Data to Wisdom

Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other knowledge in a manner that is useful in conceiving, anticipating, evaluating, and judging matters beyond the reach of information.

Native societies, which endured for centuries with little increase in the capacity to receive, store, utilize, transform, and transmit information, had time to develop a very high ratio of of understanding and wisdom to data and information. They may not have known a great deal by today's standards, but they understood a very great deal about what ... See more

The fundamental characteristics of the opposite ends of this spectrum are very different. Data, on one end of the spectrum, is separable, objective, linear, mechanistic, and abundant. On the other end of the spectrum, wisdom is holistic, subjective, spiritual, conceptual, creative and scarce.

In contrast, our society understands very little about what it knows. It has ever less understanding and wisdom in relation to the data, information, and knowledge it commands. The immensity of data and information which assaults our lives is not conditioned by a similar increase in social, economic and spiritual values--in a word, wisdom. Our vast... See more

Who could have imagined that such a wealth of information, science, and technology could have resulted in collective madness, but so it has. It never needed to be so. It does not need to be so now. If there is not a similar explosion of understanding and wisdom in order to restore proper balance between the higher cognitive capacities and the lower... See more

Information becomes knowledge when it is integrated with other information in a form that is useful for deciding, acting, or composing new knowledge.