Knowledge vs wisdom by DZOF AZMI

Sunday November 13, 2011
Knowledge vs wisdom
Contradictheory
By DZOF AZMI


Books draw readers into new worlds which help them understand real life, unlike the Net, which dishes out data that we often don’t need.

I HAVE a friend who was told by a slimming centre that if she wanted to lose weight, she had to stop drinking cold water, or else her stomach would stick out.

I don’t think she even stopped to ask why before she walked out the door. She heard this right after the staff there also said they needed to make sure the wrap around her was tight enough so they could “crush the fat cells”.

I suppose sufficient pressure could help you become thinner, in the way a steamroller would help flatten Wile E. Coyote into a sheet of paper. Good for a cartoon, messier for real life.

Perhaps the centre wasn’t intentionally trying to fool my friend. Those guys may really believe what they claim.

I’ve always wondered how it is that we live in an age where knowledge of the world is at our fingertips, but true wisdom still manages to elude us. Just stare at the right-hand side of your web browser. I would like to know how Facebook knows I’m overweight. Is it analysing photos of me?

If you want further evidence that common sense isn’t all that common, just watch debates in Parliament. These good men and women were selected to represent the rakyat, but their tone of debate at times makes me wish I had the power to veto people’s choices.

Watching the debate on the Lynas power plant in Gebeng, Kuantan, was painful. Ascertaining whether a site poses public health risks is clearly in the public interest and not a trivial task. Yet, I hardly saw any real debate about the scientific merits of whether or not the plant should be built there.

One MP even accused another in his own party of not understanding the difference between radiation from a nuclear power plant and that from rare earth materials (PAS MP defends Lynas rare earth plant, Nation, The Star, Aug 25).

But I suspect most members of the public who observed this debate did not fully understand the underlying scientific implications, and so the news that an MP had seemingly turned against his own party made bigger headlines than any quantifiable report about the scientific merits of the site.

It is ironic that while the Internet is such a vast repository of information, so much of it is so fickle, or even just plain wrong.

Data may be easy to find, but extracting knowledge from it is a game of knowing what to leave out, and the wisdom to do that cannot be just learnt online. So, when you browse the Net about whether cold water makes you fat, you can also find assertions that drinking cold water can in fact help you lose weight (recipes.howstuffworks.com/question447.htm?cid=rss1). What’s more, it’s entirely based on science: cold water takes more energy to heat up, and using more energy means you burn up more calories.

Of course, one glass of cold water doesn’t make much of a difference in itself, and I think drinking many glasses would only be effective if the glasses were at the back of a pizza delivery boy’s motorcycle and you could only get to them by chasing him on foot.

But I can see many a slimming centre offering “low-temperature hydro therapy” packages, with the words “scientifically proven” next to them.

(Incidentally: There are about 300 calories in one slice of pizza. Jogging for 15 minutes burns 100 calories and heating a glass of ice water up to room temperature takes 20 calories.)

The difference between knowledge and wisdom is mostly experience. It is the ability to understand facts in the context of the bigger picture.

Schools sometimes get the brunt of this. Teachers are said to teach memorisation and not the application of facts.

I do agree that Malaysian schools at present do not give children an opportunity to understand what they learn in the context of real-life situations. But even if you can’t provide real-life experience, at least start by helping students understand the experience of others.

We already have a mechanism to do this, and we don’t need to depend on schools. It starts with books.

The important thing when reading is both the breadth and depth of the subject. Every book you read is an opportunity to see a little more of the world. A really good book is engrossing and you end up getting lost in a completely new world.

When I was in Paris once, I heard a pair of tourists beside me describe the Notre Dame as “a really old building”, which made me want to drop them off the side of the bell tower.

Yes, the Notre Dame is a really old building. You could learn exactly how old if you searched for it on Wikipedia. But if you go one step further and read The Hunchback of Notre Dame, you will get drawn into the world of 15th century Paris, and all the machinations within.

The problem is that the average Malaysian hardly reads, and I fear that this applies to the current generation, even to those who prefer to skim words in between snatching glances at YouTube videos.

I don’t know how many parents now realise that if they choose to watch TV instead of read, it sets an example for their children to do the same. And by denying them the opportunity to learn to love the reading habit, they are literally closing off whole new worlds to the kids.

Besides, there’s another great reason to read books: You don’t see inane advertisements about losing weight.

> Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make of life’s vagaries and contradictions.