Meta Wisdom

A common definition of "wisdom", especially in engineery circles, seems to include only simple experience/conclusion pairs:

"Foo is bad. You should avoid it."
"Bar is good. You should seek it."

What if the problem wasn't "foo", but some other issue, such as the way it was done, or the people who did it?

What if "bar" didn't actually help, but it was the stone in the StoneSoup? The cargo in the CargoCult?

Yes, your experiences indicate that "foo" is bad and "bar" is good. However, have you not noticed the limitations of your experiences?

Hence: MetaWisdom. It's wisdom about wisdom. When to trust wisdom, when to question it.

"Works/doesn't work", "good/bad" "fast/slow" "do it/don't do it" -- the familiar vocabulary of conventional wisdom. However, these binary distinctions seldom correlate with reality's insistence on fuzzy lines.

(Sorry for the weakly-sketched thought... I'm trying to give words to an idea that's been bugging me for a while. I'll try to clarify what I mean, then maybe we can figure out a better term.)

You're certainly on to something real. One small example occurred to me in a dream last night: someone may have a wise indenting style in Lisp, and someone else might have a wise indenting style in C, but it would nonetheless be foolish to use the C indentation style in Lisp or vice versa. Someone who tried to take their language-dependent wisdom and assume it worked in another language would be lacking in MetaWisdom.

Synonyms or related topics: LearnTheRightLesson?, WisdomIsContextDependent?, StimulusResponse?

What about WisdomSmells? or some such? It seems you are trying to identify warning signs. One thing I have found is that people who are vehement about something are usually being close-minded. Most LanguagePissingMatches are like this. Lost of people will tell you that something sucks and the more obstinate they are about it, the less they probably understand what they are arguing about.

People tend to form their opinions quickly and for silly reasons, and to change them wth great difficulty. It's a good survival strategy if you are evading predators on the savannah, or working out which food is poisonous and which is not. MetaWisdom is about knowing what errors the HumanMind? is prone to. Its knowing a little psychology, and understanding that it applies to oneself.