What does wisdom mean to you?

Temperance and foresight are two characteristics that come to mind.

The intelligent application of knowledge.

The capacity to separate your ego from your beliefs.

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…Or the ability to speak, think or comprehend philosophically while facilitating logical thinking, and to cast judgement based on truth and without assumptions.

Seems to me that wisdom is often like pornography: I know it when I see it.

When I was young, I wanted to be wise when I grew up. But now that I’m up, I have no more idea of what being wise means than I did when I was a teen. I’ve experienced a lot more, and I have some idea about how to behave in a lot more situations than I did back then, but that doesn’t seem like wisdom to me. It’s just experience, and the knowledge that comes with experience.

I think one or two people here have called me wise to my face (don’t worry, I punished them severely). It was gratifying, but I still had no idea what it meant. Is there some standard for applying knowledge? Is there any way to meaningfully compare one person’s wisdom to the next’s?

I think wisdom is like the SAT. What it boils down to is how much culturally specific knowledge you have, and how good you are at taking tests.

Perhaps more importantly, I think it’s how many people actually listen to you, and take your advice to heart. I.e., the market, once again, is a good way to see if someone really is wise, or not.