1527 Right Most of the Time

The problem with claiming to have wisdom is that other people cynically expect it to be 100%. If you get 1 thing wrong in 100 things, people will fixate on the 1. This makes it impossible to expect others to defer to you or respect you for being wise; they’d rather follow their own counsel then think anyone may have better judgment than them. The problem gets worse as the other person’s formal education increases. If they’re a doctor, you better be a physicist, and if they’re a lawyer, they all think no one could possibly be smarter than them. Not just those examples: pick anyone out of a crowd of successful people and every one of them would rather give you advice than take any. In that environment, how can anyone claim wisdom if they’ve ever been wrong before? The functional reality is that a “wise” person is more right than usual; certainly more right than wrong but there’s still lots of room to be wrong. In Vegas, only a 3% house advantage means that, in the end, they always win. “Winning” is an objective measurement of wisdom, no matter the number of missteps. Unfortunately, most people don’t care about the end so much as they appear “right” to others during every step along the way. That’s why wisdom is worthless to anyone but the wise person using their own wisdom to be right most of the time.