Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence

Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence It’s not just okay for some things in life to be hard-it’s essential. Illustration by Ben Wiseman This article was adapted from James Geary’s book,The World in a Phrase. The first aphorism I ever read was on the Quotable Quotes page of Reader’s Digest , one of only two publications available in my house growing up. (The other was Time magazine.) I must have been about 8 years old when I came across the following sentence by Gerald Burrill, then the Episcopal bishop of Chicago: The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth . At the time, I had no idea what an aphorism was. I was just 8. And I had no idea what Gerald Burrill’s observation meant. But I knew there was something special about that sentence and the others I discovered on the Quotable Quotes page. I loved the puns, the paradoxes, the clever turns of phrase. And I was amazed at how such a compact statement could contain so much meaning. As a kid, that aphorism stuck with me, even more so many years later when I finally understood what the bishop was getting at-that drudgery is a habit-forming enemy of joy, and that staying in a dead-end job leads nowhere. I’ve been obsessing about the respective depths of ruts and graves for more than 50 years now, wondering every morning whether I’m simply walking to work or slowly burying myself. . The World in a Phrase This is the awesome power of aphorisms, and it is what sets them apart from the trite sound bites of social-media influencers and the platitudes of self-help gurus: Aphorisms do not make you feel good about yourself. That Burrill saying doesn’t offer an easy fix or a neat solution. In fact, it doesn’t offer a fix or a solution at all. It is a great example of aphoristic intelligence at work. It makes us reconsider what we’re doing, or not doing, with our lives. Take the familiar saying “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Apart from the inaccuracy-in my experience, love means having to say you’re sorry on a regular basis-this is not an aphorism, because it’s too easy. It induces complacency. It doesn’t make you think. Much more confrontational, much more provocative, and therefore much more aphoristic is this, from the Polish writer Magdalena Samozwaniec: Love is that short period of time when someone else holds the same opinion of us as we do of ourselves . Or this wry insight from the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer: People mistake their limitations for high standards . Or the wisdom in this cynical definition by the legendary humorist Ambrose Bierce: Misfortune n. The kind of fortune that never misses. Or the rueful truth of this observation by the 17th-century French aristocrat François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld: How comes it that our memories are good enough to retain even the minutest details of what has befallen us, but not to...

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