Intellectual humility | Pedleysmiths Blog

I have always thought that wisdom was something slightly magical, even biblical, reserved for those who have travelled the world in search of the secrets and meaning of life.

But in reality, it’s far less mystical and is more likely the result of a lifetime or simply a longtime of “good learning”.

This year marks my 30 years with Kaplan a professional education company here in the UK and I am leaving for pastures new. This has inevitably meant I have been doing a lot of thinking about the past, reflecting, and asking some fundamental questions such as, what do I know now that I didn’t know 30 years ago, what has been my most important lesson, and of course the classic, what do I know now that I would share with my younger self? So, I hope you will allow me this slightly self-indulgent post about wisdom.

What is wisdom?
There seems to be no single definition of wisdom, although all agree that it is much more than simply possessing knowledge. There is also a commonly held view that intelligence plays a part largely because if you are intelligent you are able to solve problems and learn from experiences, but it would be wrong to conclude that intelligent people are wise.

“A Clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.” Albert Einstein

A simple definition is probably all we need – “Wisdom is the ability to make sound judgments and decisions based on knowledge, experience, and understanding.” And when you read that back, wisdom becomes far more accessible and less mysterious. In fact, who wouldn’t want to make sound judgments every single day – We all need wisdom.

“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

But the definition gives little away in terms of what is meant by knowledge, experience and understanding. John Vervaeke, the philosopher, and cognitive scientist goes a little further by saying that to be wise you need the ability to identify what is relevant from the vast amount of information we are exposed to. “Relevance realisation” helps us navigate complexity and make sense of our world, but to do this you need to pay attention and challenge what you see, continually looking for feedback. This is an example of thinking about how you are thinking or metacognition, reflecting on what was momentarily in your mind and asking questions as to its accuracy, your bias and prejudice. And when you can do that, it becomes possible to develop insight, the aha” moment that comes from a deep understanding, revealing previously unseen connections.

Okay, that might be a little too much detail but I think it shows that in order to develop wisdom you need the ability to challenge your own thinking, in search of a greater and deeper understanding.

Wisdom and age

“Knowledge in youth is wisdom in age.” Proverb

The relationship between age and wisdom is nuanced and multifaceted. While age can contribute to wisdom, it is not an absolute guarantee. Wisdom, can be accumulated over time as a result of having different life experiences, but its not necessarily the experience that creates wisdom, it’s what you learn from it. Additionally, with age often comes a greater capacity for reflection, you may simply have more time to integrate your experiences into a broader understanding and as consequence develop that all important insight. Emotional regulation also tends to improve with age, contributing to more thoughtful and less emotional and reactive decision-making.

However, it is important to acknowledge counterpoints that some cognitive abilities for example problem-solving and processing speed, decline with age. In fact, studies from the Berlin Wisdom Project suggest there is a plateau of optimal wisdom performance in middle and old age, with some evidence of wisdom decline starting at the age of 75. One interesting aside, wisdom tends to correlate with less loneliness. In a study from the University of California, San Diego, in 2020 researchers found that for middle-aged and older adults wisdom warded off the worst effects of loneliness.

In conclusion, it’s not necessarily age that helps you develop wisdom. Its just that you have had more life experience and time on which to reflect together with a greater inclination to do so.

How to acquire wisdom
To think that you can provide an instruction manual for wisdom is at best ambitious and more likely foolish, but there might a few lessons we could learn that will move us in the right direction. A good starting point might be to ask a couple of experts:

Confucius said “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
And Socrates “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

From these “wise words” we can perhaps extract some of the traits of wise people. Wisdom comes from:

Reflection – is the process of introspectively examining and evaluating your thoughts, experiences, and actions. It’s a continuous process requiring a creative and inquisitive mind, questioning assumptions and seeking new perspectives. Reflection is an essential component of both learning and wisdom.
Experience – you need to have had some interesting life experiences on which to reflect. It is however not necessary to have “seen it all,” only that you questioned, challenge and thought about the experiences you have had.
Humility – Socrates went around asking people questions about justice, truth, and wisdom and found that despite them thinking they knew lots, in reality they were ignorant. To be wise you need to reach a sufficiently high level of questioning that you find your own level of ignorance, whilst at the same time not slipping into becoming arrogant.
Although not derived directly from the quotes, we should include Virtue – this is about consistently choosing to do what is right and good. It requires perspective, the ability to see things from the point of view of others as well as honesty, courage, kindness, and fairness.

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” Albert Einstein

30 years later
What a long time 30 years is, but so far it has been a real privilege to work with good people in an industry that helps people learn, and get a chance to change lives for the good. If I’m honest It wasn’t what I set out to do but its not worked out to badly.

And now to the hardest part, how would I answer those three questions I posed at the start?

What do I know now that I didn’t know 30 years ago – in some ways this is the easiest one because I have learned so much. But if I had to pick one thing it would be the understanding I now have as to how learning works. This has served me well in both my teaching and wider career in education.
What has been my most important lesson – work hard, have focus and purspose but try to be kind, make friends, and don’t fall out with people, life’s too short.
What do I know now that I would share with my younger self – A couple of things I guess, firstly that Socrates was right, “I know that I know nothing.” This is not so much about humility but a recognition that even when you get to a level of competence or expertise, there is always another higher-level waiting for you. And secondly don’t compare yourself with others, only with yourself, if you’re moving forward that’s good enough.

I cant claim the above as wisdom, but give me another 30 years and maybe I will have something for you.

human-being-girl-picture

For a variety of reasons, I have been engaged this month in thinking not so much about examinations but what subjects should be examined.

Whilst the news has been dominated by terrorism, Trump and Brexit, we may be facing a far bigger problem, of which these news stories are a good example, how can we be sure of making the right decisions in a world of mass information, complexity and change.

People voted Brexit for a whole variety of reasons, many “facts” were presented in simple terms, we will save £350m a week and this money will go into the NHS, immigration will be reduced as we gain control over our borders. Yet these facts are far too simplistic, any level of analysis, critical thinking and challenge would have revealed the difficulty of delivering them, and in many instances they won’t be delivered. If this is the case, did people vote to leave, or stay not on the facts as presented but using other criteria, maybe they were just naive and placed far too much trust in Politicians or perhaps they had never been taught about sensemaking, humility or studied the humanities.

Sensemaking

An interesting article caught my eye earlier in the month, “Silicon Valley needs to get schooled”. it was by Christian Madsbjeg, author of the book Sensemaking and senior partner in ReD, a strategy consulting company based on the human sciences. In the article Madsbjeg argues that the reason for a lack of new and exciting products from Silicon Valley is not because of a shortage of ideas but a complete failure to understand people.

In the book Sensemaking he expands on the problem. In order to cope with complexity, we look to science, logic and the algorithm (a rules based process) for a solution. On the face of it crunching big data so that it spews out the correct answer seems perfect, but, and this is a quote from the book, Madsbjeg makes a very important point, he says “we stop seeing numbers and models as a representation of the world and we start to see them as the truth – the only truth”. We are in fact looking at the numbers without the context of the world from which they came or a sufficiently deep understanding of the behaviours we are measuring.

We rely on science and the scientific method for so much of what we do but where people are involved we need a different approach. To put it another way “When human beings enter the equation, things go non-linear” Neil deGrasse.

Sensemaking is “how we make sense of the world so we can perform better in it”. It recognises that situations are complex and information ambiguous. It requires people to make a continuous effort to understand the connectivity that exists between people, places, and events in order to anticipate their trajectories and act accordingly.

Humility

trumpwillwin-notext Intellectual humility as defined by the authors of a recent paper entitled, Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility is the opposite of intellectual arrogance or conceit. It is in effect, recognising that you could be wrong. One of the findings from the research was that people who displayed intellectual humility were better than the control group at evaluating the quality of evidence they had been presented with. A very useful skill indeed, given the world of false news in which we currently find ourselves.

Humanities

And what job will you get after studying History for three years……

The humanities (English, History, Philosophy etc) have been given a bad press in recent times. Overshadowed by the drive to develop coding skills and with the constant chanting of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in the background, it’s not surprising that less people are studying them. They were at an all-time low in 2014 at 6.1% of all bachelor’s degrees, a long way of the 1967 record of 17.2%.

But it is generally recognised that the humanities can teach us a lot. In another reference from Christian Madsbjeg’s book, Sensemaking, he suggests the humanities can teach us, one that other worlds exist, two that they are different and three, we learn how to imagine other worlds that in turn helps us better understand our own.

As with sensemaking and humility, are these not the types of skills we need to learn?

Examinations – what to examine?

What subjects should be examined depends to a large extent on what job you would like to do. But with the claim that 60% of 11 year olds will leave school to do jobs which have not yet been invented it’s hard to know the answer. What we do know is that the world is unlikely to slow down, change not happen, data become less available and complexity give way to simplicity. As a result, we need to teach people and so examine the skills that will help them better navigate this world. Maybe when those primary school children go onto higher education they will be studying sensemaking, humility and the humanities.

Even though the ink is barely dry on the letter sent by Theresa May bringing about our formal negotiations to exit Europe, the interesting thing is we will never know if this was a good or bad decision. Because post Brexit people will behave differently, some will work hard to make the impossible possible whilst others will continue to frustrate the process, and none of that could have been foreseen at the time.

So, let’s hope the basis for the original decision to leave was not because of the headline – We will save £350m a week and this money will go into the NHS!