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Emile comments on Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: passive_fist 23 November 2013 06:04AM

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Comment author: Emile 29 November 2013 02:47:53PM 4 points [-]

Paul Graham has takes a stab at it:

"Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that "wise" means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.