this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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Ability to synthesize things from different areas into a coherent single system.
In academia this is called “interdisciplinary research.” The ones who have consciously mastered this are the dialecticians (mainly Marxists), since dialectics is the understanding of systems by analysis of each part, both in its particularity and in its relation to the whole, before reconstructing the whole from the concepts obtained from that analysis. In bourgeois academia, interdisciplinary research has a limit that concepts are thought to be fully independent in their being, their interrelations accidental rather than essential.
So I guess being smart is thinking like a Marxist, which is thinking like a scientist (in the broadest sense).
The best physicists tend to have a more or less conscious understanding of dialectics (usually less) since many of the big breakthroughs have come from synthesis and unifying theories. It would be my dream for dialectics to have a more prominent role in physics (and obviously science in general) but I think this can only happen in a Marxist institution.