Oh Boy, John Reeled Me In Like a Fish

Scene: John pings me on X: "Differentiating information from experience, and knowledge from wisdom" – Andrew Holecek. "@zakelfassi thoughts?"

We aren't even connected on X. Our digital rapport lives on Farcaster, under different avatars. His 10 following / 1,671 followers asymmetry scratches my ego. I hover. Then—I bite. This post is the tug on that line.

This essay exists because of that ping. The ping is information. My pause—ego flare, curiosity, click—is experience. Writing this—patterns organized and stress-tested—is knowledge. Whatever, if anything, you and I do differently after reading becomes wisdom.

So the post is also the reply. Recursively: without the ping, no post; without the post, no reply; without the reply, the ping remains an orphaned datum.

The Quadrade: Ladder and Loop

On one hand

There's a tidy ladder:

Information  →  Experience  →  Knowledge  →  Wisdom

Each rung integrates the one below: signals become encounters; encounters become reliable know-how; know-how becomes right-timed discernment. Business schools call this the DIKW hierarchy (Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom). Even academic literature warns it's not strictly linear—useful, but leaky.

On the other hand

Real life isn't a staircase—it's a roundabout. Humans leap rungs and backfill:

• Gut sense (proto-wisdom) arrives first; later we rationalize with information
• Information piles up online without ever becoming experience (the internet problem)
• One intense experience—illness, pilgrimage, a startup dying—condenses into wisdom faster than a year of reading

A simple map you can use

         (leaps && loops)
     ┌───────────────┐
     │               ▼
Info ──▶ Experience ──▶ Knowledge ──▶ Wisdom
  ▲  └───────────────┘      ▲            │
  │           ▲             │            │
  └───────────┴─────────────┴────────────┘
        (backfilling & recontext)

Working rule: Favor cycles over stacks. If you can't point to a recent experience coupled to your information, assume brittleness. If you can't point to a decision or restraint (a wisdom move) emerging from your knowledge, assume performative expertise.

The AI Complication: Can a Thing "Be" Without Experience?

Claim A (popular): Modern AI has (virtually) infinite information, increasingly well-structured knowledge, but no experience and thus questionable wisdom. LLMs as "stochastic parrots"—Bender et al.'s critique that they stitch patterns without reference to meaning, simulating understanding without comprehension. LLMs stitch patterns without reference to meaning.

Claim B (contrarian): Some AI systems do accrue synthetic experience—they act in environments (games, browsers, UIs), receive feedback, and update policies. Example: OpenAI's Video PreTraining (VPT) learns multi-step Minecraft tasks from human video, then fine-tunes via action-feedback loops. Is that not scalable, second-hand experience?

What actually matters: Coupling. In embodied cognition and enactive mind theories, experience isn't raw input—it's sensorimotor coupling with stakes: acting in the world, getting corrected by it, over time. Enactivism posits that cognition arises through dynamic interaction between mind and environment. Without that loop, "experience" collapses into replayed symbols. Without that loop, "experience" collapses into replayed symbols.

A useful bridge from causality: In Judea Pearl's terms, experience is the do-operator—interventions, not just observations. Pearl's causal ladder: seeing < doing < imagining. You haven't "experienced" fire from videos; you've experienced it when do(touch) updates your policy through consequences. You haven't "experienced" fire if you only saw videos; you've experienced it when do(touch) and your policy updates. If a system never does—or if its doing carries no consequences—it has information and maybe knowledge, but little claim to wisdom.

Bottom line (for now):

• LLMs: dazzling information compression; partial, simulator-bound "experience"; emergent know-how in limited arenas; wisdom only by proxy (human-in-the-loop norms)
• Embodied/agentic AIs: increasing synthetic experience in sandboxes; still thin on real-world coupling and long-horizon stakes—where wisdom usually incubates

If wisdom is close to Aristotle's phronesis—timely right-action given particulars, aimed at living well—then it implies values, context, and consequences, not just pattern mastery. Phronesis (practical wisdom): the intellectual virtue that enables acting rightly in particular circumstances. Distinct from episteme (theoretical knowledge) and techne (craft knowledge). That bar remains human-led.

Beings Club: Ritual Tech for Closing the Gap

Enter Beings Club—John's minimalist container: thirty humans max; Sundays; 90 minutes; no prep; a short practice; a 1:1; a small-group; closing reflections. It's not "content"—it's curated coupling. It turns information (that X ping) into a repeatable experience, which—through rhythm and social mirrors—ferments into knowledge and sometimes wisdom.

From my own sessions, the value wasn't consensus; it was resonance. Conversations felt like collectively untangling threads already rattling in my head. That's enaction in miniature: meaning arising in interaction. When feeds optimize for information velocity, communities must optimize for experience density. Not louder takes—better loops.

Why this matters now: when feeds optimize for information velocity, communities must optimize for experience density. Not louder takes—better loops.

A Tiny Protocol You Can Steal (Beings-adjacent)

If you want to run a micro-salon this week:

1. Anchor (5 min): Pick a practice with stakes. Tea is fine; hitting "deploy" is better.

2. 1:1 (15 min): Each person shares one experience from the past week that updated a belief. No "content." Must be a do().

3. Triad (20 min): One hot question → two contrarian takes → one action or restraint.

4. Close (5 min): Name a wisdom move you'll attempt (a decision, or a deliberate non-action) and the condition under which you'll not do it.

Rinse next week. Treat it like interval training for discernment.

The Reply—As a Post, and as a Tweet

This post is my reply. It only exists because John pinged; the ping became experience; the experience became knowledge here; any wisdom emerges if we (you, me, John, the room) act differently this Sunday.

If you want the tweet-sized version to sit under John's:

Ladder ≠ life.

Info → Experience → Knowledge → Wisdom is useful, but humans leap rungs & backfill. AI flips the tension: ∞ info, slim experience, debatable wisdom. Without do()—stakes-tied coupling—does the thing be? Beings Club is ritual tech for closing that gap: fewer takes, better loops.

Where I Land (for now)

• On one hand: The ladder clarifies drift. If your calendar has no deliberate experience attached to your inputs, expect brittle "knowledge."
• On the other hand: Don't fetishize linearity. Intuition sometimes is compressed wisdom—best honored by testing it, not explaining it to death.
• Re: AI: Powerful simulators with growing "as-if" experience are not yet moral agents. Keep humans in the wisdom loop, and use communities/rituals to translate knowledge into right-timed action.

If you're Beings-curious: drop in on a Sunday, then take the protocol home. The point isn't to agree; it's to couple.

For John, who cast the line. For anyone else swimming in information but starving for wisdom. The reply is the post is the experience is the knowledge. What we do with it next—that's the only wisdom that counts.