rogersbacon wrote, ”...there is something grand, something beautiful and glorious, dare I say holy, in the act of passing knowledge on to the next generation”.
The problem for progress seems to be...
KNOWLEDGE: It’s easy to pass on knowledge and build upon it generation after generation.
WISDOM: It’s much harder to pass on wisdom. We try, and succeed to some limited degree, but given that wisdom is largely a function of life experience, it almost has to be rebuilt from the ground up in each individual.
Example: while one can learn physics from a book (easy transfer) one can not learn love from a book (hard transfer).
Thus, we see knowledge developing at one speed, and wisdom developing at a much slower speed. Over time the gap between knowledge and wisdom widens.
This phenomena might be compared to giving kids driver’s licenses. At first we’re giving driver’s licenses to 17 year olds. Then 16 year olds. Then 15. Then 14 etc. The cars keep getting bigger, while the drivers keep getting smaller. As this progression unfolds, sooner or later we arrive at crash.
“With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and future strong artificial intelligence, however, learning from mistakes is not a desirable strategy: we want to develop our wisdom in advance so that we can get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we’ll have.”
It reassures me to find others writing on this subject, and making this point specifically. The issue of scale changes the progress equation in fundamental ways, erasing the room for error we’ve always counted on in the past.
We are required to defeat ALL existential threats, every one, because a single failure a single time with a single threat may be sufficient to bring the entire system crashing down, making other successes irrelevant. When we see existential threats in this holistic manner, it becomes clear that dealing with particular threats one by one by one is a loser’s game, and our focus should instead be on the process generating all the technological threats, the knowledge explosion. I would define that shift of focus to be an act of wisdom.
As example, if you get puddles all around your house every time it rains, the solution is not to focus on managing the pots you use to catch this and that drip. The wise solution is to go to the source of the problem, and get up on the roof and fix the leaks.
Wow, there’s a lot to chew on here.
rogersbacon wrote, ”...there is something grand, something beautiful and glorious, dare I say holy, in the act of passing knowledge on to the next generation”.
The problem for progress seems to be...
KNOWLEDGE: It’s easy to pass on knowledge and build upon it generation after generation.
WISDOM: It’s much harder to pass on wisdom. We try, and succeed to some limited degree, but given that wisdom is largely a function of life experience, it almost has to be rebuilt from the ground up in each individual.
Example: while one can learn physics from a book (easy transfer) one can not learn love from a book (hard transfer).
Thus, we see knowledge developing at one speed, and wisdom developing at a much slower speed. Over time the gap between knowledge and wisdom widens.
This phenomena might be compared to giving kids driver’s licenses. At first we’re giving driver’s licenses to 17 year olds. Then 16 year olds. Then 15. Then 14 etc. The cars keep getting bigger, while the drivers keep getting smaller. As this progression unfolds, sooner or later we arrive at crash.
Agreed, well put. Not exactly the same thing you are talking about, but the framing of the “wisdom race” comes to mind—https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26687
I liked this quote from the Edge article...
“With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and future strong artificial intelligence, however, learning from mistakes is not a desirable strategy: we want to develop our wisdom in advance so that we can get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we’ll have.”
It reassures me to find others writing on this subject, and making this point specifically. The issue of scale changes the progress equation in fundamental ways, erasing the room for error we’ve always counted on in the past.
We are required to defeat ALL existential threats, every one, because a single failure a single time with a single threat may be sufficient to bring the entire system crashing down, making other successes irrelevant. When we see existential threats in this holistic manner, it becomes clear that dealing with particular threats one by one by one is a loser’s game, and our focus should instead be on the process generating all the technological threats, the knowledge explosion. I would define that shift of focus to be an act of wisdom.
As example, if you get puddles all around your house every time it rains, the solution is not to focus on managing the pots you use to catch this and that drip. The wise solution is to go to the source of the problem, and get up on the roof and fix the leaks.
Yup that’s the challenge :)