The discussion for which this is the transcript is here: Using Our Practical Wisdom
—rules and incentives are so important for pharmaceutical companies. they depend on SOPs to do their jobs. they have a lot of incentive criteria to their sales person. I feel very interested in these two words.
—I’d like you to say more
—about what?
—about how incentives work
—they set a target, for example you need, your target is maybe 1000 tables (for example, this is too little) and if you achieve 1000 tablets, you get a percentage of incentive.
—like a cash bonus?
—sometimes? because I don’t know too many details.
—that’s like a sales incentive
—he’s talking about incentives to follow the law or help people
—it’s a different explanation
—it’s more like a different purpose.
—yes, but the rules are so close to our daily work. not just pharmaceuticals, but in many industries, it also applies
—sales incentives are a thing
—the practical wisdom, it’s an unclear concept. what is practical? wisdom, I get, but what is practical wisdom?
his examples, I agree with, but what is practical wisdom.
—practical is ‘real life, not theory’, but it’s also ‘achievable’
—to be a good parent, to be a good spouse. why is that practical? is it not also theoretical?
—what people might think as practical might have to do with material gain, how much money is in something. practical has to do with money. impractical means that you’re not going to have material gain, so it’s not doable. When people don’t think it’ll make money, they say, ‘it’s not practical’, like especially in Taipei
—what’s the word in Taipei?
—現實
—so what’s practical wisdom?
—現實的智慧? does that work?
—I think he means more like ‘not theoretical’
—I think, after i reviewed this video, I think he want to explain, even if you obey the rule, but if the result is not as good as you expected, you can have another way, and that’s what he means by practical wisdom. he was explaining about the judge, and the teachers, you can obey the rules to teach the students, and the law, but if you have another choice to revers, you can choose to do another thing, that’s also what he means by practice,
—like I think he means like it’s not theoretical.
—practice like medical practice, architecture practice, the knowledge gained from being on the ground.
Practical Wisdom
—The moral will to do the right thing, and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is.
—I want to add on to what he’s saying, I see a flaw in his thinking. we don’t actually know what the right thing is, but we know more about what the wrong thing is. I would say that to avoid to do the wrong thing, we don’t actually know what the right thing is. there are a lot of historical examples of people who thought they were doing the right thing, but what they were not aware of that they were hurting people in the name of doing “the right thing” but if you ask them to not ‘do the right thing’ just ‘avoid doing the wrong thing’ maybe then people wouldn’t kill each other in the name of the right thing.
—you might think your action is the right thing, I think i’m going the right thing, we might both, if we are kings, kill a lot of people in the name of doing the right thing.
so if we simplify it to , “let’s just not do the wrong thing.” killing people is a wrong thing, so we can avoid doing the wrong thing, at least.
—I feel Issac Asimov would agree with you
—yeah, it’s a little bit deeper, there’s a lot of people who thought they were doing the right thing.
—in the end of this video, he put an example for the doctors. actually they have a lot of choice, there won’t be a wrong thing, it’s just your choice. they want to influence the doctor to care for their patient. not only for their decision, they care about the patient, not just about ‘curing’ the patient. at harvard medical school, they put a course to let the medical students to have a class with their patients. he wanted to explain the practical wisdom, maybe it’s hard to explain, but for some reason, everything would be okay, the decision might be okay, but how do you improve the outcome. so that’s some thought there
—to improve the outcome.?
—yes
—With this doctor’s example, its something, if it happens to someone near you, you might be careful. with this medicine example, there’s treatments, which might at the time, medicine people thought this would improve the patient in some ay.
—I want to explain that his idea is, how do doctors care about the their patient, not just about medicine. He wants to just make their decision more vivid and care about people. The reason i’m getting so passionate. it’s because “you might be careful”, it’s not about my own thing, it’s about what he’s saying
—and I want to break down what he thinks, because I think he’s misleading. I would like to ask him questions i don’t think he could answer.
—his main theme seems to be “caring about outcomes”
—caring
—yes, and also about the results of the actions
—for the judges example, he cared about the person and his future, the judge care about the guy’s future,
—and also about the family attached to the guy
—other impressions?
—so what makes the people or the things to become better is what he’s emphasizing in his speech. How to make a better decision, it’s not only following certain rules
—or procedures?
—yes. like step 12345, no exceptions. for example we go to see a doctor, and he knows why my symptoms are, and I take medicine and go home, that’s a procedure.
—i’m not sure what your point is?
—just like you said, the speaker cares about the people future, or what they can get after some procedure or decision, so the speaker wants to explain what he thought practical wisdom means, and we just discussed a lot about what that means, he talked about Aristotle mentioned
—I was listening to one part of this article, a lot of rules is a lot of problems in our daily life. we need to do this and that, and then after work in our family. we ignore a lot of things, like feeling and love and some values of human beings. I think it’s really far to ‘how’ we have this practical wisdom. it’s hard for me to reach this in my daily life.
—when you’re saying ‘practical wisdom’ what do you mean?
—I can imagine this kind of wisdom, but I don’t know how to practice this kind of wisdom.
—I want to talk about the armed robbery case, what I noticed strongly, is that the speaker is biased to first judgement by the first judge. I noticed this because he is supportive of the first judgement, it’s an example of practical wisdom, for him. but this is one-sided. because we’re not saying, “he is not choosing to overlook that the person did commit an armed robbery” it’s the fact of this case. if this legal judgement, about an armed robbery could be given to judges, to give too much freedom to these judges based on their own judgement, it’s a slippery slope. the speaker is against minimum sentencing, but he’s not talking about arguments supporting this. he’s only talking about what he supports.
—I agree he maybe has bias, we cannot predict they guy may have done other crimes, or maybe he might actually do something worse. so the speaker may have some bias in this case.
—bias, everyone is biased. the point of listening to a person is, what’s their bias, what’s their points.
—what if I just only state only facts
—that doesn’t guarantee no bias, you can be selective with the facts
—what if I don’t know the other facts, if I believe I have all the facts, then I’d be unbiased.
—No, it doesn’t work like that. Even if you tell me every fact that you know, if you don’t know all the facts you’re still biased. my point is, we just take that into account. The point is, we understand that everyone who speaks has their own point of view, and we decide with our own judgement if that person’s ideas is something we agree with or not
—but this is leaving a weakness, he’s vulnerable, and I’m going to attack this
—so that’s your job, as the listener
—so I’m proposing that this is misleading
—so it’s on the listener to listen to other ideas. How is he misleading?
—the speaker is claiming moral high ground
—so his duty is to touch on all the different viewpoints? No, he only has to present his idea, and it’s on us to agree or disagree with him.
—It’s like he’s saying “I’m claiming moral authority to do the right thing, so you have to kill people to serve this country….”
—he could claim this moral authority, but does he have the power to make us listen? no, he’s not a president, or the leader of a church. IF he were, then he might have moral authority, and then his telling people to go kill other people would be a problem.
—it’s immoral to only present one view. it’s biased
—this is a persuasive speech, it’s about him presenting his opinion. that’s the very definition of bias. OF COURSE he’s biased, that’s his job right now, to present his selected opinion. like, right now you’re presenting an opinion that he’s biased, should you then go on to explain in what ways saying he’s biased might be wrong? are you not morally obligated to present all the viewpoints right now? is that not what you’re saying?
Final Statements
I understand the speaker’s point, I think from what i see, his point, my guess is to look at, in the medical example, to look at a patient more holistically, not as a disease or an organ. and with the judge to not see the person who committed the crime, not as an individual, but as part of a family. so it’s about giving them flexibility to see them holistically, to see them as people, rather than as a test score. so this is probably the main point of this talk.
before this class, I never thought about what is practical wisdom, and we discussed a lot just now, some ideas may not be true, we can discuss this. I think the speaker put a lot of examples to explain what is practical wisdom. without those examples i wouldn’t be able to understand. I can’t just look at the words and understand. but maybe the speaker wants to make our lives or everyone’s distribution more humanized., because he cares about people and their future, and their health and their emotion. maybe it is not true. but I think he wants to explain this part. maybe I’ll read some Aristotle, find some chinese transcriptions.
—there are intros in chinese
I only thought he tried to remind us to think about justice and better, because we know this about what we sacrifice for pursuing a better life, under economic financial world. we sacrifice a lot of things, how we feel, and family and love, we forgot a lot of things, nature and the environment.
there is a lot in this topic. I feel like the world is at a crossroads right now. we keep getting so many signs that we can’t continue on as we have. so I like to find people to see, are they pointing us in a good direction or not? like this speaker, I like the points he’s making, but whether these are practical actually? or sustainable, that’s what i wanted to talk about today. like the judge thing. mandatory sentences, it’s taking the judging out of judging, like their job is to judge, but we’re m making them executors, “executives”, people who ‘carry out’ rather than people who judge.
it’s a question of trust, really. do we trust these people to make good decisions or not. when society is too big, and we don’t know everyone personally, it’s hard to know, whether to trust this person or not. so we have guidelines, and certifications and certifying boards, and selection committees, and rules. but in the end, someone somewhere has to decide to put that person in a position of power and to judge.
In speaking of practical wisdom, I like his examples too, but like you said, i doubt this examples are practical, actually. For example, the texas teacher, I know not only the consultants and the teachers, make the mistakes or they have wrong ideas about teaching, so I the similar experience about teaching children. so parenting is important in this case, but it’s impossible to change parents thoughts, because parents only care about the scores. So that’s why I quit the job. as teacher, i didn’t know how to deal with the parents’ thinking, so the same is it practical in this example. the reason why I did the job, but I realized I have nothing to do with this situation. So I met the mother just like you described, I told her, the situation about her kid, but she doesn’t want to listen, she doesn’t care. She just wanted me to read the books to her kid. and play with the kid. she doesn’t care how badly her child’s behavior is, he’s very rude. I told her and she was just like, uh ok.
