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I've been wanting to write for a while, but yet haven't had the motivation to. Perhaps it is just that I've been out of practice, and hence have thought that I've forgotten how to phrase words together, or just anticipating it might be hard to do. Anyway, it need to keep up constant writing, or else I might never start up again.

I seem to have lost some of that motivation I originally had during my med block. I was going in, going on ward rounds, doing ward stuff, hangin' with the team, and getting pages and pages of learning issues, that I would go home (i.e. Chi's place) and study for a few hours every night. Now, there just seems to be less to do, less to learn, and I'm unsure of what to study, how to spend my time. Watching surgery is great, but the same sort of things seem to pop up all the time.

What to do?

Anyway, as I think I've previously mentioned, I seemed to have drawn some affinity between games and real life. Many games have a system for categorising and breaking down a person into different aspects - a common one is describing someone in terms of physical attributes and mental attributes. An example of this might be strengh, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, charisma. Ideally, it would be best to split up the description of a person into more categories than that - and assumedly the more you used, the closer you'd approximate to what's true in real life.

But in any case, what I was pondering the other day was the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom. The traditional view of intelligence was the ability to work things out or calculate things, whilst wisdom was more along the lines of 'know how' or 'street smarts' or 'awareness of surroundings'. The problem with this was that the distinction was all a bit vague to me - I mean, what is it about the wise man that makes him wise?

A more concrete example came to me when I was thinking about arguing and reasoning. To me, the intelligent person would be able to, from the original assumptions, be able to work out and extrapolate all the conclusions that these entail, and do so relatively quickly, compared to others. In essense, they'd be able to 'compute', manage and manipulate the data easily. On the other hand, my perception of a wise person, is one that would be able to see the big picture, and be able to choose the right assumptions to start off with, and to choose the right path to argue along, without necessarily drawing out all the details of all the conclusions possible. It would basically be keeping things in context, and seeing the bigger picture.

And it seems to me that some people lack this second skill at times, although they have the capability, as demonstrated by their conclusion forming skills. All wisdom requires is a bit thought beforehand, I think. In the context of a discussion one important question that needs to be asked is, "What is my point?", or from another perspective, "How is this point relevant to the discussion". It really iritates me when people either argue tangentially, where they lose sight of the idea in discussion by making non-relevant statements; bring about evidence that isn't linked to the conclusion that they are drawing; or when they choose to employ an argument against a point, while at the same time using that point to support their own conclusion.

Though this all sounds a bit vague, I think the main thing is people need to keep track of what it is they want to say, and then only say stuff that is pertinent to the topic. This would ensure a lot less time is spend with unneccessary clarifications and misunderstandings.