Data Doesn’t Make Me Wise. Experience Might. Even That is No Guarantee.
The superb Toni Morrison wrote 25 years ago:
In all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see… that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.
As a regular contributor to, and consumer of, many stories on Medium, and as someone who has at least made it to my mid-sixties, Morrison’s treatise on the essential differences among data, information, knowledge and wisdom are on display pretty much all day, every day.
