Intelligence and Wisdom

I'm in a bloggin' mood this morning. It's a holiday. I could be doing work-related things. But my brain is just turned off. :-)

Is it possible for a child to be smarter than the parent? I think so ... examples of child prodigies would support that, don't you think? I doubt I was smarter than my parents. They're both pretty smart, but in different ways. From what I understand, my mother tested out with an IQ of something like 160 or so. She had a flair for art, which I think provided her with terrific spatial reasoning capabilities. I have a bit of that ... not much, but a bit.

But that aside, there really is a difference between intelligence and wisdom, isn't there? So while some whiz-kid might know how to calculate 69-factorial in their head, they might be a tad short in the common sense department.

Note: Why 69-factorial? The better calculators of my high-school days allowed scientific notation, but had only two places for the value of the exponent. 69-factorial was the largest number that worked. 70-factorial resulted in an error because the exponent was three digits long. I once set out to hand-calculate 100 factorial to get the exact value. I gave up at about 20.

Note 2: Have you ever heard of the board game called "Diplomacy?" It has no dice, no spinners, no random chance. It consists of a pre-WWI map, tokens that represent armies and navies, and relies entirely on the ability of the players to negotiate alliances and skillfully stab people in the back. There's a whole sub-culture around that game. I used to play that back in high school. I did things like that rather than date girls. I was a pitiful example of a socially awkward geek. I wasn't smart enough to be a "true geek," so I wasn't considered one of the brainiacs. More than anything I was anonymous. I tried to stay that way.