Age Is Not A Proxy For Wisdom

They say wisdom comes with age. However, this is a fragile lie that collapses the moment we poke at it. This idea seems to stem from a naive oversimplification of how wisdom is actually acquired.

Perhaps instead of teaching us “wisdom comes with age,” our elders should’ve recognised the truth staring them in the face all along: wisdom exists in the mind of the sage, not in his age. A 25-year-old who learns from his every mistakes, and from the mistakes of others, will on any given day, be wiser than an 85-year-old who’s never learned a single lesson from his own failures. It’s not how old you are, it’s how much you’ve learned, that builds your wisdom.

The naivety of using age as a proxy for wisdom is best illustrated with the following example. Imagine a 22-year-old reads a certain book, and spends the following year applying the lessons he learned from it. At the end of one year, that 22-year-old will have one year of experience with this book’s subject matter. Now consider a 50-year-old who has never read the book and therefore never had the chance to apply its ideas. Despite being more than twice the age, he has precisely zero years of experience in that domain. And yet, society will often badger and even chastise the young man for “not listening to those older and more experienced than him.” And then we come with petulant complaints that young people are so depressed. I wonder why…

It is not just whether or not someone has read and applied what they learned. Exposure alone is not the whole story. Because even between those who learn and apply, meaningful discrepancies can exist—in fact, they can be so significant it’d be a shame to ignore them. So let us assume a different scenario: a 30-year-old who read that same book at age 21 and has been applying its principles for the past 9 years. Only now can we say that this person will have far greater ‘experience’ than the 22-year-old, since both have exposed themselves to the same information and both applied it—but over vastly different time spans. So now we’re comparing apples to apples; not Lebanese wine to Brazilian beef.

Wisdom is not about general exposure to life. It has little to do with vague notions of “life experience” — sometimes used as a vague excuse based on a logical fallacy that everyone equally uses their time to learn and apply everything they learned. In reality, wisdom about exposure to a particular piece of information or situation, reflecting on it, and then applying any lessons learned over a period of time. Only and only under those conditions can we say that experiential comparison between two people is fair play.

When Two Things Are Not The Same “Ting”

In his groundbreaking book “Antifragile,” Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about the prime geopolitical event of 1991, when the United States’ whimsical mood compelled it into invading Baghdad, after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Any and all ‘intelligent’ socioeconomic analysts and journalists at the time had predicted a rise in the price of oil in the event of war. But that causal link was precisely what became their achilles’ heel. War usually causes oil prices to rise, but not scheduled war—since prices adjust to expectations.

Indeed, upon the news of war, oil collapsed from around $39 a barrel to almost half that value.

Nassim makes the case for his notion of conflation—how people mistake something with the function of something. "Kuwait and oil are not the same ting [thing]," he writes on behalf of his fabled ‘Fat Tony’ character.

Indeed while so many “experts” had correctly predicted the war, they were off—way off—the mark when it came to mapping how it would affect oil prices. They just thought it was “the same ting.”

Managers and experts knew every possible thing about Kuwait, Iraq, the Middle East, Washington, the United Nations. The only thing they missed was the simple but consequential fact that it had nothing to do with oil—war and oil were, apparently, not the same "ting." Their analyses seemed solid, but too disconnected from the reality of functions.

The same lesson can be re-applied in our argument. It is true that wisdom is a function of age. But something and a function of something are not the same thing. Age and how age affects us are not the same thing, and should not be conflated.

The more ice cream bought, the more swimsuits sold.

Believers of this fallacy that ‘wisdom comes with age’ seem to fall for a classic rational mistake in logic: conflating correlation with causation. So for a less technical explanation of this phenomenon, here’s an analogy.

During the summer, an increase in ice cream sales is accompanied by a rise in purchases of swimsuits. But do we ever attribute increasing ice cream sales to people buying more swimsuits? NO. Never, not even remotely. No one in their right mind would believe that people buy more ice cream in the summer because they buy more swimsuits. The sales of ice cream have nothing to do with whether people are buying more swimsuits. Yes, as summer approaches we notice a rise in the sales of both—a correlation—but that in no way means there is any causation between them. The truth lies in another third factor that underlies the higher sales in both: warmer weather.

So why then, do we struggle to apply the same logic to how wisdom is related to age? Wisdom is correlated with age, yes, but as we saw with the ice cream example, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. This holds true for wisdom as well. Wisdom isn’t just a function of age; but more accurately, it’s a function of what comes with age—time, or more specifically, seized learning opportunities. Age offers us ample time for exposure to new life experiences and opportunity for practicing any lessons learned through that exposure.

So, in reality, wisdom doesn’t come with age. Age and wisdom seem to go hand in hand—much like sales of ice cream and swimsuits—but only a fool would believe one is caused by the other. There is a third, hidden factor that causes both. And for age and wisdom, that factor is time — time spent learning and applying what one has learned. Only then does wisdom come with increasing age. As the old saying goes, “A fool doesn’t suddenly become a wise man when he grows old. He just becomes an old fool.”

References: “Antifragile”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, P. 210, Ch. 14: “WHEN TWO THINGS ARE NOT THE “SAME THING”