of 25 years now (it’s buy and hold index funds, by the way). It’s worked out pretty well, and once I settled on that strategy, I had more time to pursue other ends that made me happier. I think wisdom works like that. Wise people have simple rules that allow them to focus on what is important. I am not saying here that I am particularly wise - I happen to have one simple rule that has worked pretty well. I won’t offer up my life as a paragon of wisdom. I’m still working on the rest. But I do try to convey some of these bits to my kids - my children and my students.
Thanks for indulging this thought - let me know what you think about the difference or connection between intelligence and wisdom - I’d like to hear!
Enjoy the links and I’ll see you next week!
(pic above is from a short harbor cruise my wife and I took in August out of Dennis on Cape Cod. I’m not going to talk about the 20th anniversary of 9-11 other than to say I still remember that terrible day.)
Read
What: Health Affairs Blog, How A Fire Department Funding Model Could Preserve Rural Emergency Departments And Quality Emergency Care
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20210610.559255/full/
Why: A proposal to fund rural emergency departments in the same way we fund fire departments - a global budget that covers staffing and physical plant. The authors misuse “public good” - fire departments are definitely a public benefit, but they are not a public good (they may be non-excludable, but they are not non-rival), in the same way that EDs are non-excludable but rival. The same funding model could make sense. The problem with EDs that are “free” is that people will use them more. Even if the fire department is free, I am still unlikely to light my house on fire more frequently.
**
What: NPR, Shots - Health News, Price Transparency Remains Elusive Despite Hospitals Starting To Post Fees
Why: This is very interesting. It has the potential to radically change the negotiations between hospitals and insurers, but I am not sure that this will be beneficial to the patients. The article does a good job of explaining the possible downside - namely that hospitals will also know what their competitors are being paid. This could potentially give hospitals the ability to negotiate higher payments based on what similar facilities are being paid. It is not legal for two hospitals in the same market, who are not part of a system, to share pricing information and agree to charge the same price (usually a high price that maximizes profits). This is collusion and subject to anti-trust. This new policy not only allows them to share pricing information, it mandates that they do. When two competitors know what their respective prices are, they can engage in tacit collusion - that is collusion without a formal agreement to collude. Firms do this by observing each other's behavior. If one firm signals that it will charge a higher price, then the other firm will often follow.
So imagine we have two hospitals, A and B, in Town. Without the price transparency policy, the hospitals have to guess what price the other has agreed to take from insurance companies. The hospitals aren't allowed to discuss pricing. So the result will be different prices charged, and the insurance company can use the ignorance of A and B about their respective prices to negotiate lower rates. A won't know if B agreed to a lower price or not, and the insurance companies can direct their patients to the lower price provider. With price transparency, the hospitals now know what each is charging and can coordinate and tacitly collude - by both charging higher prices, not lower prices. Collusion is especially likely when there are a small number of suppliers in the market.
**
Watch
What: TED2019, Hamdi Ulukaya, The Anti-CEO Playbook
Why: This video is the story of the founding of Chobani yogurt - probably the best yogurt on the market, and an incredible success story.
In last week’s RWL I shared a critique of stakeholder capitalism. I still think stakeholder capitalism is junk, and so I am a little uncomfortable with some of Ulukaya’s rhetoric in this video, but he is inspiring. And I actually think that you can pretty easily reconcile his comments with traditional shareholder capitalism, even though he explicitly argues against it.
In this video he says, “It is the consumer that [businesses] report to, not the corporate boards.” I think a business absolutely has to report to its customers in a particular way. It has to delight its customers, and the profits will follow.
He also makes a strong argument in favor of businesses fixing much of what is wrong in America and the world - people don’t want government hand outs. Dignity only comes from work - from a chance to build.
It’s a passionate video - definitely inspiring - but to be consumed with a little salt.
(HT to Richard Corder for the video)
**
Listen
What: Persuasion Podcast, "You Just Won't Understand!"
Why: A very interesting discussion of “standpoint epistemology”. How where you stand affects how you know things and what you can know. Standpoint epistemology is very popular with the “Social Justice” movement. I think this ties in nicely with my discussion of intelligence and wisdom as well.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast:
http://healthleaderforge.org
"Were there none discontented with what they have, the World would never reach anything better." - Florence Nightingale