How would you describe it?
There was an Egyptian communist I came across years ago who described it as “The ability to resist falling apart when encountering contradictions” I always thought that was a useful shorthand
Unlimited curiosity and breaking down problems into manageable steps. Also knowing what you don’t know, flexibility to change your beliefs or understanding when proven wrong.
Unlimited curiosity on the First World
Make this a tagline!
Observation without ego. It takes courageous honesty to seek truth when it is often not what we want it to be. I think too many people get stuck on ideas that please them whether those ideas are correct or not.
An honest person does not choose their beliefs, they believe what is most likely true given all available evidence. If a person is not open to the idea of changing their beliefs, they can never get closer to the truth.
A desire to understand things.
There are tons of smart and clever people out there who aren’t curious and to me, that means they’re not truly intelligent.
Critical thinking, compassion, emotional maturity, always striving to learn and relearn, wonder and excitement of the world.
pattern recognition, empathy, critical analysis, ability to articulate complex situations and solutions concisely and accurately in plain language.
Humility. You will never have all the answers, but if you study, work hard, apply yourself, cooperate with others, and consider counters to your preconceptions, you might get some of them, and that’s a hell of a lot more than most people get.
Very essential part of intelligence imo. No matter if you yourself or an entire group is humble about not knowing something, it conveys your ability to learn more still, and also your ability to accept that you don’t know something / are wrong. People who aren’t humble about what they know always strike me as very unintelligent
It’s also something you tend to see in very high levels of very difficult fields (when they’re functioning well). Many serious scientists for instance tend to not make definitive statements often, unless they’re supported by tests and evidence.
In contrast, strong definitive assertions without evidence are absolutely the domain of con artists(/salespeople).
Tony stark in the marbel movie !
Real recognizes real
The ability to change your current understanding via careful observations over time.
Glasses, large skull, pens in pocket, possibly a nasally voice
Ability to work on one’s own mind with intent. If you want to be really banal about it.
That’s what intelligence is to me. It’s being alive, as oppose to just existing - which is to follow a stimuli, without question. And part of living is selectively choosing when to let yourself just be.
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.
The person reading this
erudite implies that the knowledge you have is earned rather than some innate trait. The desire to learn and experience new things.
Intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems with a relevent skillset. It’s one’s ability to use the tools they have developed.
