I think reading is necessary but insufficient for wisdom. Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It doe

I think reading is necessary but insufficient for wisdom. Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It does provide leverage in that way. However syntopical reading isn’t sufficient to produce good work. Mortimer Adler himself tried doing it (I believe the Syntopicon was a product of syntopical reading) but those works never did well and were soon forgotten. Books encode canonical knowledge and this works in established domains but in a domains without much existing knowledge, taking action in perturbing the world actually produces more useful knowledge. This is why in these spaces it’s important to test ideas in reality and learn from them, rather than only constructing mental models. (We should strive to do both instead of the just latter) Action often produces more information than reading alone. Having ideas is often the easy part — executing on them is the hard part. If Mortimer Adler actually had some gauge on the market before pursuing the very ambitious multi year effort of producing the Synopticon, he might have produced something noteworthy (which he did with the much smaller experiment “How to read a book.” To me, wisdom isn’t about thinking rightly (which is what rationalists hold) but about being able to make good decisions with good judgment.