I.
I turn 33 today. I can only hope that age brings wisdom.
We’ve been talking recently about the high-level frames and heuristics that organize other concepts. They’re hard to transmit, and you have to rediscover them on your own, sometimes with the help of lots of different explanations and viewpoints (or one very good one). They’re not obviously apparent when you’re missing them; if you’re not ready for them, they just sounds like platitudes and boring things you’ve already internalized.
Wisdom seems like the accumulation of those, or changes in higher-level heuristics you get once you’ve had enough of those. I look back on myself now vs. ten years ago and notice I’ve become more cynical, more mellow, and more prone to believing things are complicated. For example:
1. Less excitement about radical utopian plans to fix everything in society at once
2. Less belief that I’m special and can change the world
3. Less trust in any specific system, more resignation to the idea that anything useful requires a grab bag of intuitions, heuristics, and almost-unteachable skills.
4. More willingness to assume that other people are competent in aggregate in certain ways, eg that academic fields aren’t making incredibly stupid mistakes or pointlessly circlejerking in ways I can easily detect.
5. More willingness to believe that power (as in “power structures” or “speak truth to power”) matters and infects everything.
6. More belief in Chesterton’s Fence.
7. More concern that I’m wrong about everything, even the things I’m right about, on the grounds that I’m missing important other paradigms that think about things completely differently.
8. Less hope that everyone would just get along if they understood each other a little better.
9. Less hope that anybody cares about truth (even though ten years ago I would have admitted that nobody cares about truth).
All these seem like convincing insights. But most of them are in the direction of elite opinion. There’s an innocent explanation for this: intellectual elites are pretty wise, so as I grow wiser I converge to their position. But the non-innocent explanation is that I’m not getting wiser, I’m just getting better socialized. Maybe in medieval Europe, the older I grew, the more I would realize that the Pope was right about everything.
I’m pretty embarassed by Parable On Obsolete Ideologies, which I wrote eight years ago. It’s not just that it’s badly written, or that it uses an ill-advised Nazi analogy. It’s that it’s an impassioned plea to jettison everything about religion immediately, because institutions don’t matter and only raw truth-seeking is important. If I imagine myself entering that debate today, I’d be more likely to take the opposite side. But when I read Parable, there’s…nothing really wrong with it. It’s a good argument for what it argues for. I don’t have much to say against it. Ask me what changed my mind, and I’ll shrug, tell you that I guess my priorities shifted. But I can’t help noticing that eight years ago, New Atheism was really popular, and now it’s really unpopular. Or that eight years ago I was in a place where having Richard Dawkins style hyperrationalism was a useful brand, and now I’m (for some reason) in a place where having James C. Scott style intellectual conservativism is a useful brand. A lot of the “wisdom” I’ve “gained” with age is the kind of wisdom that helps me channel James C. Scott instead of Richard Dawkins; how sure am I that this is the right path?
Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it’s considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of “low-status” and “bad and wrong” have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it’s true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it’s in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it’s true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don’t know how many times it’s slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement.
And what about number 9 on the list? Believing nobody cares about truth is cynicism, which seems sort of like wisdom. But traumatize someone enough and they’ll reliably pick up some new cognitive styles; it’s much easier to give someone hypervigilance than it is to cure them. Imagine someone reading enough newspapers that they hear all of the worst and scariest things, and maybe start thinking that the country is 50% Nazis and 50% violent antifa. Is the resulting pessimism and paranoia really wisdom? Or is it just a more stable, more thermodynamically-preferred state than innocence?
And if I accept my intellectual changes as “gaining wisdom”, shouldn’t I also believe that old people are wiser than I am? And old people mostly seem to go around being really conservative and saying that everything was better in the old days and the youth are corrupt and Facebook is going to be the death of us. I could model this as two different processes – a real wisdom-related process that ends exactly where I am now, plus a false rose-colored-glasses-related process that ends with your crotchety great-uncle talking about how things have been going downhill since the war – but that’s a lot of special pleading. I remember when I was twenty, I thought the only reason adults were less utopian than I was, was because of their hidebound rose-colored self-serving biases. Pretty big coincidence that I was wrong then, but I’m right about everyone older than me now.
There’s one more possibility that bothers me even worse than the socialization or traumatization theory. I’m going to use science-y sounding terms just as an example, but I don’t actually think it’s this in particular – we know that the genes for liberal-conservative differences are mostly NMDA receptors in the brain. And we know that NMDA receptor function changes with aging. It would be pretty awkward if everything we thought was “gaining wisdom with age” was just “brain receptors consistently functioning differently with age”. If we were to find that were true – and furthermore, that the young version was intact and the older version was just the result of some kind of decay or oxidation or something – could I trust those results? Intuitively, going back to earlier habits of mind would feel inherently regressive, like going back to drawing on the wall with crayons. But I don’t have any proof.
Wisdom is like that.
A few weeks short of seventy, I’m tremendously impressed by how much wisdom you’ve already acquired; I was an idiot at your age. But I expect that you’ll find, in the future, that reversals become rarer. Comprehension reduces contradiction to complexity.
Forgetting arguments but remembering conclusions may be part of this. Same with already being vaccinated against a wide-range of memes. Also, Dunning-Kruger, as we either forget more than we realize but still think we’re an expert, or as the state-of-the-art progresses far beyond where it was the last decade we looked. Also, just acquiring more random knowledge makes it easier to offer counterarguments to anything we don’t want to change our mind about, or even create fully-general counterarguments.
If “wisdom” really is the result of something like declining brain function due to NMDA receptor decline, though, maybe anti-aging drugs will help? One argument against biological immortality is that “science advances one funeral at a time”. Same applies culturally. Imagine if all the catholics from 1500 were still alive and voting. No religious tolerance, no enlightenment, no abolition of slavery, and certainly no gender equality or LGBTQ rights.
But, if resistance to such ideas is mainly due to NMDA receptor decline, or decreasing neural plasticity, or hormonal shifts or whatever, then that’s fantastic news. It means we might naturally sidestep the whole ethical conundrum of weighing all social progress against genocide-by-inaction form not curing aging. (And, ending social/philosophical/scientific progress certainly counts as an X-risk.)
No need to limit the voting age to below 130, or quarantine billions of centinarians in internment camps for millennia, or keep them off the internet or whatever memespaces they might poison, or whatever other dystopias society decides are less bad than the genocide-by-aging dystopia and the end of progress.
First, happy birthday. Keep shining.
Second: I’m 2 years older than you, but reading your blog feels like learning from a teacher who has advanced in the path of wisdom an unfathomable lot more than me. In my own circles I meet dull and thick PhDs all the time, so my perception of your wisdom cannot entirely be due to your having done three times the education I have.
Your writing is the most careful I know. You know when you’re right, but you never come off as overconfident. Time after time, you go out of your way to try to prove yourself wrong. And you care whether you’re wrong, which is a rare virtue these days.
A predictable retort is that I’m not much wise myself, so what do I know. Maybe. You’ll decide how much to weigh the admiration coming from people less wise than you vs. the admiration from people wiser than you. But the fact that you get admiration from both groups must count for something.
Definitely an interesting article.
Based on what you are saying, I end up thinking of 3 buckets:
Socialization-as-perceived-wisdom
(I learned about the word dialectic the other day, and it would probably fit here somehow)
Maximizing results in society
Maximizing results general
Some of your items could fall into the first category, but I don’t think all of them would. Is your reduced trust in any specific system due to a value (item 3), or based on results of your actions?
I think the key might be to develop methods of measuring your sanity.
I have often questioned my judgement when in disagreements. But it is hard to tell if judgement is good or not, especially if all I have to measure it is my opinion.
But if we measure the value of judgement or wisdom based on the results of their actions, then it is not as value-driven. Of course measuring results is still subjective, so it needs to be compared to what the intended outcome of the action was as well. Additionally, we would need to obtain a large enough sample size, otherwise we could conclude that lottery winners have better judgement than lottery losers.
Actually now that I think about it more, the second half of your article sounds like you are more concerned with your beliefs more than your heuristics. I am not sure if I would consider beliefs a component of wisdom, but I am not opposed to the idea either. I could believe in a flying spaghetti monster and still have wisdom. Though that example is not a proven fact, just something I believe.
Edit: Also thinking about it more, there is the decision between tools of perception, option generation, decision making, and implementation. Maybe the problem is that wisdom consists of so many sub-topics.
I don’t think old age brings wisdom. It reinforces continued behaviors that have brought a person whatever they define as success. In a real sense, until you get knocked on your butt, you aren’t changing. An awful lot of people just think, it’s getting me paid, it’s getting me laid. I’ll just keep on being me. Once someone demonstrates that some aspect of an individual’s behavior is giving them butt cancer, then they might knock that particular habit or behavior off or reduce it assuming they have the requisite will power. But no. Just having the odometer click doesn’t make you smarter or wiser.
It took me going through therapy and then alcohol recovery till, “Oh, yeah—There it is.” A core self. It took finding that. Not that I can always let go to accessing it.
It’s amazing how many people don’t have a core self. That is, when you have intuitions that can be reality-tested, fact checked. I can’t even say that that’s wisdom, but it sure comes closer than before.
Great post. I think Robin Hanson would accept that “older people are wiser” should tend to be true, even in relation to himself, but he also accepts that number 9 applies to himself, so it wouldn’t bother him that he hasn’t corrected his beliefs in particular ways yet.
You’re the same age Jesus was when they crucified him. He had answers too.