The intelligence–wisdom gap and the urgent need to close it

[摘要] For thousands of years, thinkers and practitioners across various domains — from philosophy and psychology to theology and literature — have sought for an understanding of the concept of wisdom. In more recent times, especially since progress in machine-learning capability, a corresponding search for a definition of intelligence has revealed various opinions on this widely used notion. Rather than striving for consensus on the meaning of these terms, I will try to shed light on their features by contrasting their differences, and argue that, while our intelligence is accelerating rapidly, our wisdom is lagging with a much lower growth rate. The widening gulf that expands between these concepts — which I shall refer to as the intelligence–wisdom gap — is markedly evident across many domains of life. Concerningly, the existence and growth of this gap in medicine and health care poses enormous challenges to the success of our profession, and constitutes a problem — arguably the most pressing of all problems — that must be urgently addressed.INTELLIGENCE AND WISDOM: WORKING DEFINITIONS A wide variety of theories of intelligence have so far been proposed, which have collectively generated a large and substantially overlapping patchwork of major characteristics. These include features such as the ability to acquire knowledge and learn, to deploy abstract reasoning, logic, and rationality, to build mental models, to solve problems in novel environments, to competently and efficiently complete the task at hand, and to maximise a production function with ruthless execution.

[学科分类] 卫生学