<p>QM - Andrew Carnegie? I wrote college admission essays years ago on his funding of small town libraries. </p>
<p>And this whole discussion is one of the reasons why I wished I’d considered History of Science as a major! I always wanted to write the book on the Carnegie libraries - alas someone beat me to it!</p>
<p>Just an admissions essay! The prompt was someone historical you’d like to meet and why. </p>
<p>Thomas Midgely, Jr.<br>
Gavrilo Princip</p>
<p>People I’d love to meet after their most famous actions, to ask, “well, in hindsight, was that the best use you could find for your talents?” Or before, to try to dissuade them.</p>
<p>Re wisdom vs. knowledge: I certainly understand that wisdom is more than knowledge. I think that wisdom tends to be developed by the combination of experience and a reflective spirit. </p>
<p>Take the topic of mortality, for example. I can agree that there might be some 18-year-olds whose experiences have developed in them an understanding of mortality that I would find illuminating. But for the most part, I don’t think you will find much wisdom about mortality among 18-year-olds. Indeed, I thought I had made my peace with mortality some time ago; but recently I discovered that I had just had a few years’ pause in the deaths of people who mattered very deeply to me.</p>
<p>Re PG, #420: The major industrialist in my hometown was not Andrew Carnegie, though he might have been inspired by Carnegie’s example.</p>
<p>On a separate topic, I would have to admit to skipping a few 10 am classes myself, when I was in college. a) The professor distributed his notes; and b) I was up late doing problem sets for other classes, not doing anything that was technically “fun.”</p>
<p>One of the movie scenes I really enjoy is in Real Genius, set at Supposed-Caltech. The professor in one of the physics classes notices that at each session, there are more and more tape recorders sitting on the student desks, and fewer and fewer students. In the final segment of that section, the professor has left a tape recorder playing at the front of a lecture hall that is empty except for the student tape recorders.</p>
<p>Ha, I’m old school - I attended lectures AND recorded them! On equipment that would embarrass any self respecting student of today. </p>
<p>^^^D2 attends class regularly and takes notes prolifically, color coding and organizing. She got really peeved when, after loaning her notes to a couple of friends who made good grades on the exam after using them, received literally 15 texts from people in her class asking her to scan her notes and send them to them because they couldn’t be bothered to attend class or take notes if they did. She sent a mass text to all the freeloaders and said she wasn’t running a note taking service. Some were sheepishly understanding, but a few sent her nasty responses. Geez.</p>
<p>I was an attendance nerd also back in the day. </p>
<p>She should have just attached a fee to the service!</p>
<p>As I remember, when I went to undergrad, there were note taking services for a fee. I didn’t trust them, though! Nor did I have the funds anyway. :D</p>
<p>Oh I understand that it was just an admissions essay - sounds like a good one.</p>
<p>This is the book I wish I’d written: <a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Carnegie-Libraries-Across-America-Preservation/dp/0471144223#”>http://www.amazon.com/Carnegie-Libraries-Across-America-Preservation/dp/0471144223#</a></p>
<p>Too funny about the notes. I took excellent notes and my roommate used to borrow them for a course I was only auditing, but she was taking for her major.</p>
<p>I attended the vast majority of classes except when I was seriously ill or attending my grandmother’s funeral. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Several classmates wanted my notes because it seemed I understood what the Prof was discussing and I had a rep for doing well. Unfortunately, they were extremely disappointed when they found my notes were extremely skeletal at best* or made too many esoteric references/analogies that they likened it to decrypting ancient dead languages. </p>
<p>Some of those disappointed classmates also responded pretty nastily which I found to be ROTFLOL-worthy. :)</p>
<ul>
<li>Skeletal was one disappointed classmate’s description of half a semester’s notes which took up only two sides of a loose leaf sheet.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>@cobrat, were you a classmate of Gary Shteyngart by any chance? I can just imagine a character like you in one of his books! :)</p>
<h1>424 I have had that experience this last year as well. My background and culture have meant more than a few death bed watches during my life, beginning when I was elementary school aged. Before that, I was just encouraged to go kiss and say goodbye. Once I only pretended to do so and had to live with a few decades guilt before finally understanding it really didn’t matter. I was a little bit wiser at that point. My kids are so much more intelligent and so much better educated than I could ever have envisioned myself. They can not understand mortality in the same way I can. So they ask me questions to try and understand. When they reach my age, they will understand it much better than I do now, but that is a long ways off. Timely subject since I’m waiting for the call to leave for yet another family funeral. Being the matriarch, part of the oldest generation is something that can be described, but is it possible to really understand that state of being without living it? These days I do my best to pay really close attention to what my older friends are saying and ask any questions I can think of because soon there won’t be any left to pass on the wisdom of age and that is truly a standing on the brink of the abyss sort of moment for me.</h1>
<p>so - intelligence, knowledge, wisdom: pretty much all different concepts to me. I hope the speaker meant something about making best use of potential and talent. I guess “best use” is one of the subjects of the thread.</p>
<p>I’ve got kids very hesitant to share notes (because after all, life is a competition) and one delighted to do so because this stuff is so much fun and he wants everyone to have access to the fun even if they were off doing some ECs and had to skip class. And he wants everyone to get the highest grade. Because that makes people happy. I think “best use” of his talents would be teaching, in some capacity or other, but we shall see how it all turns out. My evaluation of his potential may or may not be a wise evaluation, but it is based on 58 years of observing and judging countless teachers.</p>
<p>adding: the “life is a competition” sort of approach is valid and we need those guys. This also I understand in a different way at 58. Almost my whole world is shades of gray. I am having to deliberately add some black and white back in at this point!</p>
<h1>433 rings very true for me.</h1>
<p>For the advocates of the wisdom of 18-year-olds, are you wiser now than you were at 18, or less wise?</p>
<p>There is probably a reason why people sometimes wish they could send messages to their younger selves, but you rarely hear of someone wanting to send a message to his/her older self (not never, but it is pretty rare). About the only useful message I could think of, to come from my younger self would be, “Hey, I am doing the best I can!”</p>
<p>Of course, I would like to have been able to send messages forward in time: That Canadian mining stock? Buy it! Later on, buy Cisco! Then, sell Cisco! Except that my younger self didn’t know any of that.</p>
<p>I definitely believe that there are people under 30 who are innovating at Stanford. But a lot of them are advanced Ph.D. students who have spent years acquiring background knowledge, a lot of them are post-docs, and some of them are faculty members. There are some who are innovators in fields where it takes relatively little background knowledge, and of those, some might be undergrads. But I don’t think that’s the common pattern.</p>
<p>Your experiences may have varied, but I think that it takes a lot of openness and a certain amount of humility to learn from other people. There were a few of my undergraduate classmates who were pretty full of themselves (“Pffffttt! I’m already wise!”) and learned less than they otherwise might have. </p>
<p>Besides the mortality question, my kids and some of their friends started wanting to talk with me a lot about sex and relationships when they reached college age. Not because I was smarter than they were; that they knew wasn’t true, but I had life experience they didn’t have and they were smart enough to want to tap that. It was clear to me they weren’t necessarily in agreement with my answers but they still wanted to hear what I had to say. Also, a few years later I understand it had to do with the fact I am still married and still very much enjoy my husband’s company. Some of the friends had parents who stayed together until the kids were off to college. Thank goodness even ten years back I had enough wisdom to realize parents owe their kids a whole lot but not the entirety of their lives. At 20, I couldn’t understand divorce at all either. OTOH my husband, a much wiser person, warns me not to be patronizing of our kids. You will understand when you’re my age isn’t really all that helpful. Even when true.</p>
<p>There are always people innovating, whether they are 10 or 30 but then there are also people who think they matter a lot more than they do in reality to the innovator’s growth. I think many professors with their exalted chairs/positions do belong in the second category.</p>
<p><a href=“This CEO's out for blood | Fortune”>http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/</a></p>
<p>Those professors who recognize the kids who are 18 or 19 can be wiser than them, do end up working for them.</p>
<p>texaspg: how do you define wisdom? How do you define success? How about meaningful life work?</p>
<p>Why do we need to define wisdom at all? Why is it relevant?</p>
<p>Kids go to to college to become productive members of the society. Whether they need college to do so is quite debatable, let alone whether they need professors.</p>