I have been revisiting an idea I've had many times in my life that is tangential to Paul's "Smart" vs. "New idea" differentiation. That is the difference betwee

I have been revisiting an idea I've had many times in my life that is tangential to Paul's "Smart" vs. "New idea" differentiation. That is the difference between "Knowledge/Intelligence" on one axis and "Experience/Understanding" on another. I feel our modern society, as obsessed as it is with science and logic, highly prioritizes the former and unduly devalues the latter. I've started to wonder what "Artificial Understanding" looks like and if there is some systematic way to describe it. I also loosely define "Wisdom" as a kind of dialectic synthesis that bridges intelligence and understanding (and thereby knowledge and experience). I believe Wisdom is the place where new ideas are bred. However, his essay struck a chord in me because it suggests a double edged sword. I'm ever-so-slightly above average intelligence. In almost every group I have ever been part of I sort near the top but rarely at the top. But I definitely have always demonstrated different thinking and often times new ideas. And I can report that not all new ideas are good ideas. This leads to quite a bit of insecurity/self-doubt. Sometimes I am literally a prophet that sees the future that no one else expected. Often I am completely off base. I have no repeatable means of discriminating between those cases. What I have learned, in those times I have acted as a leader/manager, is that I don't always go with the most logical/intellectual idea presented to me. I try to always take into account experience/understanding. That is doubly true when I evaluate my own new ideas. I should ask myself: Am I leaning too heavily on knowledge/intelligence in an area where I lack understanding/experience? Therefore I think Paul's stated trade-off of intelligence for new ideas is not strictly correct. I wonder if he would accept my knowledge/intelligence vs. experience/understanding description. If so, perhaps what he means to say is that for the generation of new ideas he might be willing to accept trading some innate capacity for intelligence for some innate capacity for understanding. In that way, perhaps one could increase the likelihood of synthesis between the two. Stated another way, it would be a sacrifice of intelligence to gain understanding with a goal to promote wisdom.