Teaching Wisdom
The goal of A Wiser World is really two-fold. It is both about acquiring wisdom (by finding the first principles of all topics), and about teaching these ideas to people. We have looked at how to acquire wisdom. Now let’s turn to how to teach it.
Teaching wisdom involves expressing ideas with the hope that they are learnt in an accurate way, and that the person is able to apply those ideas in their life in such a way that their life and society thrive. Thus, there are three things we want to make sure of:
- Are the ideas accurately understood or learnt?
- Is the person able to apply them in their life?
- Does the application of these ideas make their life and society better?
Let’s look at each in turn.
Accurate learning
It is easy to make the mistake of believing that if someone has heard what you said, or read what you wrote, they will also have understood what you were trying to communicate. But that is often not the case. People may interpret your words differently than you. For some people one thing is obvious, to another it is not. Or they may simply not believe you. Learning from others is a risky business. How do I know that I’m not lied to? Or that the person trying to teach me something is incompetent and has misunderstood everything?
For people to learn things the way they were intended therefore involves the following:
- Trusting the source. If we don’t trust the source of the information we will not make an effort to learn it. If we suspect that the information is wrong or misleading we won’t think that it is useful to try to learn it.
- Understanding the information. We may understand words or sentences differently depending on our experiences. And some words or ideas may be new to us, so we may not understand them at all unless we have concrete experiences that help us understand them.
Thus, in order to teach wisdom, we do well to:
– provide the source for the ideas we are trying to teach, so that they can feel confident that the ideas are accurate.
– get feedback on how the listener interpreted or understood what was said, so that we can figure out if they understood what we meant, and if not, how to adjust our teaching to help them understand better.
Feedback also allows us to discover mistakes that we have made. Even the wise make mistakes, and by engaging in dialogue with the person we are trying to teach we get an opportunity to discover mistakes.
We can use the knowledge method (OCHPA) to figure out how best to express ourselves in order for people to understand what we mean.
Observation: We can ask how they understood what we said and listen to their reply.
Comparison: We can compare this to what we expected them to say, and see whether we succeeded in communicating what we intended.
Hypothesis: From this can form a hypothesis of why the person understood what we said differently. Was it the use of a certain word? Was it an example we used? Or perhaps the lack of examples?
Prediction: We can then try to figure out what we could add or change that we predict will help the person understand better.
Action: We can then express ourselves in this new way, which hopefully helps the person understand better.
And if it doesn’t help, we can just repeat the cycle.
Applying in real life
If it is easy to make the mistake of believing that people understand us perfectly when we say something, it is even easier to make the mistake of believing that once a person has understood something they will automatically apply this in their lives without any problem. But knowing something and being able to do something are two different things. As humans we often do things we actually know we shouldn’t do. Perhaps we forgot, perhaps there were practical reasons that prevented us from doing it. So in order for us to make sure that we are successful in teaching wisdom, we must also see to it that people are able to apply the ideas in real life.
For this reason we must try to express our ideas in a way that connects to real life situations. If we are too abstract then it will be unclear how the ideas relate to our everyday lives.
In order to figure out how successful we are at this, we may once again use the knowledge method, and observe whether people really are able to apply the ideas in their lives or not. After a while we will get better and better and express ourselves in more appropriate ways.
Enabling a better life and society
Even if people understand what we have to say, and are able to apply the ideas in their lives, we are still not done. For the ideas to classify as wisdom, it is necessary that when people apply the ideas in their lives, their lives actually get better. This is harder to keep track of. Some things may take a long time before they have a significant effect. It takes more rigorous scientific studies in order to find the answer to such questions.
In order to be as successful as possible in this regard, we need to look at the science available on this question, and incorporate that knowledge into what we teach. We also need to figure out where knowledge is lacking and try to generate ideas for how scientific investigations could be carried out to gain that knowledge.
Taking all the above together, we now have some idea of how to make sure that ideas are accurately understood or learnt, that people are able to apply them in their life, and that this application makes their life and society better. But for all this to be possible, people must have access to the ideas we want them to learn, so we must look at how we make sure of this.
Access
There are a number of ways that we can gain access to ideas. We can read a book, listen to a podcast, talk to the person directly, talk to someone who has read a book, watch a video, etc. If it is hard to get access to any of the sources, we will not be able to learn the wisdom that someone wants to teach. Reasons for low degree of accessibility can be that the book is only sold in a far away country, the person who tries to teach is hard to get a hold of, the podcast requires an expensive subscription fee, the material is only accessible in written form and we are blind, and so on.
This means that in order to be able to teach wisdom effectively to the world, we must make sure that the ideas are as accessible as possible. This includes which format we present our ideas in, what is required by the person to gain access in terms of cost or time. The easier it is for people to get access, the more likely it will be to spread wisdom throughout the world.
Next: What the first principles of wisdom mean for A Wiser World
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