Information, knowledge, wisdom
I've been in the education business almost my whole adult life. When I started, a major part of what teachers did was to convey information. As teachers we didn't create information. That was left to scientists, researchers in other fields, and all the people who do things other people might be interested in. We assigned readings, gave lectures and explained what needed explaining.
Conveying information is today a smaller part of the teacher's task. Information is easy to find and cheap to acquire. The internet and smartphones have put a very large part of the world’s information within fingertip reach. To be sure, students still need help finding what they're looking for and discerning accurate information from bogus. But in this regard teachers are less teachers than reference librarians (who, I say with respect and gratitude, are among the most helpful people in the world).
When information is sorted and integrated into someone’s mental model of reality, it becomes knowledge. Teachers often talk of imparting knowledge, but I'm not sure that's the best way of describing this part of the teacher's task. Information exists independent of individuals. A radio station blares out the news whether anyone is listening or not. Individuals can choose what information to pay attention to, but their choices don't affect the information. Knowledge, by contrast, exists within individuals and is specific to them. I know that if I stick my finger in a flame, I will feel pain. A child who has never been burned doesn't know this. As a teacher, or a parent in teacher mode, I can try to impart this knowledge to a child. But the effort is hit or miss. Some kids will take the warning. Others will have to get burned before their mental model integrates the flame-pain connection.
Because the transmission of knowledge depends as much on the receiver as on the transmitter, it's a hard part of teaching. I can give a great lecture, but if students are distracted or if I miscalculate their existing knowledge, I might be wasting my breath.
This part of teaching hasn't gotten any easier with the advance of technology. Except for one thing: that because I don't have to spend as much time conveying information, I can spend more time helping students convert information into knowledge.
This is the main reason I devote a lot of classroom time to telling stories. Stories—series of events that are causally connected—come in two genres, fictional and factual. The former is the province of novelists and playwrights, the latter of historians. Either way, stories facilitate the integration of information into existing mental structures. This is probably why humans evolved into storytellers. We make sense of the world by our stories.
Not only do stories provide a framework for organizing information, they provide an incentive for the story-listener to acquire new information. The clearest example is the murder mystery, which carries the reader along by the promise of finding out who done it.
Beyond information is knowledge, and beyond knowledge is wisdom. Wisdom is the hardest to teach. In fact, it is essentially impossible to teach. Wisdom requires judgment, and judgment comes only through experience. Counsel patience to young people and they will ignore you. As well they should. Impatience is one of the strengths of youth. Even so, impatience causes rash decisions, which are often regretted. You can't have the upside without the downside. “Older and wiser" is one of those truisms that is actually often true.
Could a computer ever be wise? The internet makes information ubiquitous. Artificial intelligence bots may or may not have knowledge, but they do a fair job of faking it. And they are bound to get better. Wisdom would seem more elusive.
Yet we're already making progress. Expertise is a subset of wisdom. And so-called expert systems are used in radiology to find tumors, in accounting to detect patterns of fraud, and in many other areas. So far they assist humans, who typically make the final call. Many people hesitate to ascribe wisdom or even expertise to machines. Yet if a human radiologist made the same judgments as an AI radiologist, few people would withhold the labels. Here a version of the Turing test might apply. If you can't tell the difference between human judgment and machine judgment, then the machine is exercising judgment.
How about an AI counselor or psychotherapist? It's not difficult to imagine a bot asking a patient the same kind of reflective questions a human counselor would ask. How would the bot learn? By experience, presumably in practice sessions like those in which human counselors are trained. Indeed, if it's not done already, one might suppose bots could be the practice patients.
Note the importance of experience. And note what was mentioned above as the experiential basis of wisdom. Maybe wisdom, or an indistinguishable approximation of it, comes more easily to computers than knowledge does.
Or maybe wisdom is simply not all it's cracked up to be. The pithy sayings inside fortune cookies often sound wise. Horoscopes can seem wise if you read enough into them. Perhaps wisdom is in the eye or the ear of the beholder. A wise decision isn't known to be wise until after the fact. We can all look like Socrates after the fact. And consider what Socrates' wisdom won him.
Dr. Brands, I wholeheartedly concur with you on telling stories. I teach grades 7-12 as well as adjunct and although different populations, they all say that they love the stories I tell in all my American history classes. A lot of that inspiration comes from your work so I thank you for that.
An essay timely for you and other educators, given the recent beginning of this academic year; untimely, or at least inconvenient for me, given I am scheduled to have my annual physical. I will explain.
When I go in for my physical, I will be handed a form to complete to evaluate my present mental health. I am given this form, because some “protocol” says that they should do it and the clinic can charge an insurer or Medicare $35.00, for which the clinic may only be “reimbursed” $3.50, because some other computer says that is all they should be paid for a “claim” presented electronically to that computer over some digital network.
There may be 10 or so “yes/no” questions, answered by checking a box so that, without human eyes, it can be machine-read, and without medical minds evaluating the answer, by a computer program that will then use it to write a “medical record” making up some medically sounding text in response to an affirmative answer to comply with a “diagnostic” coding manual, now also electronically interacting with the clinic’s computer system, that then goes into my permanent medical file, digitally stored who knows where, for who knows how long, and accessible by who knows whom.
The last question is always a version of “have you considered suicide recently?”
Now that I have read your essay tonight and not wanting to answer untruthfully, because that questionnaire might be considered a “government record” since payment for administering it may be reimbursed through some governmental agency, thereby giving some overly zealous prosecutor an excuse for a criminal prosecution, under some broad and ambiguous law, or, in the case of a federal agency, perhaps a regulation that Congress had no hand in crafting, if the answer is not truthful, I will leave the answer blank.
If the doctor had asked the question of me directly, I would have answered “yes, but not my own. You see, last night I was reading Prof. Brand’s splendid essay on ‘Information, knowledge, wisdom.’ It started off with a photograph of French painter Jacques-Louis David’s 1787 painting ‘La Mort de Socrates’, which in turn spurred my neurons to recall the trial of Socrates of which I had read in Plato’s Socratic dialogues including ‘the Socratic Apology.’ There Socrates was tried by an overly zealous prosecutor for ‘moral corruption of Athenian youth’ and ‘impiety’ through his teachings at his academy. Convicted by an Athenian jury of 501 men, the prosecutor recommended the death penalty, which he was given. Although encouraged by his friends, followers and students to flee Athens, ever faithful to his teaching of civic obedience to the law, Socrates executed his own death sentence by drinking hemlock, as he was condemned to do at his trial.”
Well, that explanation would have never ended up in my medical records (perhaps because it is too long for a doctor to write down), and I would perhaps also be spared of a criminal accusation that I had lied on what might be considered a government record.
[Before a reader might consider me under some sort of paranoia for its telling, I offer this story as only a feeble attempt to come up with a weak example of information, knowledge and wisdom.]