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"Here’s one last advantage of dividing intelligence into well-defined problem-solving and poorly defined problem-solving: it reminds us to give some respect where respect is due."

There is another way of looking at this. A problem seems "well-defined" when it is presented in terms of your current paradigm. This means that it uses the thought apparatus with which you and everyone around you is familiar. So what appears to be a property of the problem is actually a state of affairs, a property of the whole problem/problem-solver/paradigm system. On the other side of the coin, an ill-posed or "poorly-defined" problem may actually be well-defined in an alternate paradigm. In the alternate paradigm one has new thought apparatus that suddenly make the ill-posed problem tractable.

On this view, what you call "stupid" may be identical to what you don't yet understand and what you call intelligent is that with which you are most familiar. So intelligence is not a property a human can possess but a network effect that is quite intellectually bereft.

Wisdom then is the experience of watching many paradigm shifts over time and realizing that what is stupid today may be smart tomorrow and vice versa.



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