Can anyone cite real-life examples of low intelligence, high wisdom people?

[Donnadogsoth]

I'd have to disagree with this. If my choices are to die in agony, but be remembered forever, or spend the rest of my years in comfort but die knowing only my friends and family will remember me, I'll pick the latter every time. Unless dying would somehow save someone or something I deemed important, I have no reason to do so - I get nothing from being remembered, so why is that the wise thing to do?

In terms of your immortal soul the first choice is best. If you don't believe in/don't care about that then you will pick the second choice.

[danzibr]

I think a problem with this is both int and wis are "smarts." A person with high wis may very well come off as having high int.

Another problem is... there are so many different ways to have high int. Maybe you stink at number crunching but are great with theories or patterns. Shoot, or art or music.

Anyway, back to the actual question, I teach math. I have several students who struggle with math (not that I'd necessarily call them low int), but are insightful or otherwise indicate traits associated with wisdom.

[McBish]

Know any good bureaucrats? People that despite not being smart or charismatic still succeed at business? Someone who notices a lot and understands little? Really stubborn people? It is sometimes hard to tell who is naturally wise and who just points in sense motive.

[Wardog]

This would work a lot better if artisan skills were tied to Wisdom, which they really should be. A huge amount of making something by hand, and getting any result above completely mediocre, is observation and understanding of your tools and materials.

Alternatively, games makers should stop calling their "spiritual attunement, perception, and resistance to mind control" stat "wisdom", and call it something like "force sensitivity" instead.

Then they wouldn't have to arbitarily decide that e.g. (going by 3.x) knowing stuff, making stuff, and working out what things are worth all require "intelligence", but earning a living by making and selling stuff requires "wisdom". Or that noticing hidden people depends on wisdom, but noticing hidden things depends on intelligence.

[JCarter426]

Hmm. If you want a clear answer on the difference between knowledge and wisdom, you'll have to solve various branches of philosophy. And then if you want to apply that to human behavior, you'll have to solve psychology as well. But it's an interesting question.

I'm not sure if this is a good analogy, either philosophically or in D&D terms, but it reminds me of the distinction between knowing something (wit) and knowing how to do something (ken).

To be successful at any skill generally requires a bit of both, but there are certainly cases where one is more important than the other. Cooking, for example. One certainly needs intelligence to memorize a recipe and be able to calculate serving amounts and convert units and so on, but one can also simply look that stuff up. On the other hand, memorizing the recipe won't help much if you don't know how to cook. If you're a terrible cook, you're a terrible cook. So you need ken more than wit, in that case.

Of course, cooking in D&D requires the intelligence skill. And linguistically speaking, knowing how to calculate is also ken. But I think the general concept of knowing facts vs understanding how to do things is comparable.

[Scarlet Knight]

Another real life example: George Washington vs William Howe.

Howe gained his military knowledge through experience in many battles and earned his way to General. Washington had limited experience and only earned the rank of Colonel. That experience would equal intelligence. Howe knew what needed to be done to run an army and had done it before, while Washington had not.

Howe contantly outmanuevered Washington but then would underestimate him. Washington, on the other hand, was able to see opportunities overlooked by Howe, which allowed the Americans to escape certain destruction in New York and grab victories in Trenton & Princeton. That skill, I equate with wisdom.

Thus Howe had high INT but low WIS while Washington had lower INT but much higher WIS.

[The Golarion]

I thought this was more apropos here than in the roleplaying forum, as it's not really about roleplaying but about real life. In a thread there from some time ago, the character cited to fit my request above was Forrest Gump. I discount that because Forrest Gump is not a real person. Is there anyone you know of, or have met, who is simultaneously of low intelligence ("figure out how") and high wisdom ("realise consequences")?

From Pathfinder at least, it seems to me that Intelligence is a measure of your capacity to learn and your knowledge while Wisdom is a measure of your awareness of your surroundings and ability to reason. Using these definitions, I do not think that combination is particularly rare. I know several people who are good at telling what is going on around them and cutting through rhetoric but are not good at academics and do not have a good education or knowledge base.

[BayardSPSR]

Another real life example: George Washington vs William Howe.

Howe gained his military knowledge through experience in many battles and earned his way to General. Washington had limited experience and only earned the rank of Colonel. That experience would equal intelligence. Howe knew what needed to be done to run an army and had done it before, while Washington had not.

Howe contantly outmanuevered Washington but then would underestimate him. Washington, on the other hand, was able to see opportunities overlooked by Howe, which allowed the Americans to escape certain destruction in New York and grab victories in Trenton & Princeton. That skill, I equate with wisdom.

Thus Howe had high INT but low WIS while Washington had lower INT but much higher WIS.

That sounds more like a contrast between good tactical leadership and good operational leadership.

[Scarlet Knight]

That sounds more like a contrast between good tactical leadership and good operational leadership.

Yes, I just feel that Howe's good tactics were learned, either by training or experience and thus correlate to INT.
Washington may have had good operational leadership, but without any training or experience in handling a whole army, it was intuitive , and thus fits with WIS.

[Aedilred]

Yes, I just feel that Howe's good tactics were learned, either by training or experience and thus correlate to INT.
Washington may have had good operational leadership, but without any training or experience in handling a whole army, it was intuitive , and thus fits with WIS.

I feel like you could equally make the argument though that Howe had the wisdom of experience but had become set in his ways, while Washington had the unencumbered intelligence to see opportunities.

Of course, part of the problem is that D&D lumps intelligence and knowledge in as one category, whereas really while there's often a correlation IRL they're separate things and you can have one without the other. Similarly it throws in a lot of the rest of sensory experience with Wisdom even where that makes no sense (see the OotS joke about how one's hearing and eyesight get better with age). As I think I said earlier, the wisdom/intelligence distinction in D&D is really pretty arbitrary, and doesn't map well to real life.

[Dienekes]

Personally, I see this all being just about how you divide the "9 types of intelligence"

Which are roughly:

Spatial: How you are able to visualize the world around you
Naturalist: How you are able to understand nature and natural things
Musical: Able to determine pitch, tone, and flow of music
Logical-Mathematical: Quantifying things, reasoning, and working with numbers
Existential: Dealing with philosophical questions
Interpersonal: Sensing people's feelings and emotions
Bodily-Kinesthetic: Ability to coordinate your body
Linguistic: Ability to express yourself eloquently
Intra-Personal: Ability to sense and understand your own feelings.

Now a lot of these have overlap but I would place these, when being forced to fit them into the D&D attributes as something like this:

Spatial: Wisdom
Naturalist: Wisdom or Intelligence
Musical: Wisdom
Logical-Mathematical: Intelligence
Existential: Wisdom primarily, but Intelligence can get their say as well
Interpersonal: Wisdom
Bodily-Kinesthetic: Dexterity
Linguistic: Charisma
Intra-Personal: Wisdom

Now, with that in mind I would place as a person with a high understanding of their desires or other people's desires OR a high spatial awareness without really being smart (since Wisdom is kind of used to shoehorn in a lot of random stuff in D&D).

It should also be noted, that while Intelligence is at least partly increased by education, just looking at your highest level of education might not be a good indicator of Intelligence, it could mean they just dumped all their skill points into one topic that happened to be Intelligence based.

Now, and I don't know if anyone would like to count this, but I can easily think of someone in my life who I would classify as low Intelligence, reasonably high Wisdom. A good friend of mine, she's a nurse, who failed college twice trying to get her degree. She is quite frankly, one of the worst people I have ever seen trying to do math or just learn from books. She had to work at learning harder than I ever had just to get her Bachelor's and nursing license. But she knows people, far better than I ever could. She is a great nurse (so I'm told anyway, I've never been her patient), she understands the patients, takes time for them, recognizes and helps them with their issues very well.

The only hitch in the comparison is she is damn near oblivious to her surroundings when she is not actively focusing on something. But I would toss that under the main problem that Wisdom was used as a catch all for awareness as well as being wise.

Which does bring about another potential high wisdom character. This is more theoretical, but a scout, someone who is good at recognizing their surroundings, has exceptionally high spacial awareness. That doesn't by any means imply they are logical or smart. But I haven't met any scouts or army rangers, so I can't exactly verify if this would actually play out in real life.

[Strigon]

I realize this doesn't necessarily help you have a clear idea of what they might look like, but my own grandfather fit this bill quite well.
I wouldn't say he was low Int; he was a medic in the war, which I imagine required at least average intelligence (regardless of what attribute D&D claims Heal uses). However, he was no intellectual giant; he quickly became lost at the pace of technology, and his mathematical or scientific knowledge wasn't enough to have much of a theoretical grasp on anything.

He was, despite this, the wisest man I've ever met. This manifested itself in a number of ways, the first being a keen attention to detail. Have you ever began a project, and either realized that you overlooked some small detail that complicates the situation, or realized that something was off, but you couldn't tell what? He was the sort of person that would have noticed those things before he even began.

Secondly, he had an almost uncanny ability to read between the lines. He knew the way things worked, he knew what went unsaid, and he could easily see beyond the obvious facts of a situation.

He was never great with facts, figures, or memorization, but his Wisdom was the highest I've seen. Good Charisma, too.

[danzibr]

Saint Therese of Lisieux.

[JCarter426]

Of course, part of the problem is that D&D lumps intelligence and knowledge in as one category, whereas really while there's often a correlation IRL they're separate things and you can have one without the other.

I'd say it's a mild case of the system optimizing for you. D&D defines intelligence as the ability to acquire knowledge (in the form of skill points, languages known, bonus spells, and such) and then immediately assumes anyone with intelligence automatically gets that knowledge off-screen. I guess because not a lot of people want to play intelligent slackers.

[Bohandas]

Well, this is assuming that you're right about nuclear power. It might be that you're low-wisdom because you distrust them and think they're unsafe even though they are and in fact provide the only viable medium-term energy source for the planet. Maybe you don't understand them well enough; maybe your opinion of them has been swayed by the media. I don't think the issue has been sufficiently conclusively settled for someone to be able to claim victory on that score yet.

Yeah, they're not worse than oil or coal overall; it's just that the environmental damage done by nuclear plants is generally all concemtrated in one place so it's more noticable