This is part of River's Moonifesto, in which various of us are taking the lunar month 2022-05-30 to 2022-06-28 to write a manifesto.
My manifesto is about what I call practical wisdom, which is an important phenomenon that a lot of my work centers around.
Practical wisdom is the character of maturity in a skill that people typically develop through experience. It is a deep and intuitive understanding of what the right thing to do in some context is - being able to anticipate problems, easily spot what is important, know what is needed, and in what amount.
It is particularly distinguishable from other parts of skill because you can gain the benefit of someone else's practical wisdom much more easily than you can gain the benefit of their whole skill. If you go to someone and ask for their advice in a particular endeavour, you are drawing on their practical wisdom in particular.
It is hard (likely impossible) to develop practical wisdom in an area without having some skill in it, and beyond a certain point of skill vice versa, but the two don't necessarily go hand in hand - someone can be brilliant in an area but not wise, or vice versa.
Practical wisdom is the characteristic difference between a senior engineer and a junior engineer, or an adult and a teenager. Not everyone who is senior or an adult will possess this maturity, but generally we expect them to and feel like something has gone wrong when they don't.
Unfortunately, things go wrong a lot. Most of us grow into our wisdom at best imperfectly, or develop wisdom in one area and lack it in others.
This manifesto is about how to encourage the development of practical wisdom, and how to broaden it once you have developed it. Where possible I will talk about the problem in general, where useful or necessary I will talk about my own particular approach to it, which tends to focus fairly heavily on reading, writing, and helping others solve their problems as ways to build on the wisdom you develop in the course of normal skill acquisition and living.