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@Braininabowl@mastodon.gamedev.placeYou know the expression "#Intelligence is knowing that a #tomato is a fruit, #wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in a fruit salad"?
This statement says intelligence is about knowing facts, and wisdom is about applying knowledge.
That's wrong on so many levels, and it's been bothering me for a while now. So time for a good old-fashioned #rant.
First let's look at the prototypical intelligent person: the inventor.
The inventor doesn't already *know* how their new invention works. If they did, they would be an assembly worker instead of an inventor. An inventor needs to figure it out, from outside their pool of knowledge. They need to take their existing knowledge and extrapolate out from there to gain new insights and knowledge.
Now, the stereotypical wise person: the mentor.
A mentor looks at a person, and tells them exactly what they need to hear. Or they explain a complicated concept in simple terms. In other words: Wisdom is all about reading people and communicating. In rpg terms it is a social attribute instead of a mental one.
Determining whether a tomato belongs in a fruit salad is exactly where you apply intelligence. You take what you know about tomatoes and fruit salads, and reason from there.
Wisdom, on the other hand, would know whether or not to offer you a tomato right now.
@Braininabowl Going with your reasoning, though ... I kinda come to the opposite conclusion.
Intelligence is the ability to reason out things beyond straightforward direct experience. So, if you have limited experience and info about what tomatoes and fruit salad are, you can use intelligence to figure tomatoes could go in fruit salad.
But wisdom is more about drawing from practical experience rather than theoretical extrapolation.
Although ... I think tomatoes would be fine in a fruit salad.
@Braininabowl Huh. A quick internet search does indeed find lots of fruit salad recipes which include tomatoes. So ... ???
@isaackuo Indeed, another reason why that expression is wrong :-/
@isaackuo So the difference between intelligence and wisdom would be theoretical vs practical. That could work as well. It doesn't cover "wise" people spewing metaphors that sound good until you actually think about it, but no model is perfect :-)
@Braininabowl I mean ... there is such a thing as "received wisdom", which is hard to cram in to a silly short saying because received wisdom can be wrong. And it's not just some annoying edge case ... received wisdom is often wrong on a wide scale and even immoral, reinforcing evil systems of bigoted oppression ...
Yeah, this is leading to no good "saying" that provides any sort of actual insight. The words we're dealing with are just too imprecise in theory and ambi-valuent in practice.
@Braininabowl I thought the expression went:
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."
But doing a quick web search, I see that your version is also out there. Seems much less common, but I dunno. Could just be confirmation bias on my part.
Oh, I hadn't heard the "knowledge" version, that makes slightly more sense.