Knowledge vs Wisdom

The article ‘Does more information mean we know less?’ argues that nowadays, people are swamped with too much information that we lost the ability to utilize it wisely. Yes, it is true that people are provided with a lot of information more than ever. Yet, does having more information mean equal to a lack of wisdom?
Wisdom is a deep understanding of things and an ability to choose right. To understand and to make decisions, we should first gain knowledge and then develop it into a higher level. As Immanuel Kant said, all our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. To acquire sagacity, knowledge should be gained first. Separating those two, just like the author of the reading did, is nothing more than mere black-and-white logic.
To understand and tolerate others, we should know more. If our knowledge is constricted to a certain aspect – a world around us, we will never be able to entertain various view points. For instance, Indians worship cows because they are Hindus. Western countries, whose values are concentrated on efficiency, criticize their tradition because worship of cows results in extreme traffic jam and extravagance of grains. But in reality, India needs more than 120 million cows because their major industry – agriculture is run by cows’ labor and cows are also used for transportation in India. Without enough information, there is no understanding and there is no tolerance.
To make right decisions, again, we should know. We learn history to learn from the past – to analyze between similar current and past situations, to understand why and how certain events are happening nowadays, and not to commit the same mistakes as our ancestors did. We also read newspapers about the whole world even though we will not go and fly from US to France and to Libya the very next day. Reading newspapers allows us to be alarmed how the world is changing day-to-day and we broaden our viewpoints by adding diverse and analytic perspectives.
Simply saying that we have to choose between the two – wisdom and knowledge is such an ‘unwise’ thought. Maybe that is because the writer of the article limited himself to a small amount of information just like he believed in to be a wise man.

Knowledge itself has no power. But wisdom stands on knowledge.
No knowledge, no wisdom.