YY U R YY U B I C U R YY 4 me
That was depressing. I scored a 3. [sigh] I guess I need to understand a lot more about life.
3.2, relatively moderate wisdom
I'm not known for my wisdom, but I'm wise enough to know that "wisdom" is not measureable.
@Linkat,
Hah, I was just about to post something similar. I didn't see any point in taking a wisdom test.
I scored a 3.6, which is moderately wise. Oddly I didn't have any idea about how wise each of the answers were. I usually know which answers would score for which qualities when I take tests like this.
4.1 ... for what it's worth.
4.0 To conclude that older is wiser doesn't make sense to me. Naturally testing older people would eliminate all those who did unwise things resulting in their not becoming older. In addition, if they tested people in nursing homes who paid for their care then these are people wise enough to have made enough money to afford the high cost of nursing home care. So, the test screens out unwise people by the group they test and then conclude, falsely, that older people are wiser then younger people.
All their test proves is that you're more likely to encounter a wise person amongst the elderly then the young.
@BumbleBeeBoogie,
4.5. However, most of the questions dealt with empathy and many were repitious. There is no solid way to measure wisdom without context, and without an understanding of the indivduals situation and place in life it's hard to determine how wise they are. But, hey, i suppose thats empathy. Interesting...
@Linkat,
Wisdom is simply making right decision that derive from wrong conduct. Making right decisions in instances where you have always chose the wrong choice. No individual is wise without pulling knowledge of previous mistakes.
Wisdom is keeping your mouth shut when you think of something clever to say. Or so I'm told.
@Cyracuz,
That was clever; I'm glad you said it.
it is amazin how u cant but mean to use anything for ur own life
u cant get positive from negative, it is impossible equation callin it wisdom by using smthg else u never say dont change the fact but making it worse from ur present wills
that is how from ever humans words, being wise was assimilated to stepping back from doing, there is no decision there but to not get involved
from humans own expressions always, being wise is knowing bein ruled anyways therefore acting individually for his own right to rule out of all situations, so nothing objectively to do while even subjectively reaching a state of meaning the right to b out of nothing at all
it is called being wise bc of nothing absolute fact existence while there is that i with so a relative tiny thing that could one day b smthg right or about it
n that is how being wise is like a change bill that belong to history so overrated impossible to use anywhere, a stipulation proved failin to exist or to b ever real
now it is known that any is wether true or a liar, there cant exist what is not any for sure bc truth of any is first so it is existence fact or reality will is an objective certainty
nothing exist but bc truth exist nothing is really nothing so never related to everything nor to any so never smthg
but bc truth exist nothing is conceived as being always truth base, where out of nothing reality is not smthg while definitely truly happening and present is always, which is observed and known being exclusively about values way over nothing value in objective absolute sense, as it is known that what is then true is always exclusively superiority over absolute objective values
the word even mistake say it all literally how i am right
mis take mean any that take or took smthg at the first place
so mistake assume that everyone is fake, existing only by getting smthg to pretend being
so mistake dont belong to the existence of any that dont mean to take
therefore what is honest cant ever b mistaken while it could only b real or true
u keep willing to think how to act in order to relate urself existence with everything positive existence
it is obvious that u mean positive creations and not that existence is ever true
when existence is true then it is up to u to take urself seriously and act for urself alone detaching it from everything else
when existence is true then ur own sense of existing is truly happening so ur constant sense of being is already real while u have to realize out of ur own reality ur freedom kind of sense that confirm ur existence from the close relation between free stand and objective constant being
im not being an alien by sayin this, on the contrary it is obvious for any honest head that i am describin in details what everyone know by himself alone so only honest beings realize
anyone know that everything is never useful to its needs and wills, by definition all belong to smthg else as it cant b for one
so everyone know that all is to deal with wether positively or negatively, but to never confuse one with all
it is wether all is one ennemy or all is any else right too to exist
I'm currently researching the topic of wisdom measurement, and I did an analysis of this test as part of that research. I've decided to post part of the analysis here, on the chance that others might find it useful, or might be able to contribute additional insights. In the analysis below, I've gathered similar questions together and analyzed them as a category:
"Do you have common sense wisdom?" style questions
While the questions below don’t probe the nature of reality very deeply, they do explore the practical, common-sense dimension of wisdom. The first two (listed below) are very closely related to empathy, however they address cognitive perspectives on understanding the feelings of others more than actual capacity to be compassionate.
18. When I'm upset at someone, I usually try to put myself in his or her shoes for a while.
35. Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.
16. I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision.
20. I always try to look at all sides of a problem.
32. When I am confused by a problem, one of the first things I do is survey the situation and consider all the relevant pieces of information.
Are you capable of somewhat deeper wisdom?
These questions probe for a more profound understanding of reality. Unfortunately, they’re all essentially different versions of the same question: “In the world we live in, are things typically black and white?” Of course, the answer is an emphatic no (usually, for the most part).
5. You can classify almost all people as either honest or crooked.
15. People are either good or bad.
13. A person either knows the answer to a question or he/she doesn't.
7. There is only one right way to do anything.
Do you feel compelled to understand the world around you deeply?
Wisdom is a form of, or aspect of, intelligence. It involves understanding things deeply. As such, a person who isn’t curious, doesn’t reflect much, dislikes thinking, and prefers to leave moral decision-making to others isn’t likely to accumulate much wisdom. (I think these are very good questions to include in a wisdom test.)
38. Simply knowing the answer rather than understanding the reasons for the answer to a problem is fine with me.
31. I prefer just to let things happen rather than try to understand why they turned out that way.
22. I try to anticipate and avoid situations where there is a likely chance I will have to think in depth about something.
1. In this complicated world of ours the only way we can know what's going on is to rely on leaders or experts who can be trusted.
25. A problem has little attraction for me if I don't think it has a solution.
How compassionate and empathetic are you?
Compassion— the capacity to mentally project oneself into the mind and emotions of another— is an important component of wisdom and an extremely sophisticated intellectual faculty. It really should be included in IQ test scores, along with verbal, mathematical, and spatial abilities. It’s okay to call compassion “the wisdom of the heart,” so long as we’re only speaking metaphorically. Of course, the brain is the source of these feelings, not the pump in our chests. Buddha approached compassion in a more rational, philosophical way, pointing out the intrinsic interconnectedness and interdependence of all things. (When the left sleeve catches fire, the right hand doesn’t hesitate to extinguish the flames out of fear for its own well-being.) Jesus approached love and compassion in a more emotional, heart-based manner, but he also demonstrated deep intellectual understanding. (Compassion questions should definitely be included in a wisdom test, but I think there are too many in this one, compared to the number that address abstract intellectual understanding.)
2. I am annoyed by unhappy people who just feel sorry for themselves.
4. People make too much of the feelings and sensitivity of animals.
14. It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help.
17. If I see people in need, I try to help them one way or another.
21. Sometimes I feel a real compassion for everyone.
24. I often have not comforted another when he or she needed it.
27. Sometimes I don't feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems.
30. Sometimes when people are talking to me, I find myself wishing that they would leave.
33. I don't like to get involved in listening to another person's troubles.
19. There are certain people whom I dislike so much that I am inwardly pleased when they are caught and punished for something they have done.
Do you get upset easily and feel painful emotions often?
I understand the rationale behind including these questions. I think the inclusion is justified, even commendable. However, we have to be careful. Human beings are emotional creatures, and not all of our emotions are peaceful and pleasant. In the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, a peaceful, tranquil, joyful mindset is often attributed to wise individuals. There is certainly a kernel of truth to the idea that a wise person will tend to have an even emotional keel and rise above bitterness, resentfulness, irritation, and impatience.
The less wise a person is, the less philosophical perspective they’ll have, the less objective they’ll be, and the more strongly identified they’ll become with their own “negative” emotions— to a degree. However, it’s the total, blind, clueless identification with anger, fear, impatience, envy, and resentfulness that is unwise, not the emotions themselves. Wise people get upset, too.
26. I either get very angry or depressed if things go wrong.
29. Sometimes I get so charged up emotionally that I am unable to consider many ways of dealing with my problems.
37. When I look back on what's happened to me, I feel cheated.
23. When I look back on what has happened to me, I can't help feeling resentful.
36. I'm easily irritated by people who argue with me.
12. I can be comfortable with all kinds of people.
Those perpetually tranquil and eternally smiling Buddhist icons are idealistic exaggerations, and the notions of perfect, ceaseless, transcendent bliss that New Age culture foists on the gullible are blatant lies. The bulk of human cognition is unconscious and instinctive, shaped by millions of years of evolution. The narrow bandwidth of consciousness only contains the tip of the iceberg that is the human mind. Everyone experiences “negative” emotions. Hey, even Jesus lost it once in a while. Including these items in a wisdom test is a good idea, but the questions need to be worded and evaluated carefully.
How often one becomes emotional, and how intensely one becomes emotional, are as much functions of one’s physiology, personality, and culture as they are of one’s cosmological perspective. There’s also the question of how honest one is with oneself about one’s imperfections and limitations, and self-honesty is an indicator of wisdom. "Know thyself" was an ancient Greek aphorism. (What these questions should really be attempting to measure is the extent to which the test-taker is identified with painful emotions.)
Faulty wisdom questions:
These are poor questions, for various reasons— but I don’t intend to be critical of the test in pointing out these flaws. I deeply appreciate the challenges involved in composing a multiple-choice test of wisdom. This test was a superb and highly commendable effort, in spite of its minor imperfections. Noting and analyzing the imperfections, however, will help us to build better tests in the future.
3. Life is basically the same most of the time.
6. I would feel much better if my present circumstances changed.
9. It is better not to know too much about things that cannot be changed.
28. I often do not understand people's behavior.
34. I am hesitant about making important decisions after thinking about them.
39. I sometimes find it difficult to see things from another person's point of view.
10. Things often go wrong for me by no fault of my own.
11. Ignorance is bliss.
Many of these questions are flawed because they are both true and false, depending on how one interprets them. This is a frequent problem with proverbs, and it is a function of the intrinsic multidimensional nature of reality:
Look before you leap. He who hesitates is lost.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. Many hands make light work.
Opposite attracts. Birds of the same feather flock together.
Clothes make the man. Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Better be safe than sorry.
Actions speak louder than words. The pen is mightier than the sword.
The problem goes much deeper than that, however. To a significant extent, correctness of the answers depends on how deeply the questions are pondered. As we’ve already pointed out, shallow wisdom is essentially common sense. Profound wisdom, on the other hand, is intrinsically counter-intuitive. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that what makes profound wisdom wisdom, IS its intrinsic counter-intuitiveness. It’s wise BECAUSE it’s so counter-intuitive. The same test question might be false at the level of common-sense wisdom, but true at a more profound and philosophically probing level.
For example: “Things often go wrong for me by no fault of my own.” Interpreted at a superficial level, the question is attempting to determine whether the test-taker realizes that we usually carry some responsibility when things don’t turn out as we’d hoped. A foolish person might blame everyone around him whenever things don’t turn out well, never taking any responsibility. Fair enough. However, a wiser test-taker might understand that luck and chance play a vastly greater role in outcomes than people like to believe. Being born smart or talented or patient, or being endowed with the capacity to work hard— these are lottery winnings, too.
A wise person might realize that any part that she might play in shaping her own life path is a function of 1) her genetic makeup, 2) her present environment and its influence on her, and 3) her accumulated past experiences. If one traces the string of causal relationships far enough back, one reaches a point (in infancy), where one’s actions are purely a function of genetics and environment— neither of which one has any control over. Those actions then, in conjunction with genetics and subsequent environmental influences, determine all the future decisions and actions that follow in one’s life. Unless one holds a belief in “magical free will” which breaks the laws of physics and transcends causal relations, nothing is our fault in absolute terms.
Another problem is the fact that an extremely wise person can give correct and justifiable answers that a less wise test writer assumes are wrong. This happens in IQ tests, too, because the writers of IQ tests often assume that the test takers will interpret their questions in the most obvious, conventional, culturally-standard manner. They rarely take “outside of the box” thinking into account when they formulate the test questions. There’s a certain irony there, because a capacity for “outside of the box” thinking is closely correlated with intelligence (and wisdom). In the case of wisdom, non-standard perspectives are only one variable. There are many others.
For example, the test writer might ask if the test taker agrees that “ignorance is bliss” because a person who equates ignorance with happiness is unlikely to reflect deeply, seek understanding, or ask profound questions. On the other hand, since the phrase is generally considered to be a truism, familiarity with this fact could be a sign of mild wisdom. This is one of those questions that can be either true or false, depending on how it is interpreted. Straight-forward, predictable interpretations aren’t the only possibility, however. A wise person might interpret the phrase in the context of the parable about the Zen master who equated an opinionated student with a tea cup that is already filled. Ignorance, in that context, would be the absence of entrenched belief, dogmatic knowledge, and false confidence. We are told that, when the Oracle at Delphi claimed that Socrates was the wisest man in all of Greece, he first denied the claim, but later admitted that it might be true— given that, knowing that he knew nothing, he was wiser than men who were unjustifiably confident in their opinions.
Alternatively, a wise person might interpret “ignorance is bliss” within the context of the biblical story of Eden and the fall from grace. After eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve were kicked out of paradise and told that they would suffer in ways that no other creature had ever experienced. They were also informed that, unlike the animals which still resided in Eden, they would eventually die.
The story of Genesis accurately depicts the break that the early hominins made from other species when they first began to develop 1) a sense of justice and injustice (morality), 2) awareness of the many hypothetical dangers and threats that exist outside of present moment experience, and 3) knowledge of their own mortality. Most animals enjoy the bliss of ignorance because they are incapable of imagining events outside of their present moment experience and oblivious to their own mortality. In the context of this sophisticated mental framework, ignorance is indeed bliss. The fact that test writers might mark such an insightful affirmative answer wrong is highly problematic.
When we attempt to compose questions that measure wisdom, we need to be aware of the fact that wisdom, almost by definition, involves looking at things from non-typical perspectives and framing reality in counter-intuitive, unusually insightful ways. To an ordinary person, matter and energy are clearly different things, as are time and space. To a particle physicist, they are aspects of the same thing. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson provides empirical evidence for the idea that even matter and the empty space which contains it are aspects of the same “thing.” (The very “stuffness” of subatomic particles, their mass, resides not in the particles alone but in the invisible fields through which they move.)
Similarly, to an ordinary person, good and evil are intrinsically different— even opposite. To a profoundly wise person, however, they are aspects of the same thing, interdependent and inseparable. In the same way that a physicist speaks of “space-time,” we should really speak of “good-bad.” If the composer of a test of wisdom isn’t themselves profoundly wise, or at least incredibly cautious, it is very likely that they will create a faulty instrument.
Finally, as some have already pointed out, the form of the multiple choice answers used in this test is problematic. Extreme responses give better scores than moderate responses. Here, too, we find irony, given the fact that several of the test questions are designed to determine whether the test taker realizes that reality isn’t all black and white. (eg. “You can classify almost all people as either honest or crooked.” “People are either good or bad.” “There is only one right way to do anything.”) If reality isn’t simplistically black and white, and if many different ways of framing and interpreting the questions are possible, then designing the test in such a way that extreme, black and white responses always give better scores makes little sense.
Again, it isn’t my intention to be critical of this test. I think it’s a wonderful, impressive accomplishment. As the above analysis demonstrates composing a multiple choice test of wisdom is a dauntingly difficult task. The author(s) of this test did an excellent job, and I learned a lot from taking and evaluating this instrument.
