I've found that hardship seems to be the best at imparting wisdom. Several years out of college I don't think I was very different from the day I graduated, but then one day something happened to me and I was suicidally depressed for months and experiencing immense amounts of pain every day. When I came out the other side I was a different person.<p>People kept telling me: This is an opportunity. You can use it to grow if you want. I think I did, and I think it taught me that as much as it sucked, I gained something I would not have otherwise have had from the experience.
Anecdotal data point from one who's old, by chronological criteria.<p>I can't say I feel wiser than I was at 25 or 50. Different, definitely. I'm still unclear what constitutes "wise".<p>But as I age, I increasingly see the degree to which phenomena are interconnected, and the knock-on implications regarding complexity and unanticipated consequences. It biases me to err in the direction of generosity and empathy.<p>Still, it would feel good to know what "wise" is. Not sure I'd recognize it if it bit me in the butt.<p>That said, go read Staudinger's paper (SciHub is your friend). Set a reminder to rethink these issues everytime your age doubles. You'll be interested in your results.
It's experience that matters. An elder person with less exposure to different situations may not be able to offer good advice in general, but ask them about their own specific niche on which they've spent a lot of time, and you'll be amazed at the wisdom there.
Studies like this that try to pin or correlate a fundamentally changing, social concept like wisdom with precise quantitative fixtures are idiotic.<p>No matter the qualifications the authors might make to ensure their definition of wisdom is as empty and useless as that of a specific number, the grand claim of the study makes it sound as if they hadn’t even grasped that qualitative concepts are subject to change and depend upon the entire universe of conditions that impinge upon the concept’s users.<p>What we mean by wisdom today in 2018 and what, for example, the ancient Greeks or scholastics meant by wisdom is entirely different, such is the power, history, and blurry bounds of the concept—and the point of studying these concepts in such a quantitative fashion is refuted before it’s even made.
Wisdom is not something you get. It's something you learn.<p>I've met plenty of 75-year-olds+ that are just morons. Age is just a number for them.
Heinlein knew it in 1973:<p><i>Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit.</i><p>Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love"
Link to full PDF: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publication/247779532_Older_and_Wiser_Integrating_Results_on_the_Relationship_between_Age_and_Wisdom-related_Performance/links/00463529cfa9c536e7000000/Older-and-Wiser-Integrating-Results-on-the-Relationship-between-Age-and-Wisdom-related-Performance.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publi...</a>
Maybe wisdom is like Pokemon, but instead of collecting cute cartoon animals to abuse, you collect heuristics.<p>At one extreme, people go through life and pick up new mental models along the way. At the other extreme are people who actively seek them out.<p>So age should bring wisdom, but not necessarily more than younger people.
I can see this, but I feel like it would depend on the person. Some people constantly learn and improve as they grow older and those people become wise as their life goes on. Other people just do not ever learn, so why would they be wise when they are old?
"You should listen to people that are older than you are. Even if they're wrong, their wrong-ness is rooted in more information than you have."<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaPqFI5-yWM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaPqFI5-yWM</a>
Most people definitely become wiser with age. Maybe the results are skewed because millennials are a particularly wise generation which have to deal with increasingly complex social, economic and environmental problems and this forces them to think more and ask more questions. Also, the internet has given millenials a big advantage in terms of finding information. It's not fair to compare one generation with another completely different generation; we need to track people from the same generation over a long period of time in order to get meaningful results.
Here is a link to the pdf, without having to pay sagepub : <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publication/247779532_Older_and_Wiser_Integrating_Results_on_the_Relationship_between_Age_and_Wisdom-related_Performance/links/00463529cfa9c536e7000000/Older-and-Wiser-Integrating-Results-on-the-Relationship-between-Age-and-Wisdom-related-Performance.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ursula_Staudinger/publi...</a>
Plus ça change, the better it has been said before:<p>In philosophy, anamnesis is a concept in Plato's epistemological and psychological theory that humans possess innate knowledge (perhaps acquired before birth) and that learning consists of rediscovering that knowledge within us.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)</a>
Doesn't wisdom come from experience? So, no matter how old you are, if you have done something then you have experience doing it and you have some insight and wisdom about it (whatever it is).<p>So a 20 year old who has driven the Rubicon Trail probably knows a lot more about that than a 50 year old who has never done so.
this might be a more interesting, and much more recent overview of wisdom, measurements of wisdom, and what it all means ( including how it relates to demographics ) <a href="https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/73/8/1393/4769351" rel="nofollow">https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/73/8/13...</a>