What is the measure of intelligence? Is it by your academic achievements?

It is truly sad today that academic achievement has become a measurement of intelligence to some when its original function should be a measurement of knowledge, if not of competence. Simply put, just because you know does not make you intelligent. It simply means you have the necessary knowledge required to deal with the tasks where those without the knowledge cannot. Above which, there are many kinds of knowledge, and certain knowledge may not be at all applicable to the problems at hand. For e.g. knowing your OSI model maybe useful in understanding networking and network data transmission, but that is completely useless in helping you identify whether a fungus is poisonous and thus edible or not.

Unfortunately, such common sense appears to have escaped even men such as the MinisterMonkey Mentor. He has recently sprouted his elitist and eugenics nonsense again. He seems to believe that if you are not a graduate, then you do not even have the right to breed, even if you marry a graduate.

Graduates… mix non-graduates… bad… very bad… for society.. no good…… must remember.. very important!

This news must have made diploma holders, the Ah Beng towkay who drove his a BMW 9-series, or the Ah Lian mamasan who earns even more money a year than some fresh graduate so sad. And this brings me to my second point: Is not the ability to effectively and efficiently use one’s available knowledge and resources, a better measure of success than academic achievements?

First, let me point out an example of 读死书 (literally: study dead books – which means having learnt something but not know how to apply) people. An IT entrepreneur friend of mine hired this girl, who is also among the top of her class as a temp during her holidays. One day, one of the IT engineers took a SCSI hard disk to her and asked her to configure it as device 6. He explained to her that there are 3 sets of pins and by shorting them with jumpers in binary code, it would determine which device it will be. It was an easy task – all you need to do is know what is binary code and the binary code for 6 (110) and short the respective jumpers.

The girl then took out a piece of paper, and started drawing out each and every position from 0 to 6. The IT engineer was in shock that she need to do this because in binary, each position represent 2 to its respective power. In other words, the leftmost set of pins will be 2², the centre set 2¹, and the last set 2⁰. In other words, shorting all 3 pins will give you device 7 as 2² + 2¹ + 2⁰ = 4 + 2 + 1 = 7. To put it to device 6, you simply just short the leftmost and center set of pins. Now how difficult is that and why is there a need to draw out each position in binary?!

In another incident, the engineer had asked the same girl during a meal break if she can name forms of wireless communications in ancient times. The girl without thinking told him that such communication does not exist in ancient times. He then pointed out that smoke and fire signals (such as those you see in Lord of the Rings Part II), flag signals, and even hand signals are other forms of wireless communications and it is not limited to just Wifi. In fact, way back in the Zhou Dynasty in probably 12th Century BC, the Chinese military is already using smoke signals by day, and fire signals by night as a means of long range wireless communications.

The point I am trying to make is this, knowledge in your own field, which can be proven by your academic achievements proves nothing about intelligence. Had I even been a believer of Eugenics, I would rather not have this person contribute her genes into the gene pool!

Now, contrast that with the hypothetical Ah Lian mamasan. She might not even have completed her GCE ‘O’ level education, but she has manage to adapt and make use of what is available to her – her ability as a woman to charm, and her talent in swaying customers in the night club to spent money on the girls and alcohol so she can earn her keep – to attain a living standard even some graduates cannot afford. Is that not a sign of intelligence? Note, I am not glamorising this trade here but just pointing out the facts as they are.

Unfortunately, by the Monkey Mentor’s definition, she is definitely an undesirable whose genes should have no part in the gene pool. And I can’t help but wonder if that is the reason why Singapore is so ordinary that there is nothing inspiring. Even if you happened to be the rare few examples of rags to riches stories in Tali-PAP Singapore, remember this, you shouldn’t breed as long as you are a non graduate. And don’t even try and get around that by breeding with a graduate because your partner would worry if your offspring would even made it to university!

And this form part of the basis of my objection as to why academic achievements is in my opinion completely inappropriate, if not insufficient, to determine who qualifies to have an offspring. And note that this is not my complete argument why Eugenics is an obsolete idea.

Meantime, blogger friend Mintea who is in the field of genetics, pointed out that graduate women is not some breeding cow (or something to that effect). She further point out that Gregor Mendel never intended his findings on genetics to be a selective mechanism for who has the right to breed or not. Being someone who is more qualified than me to talk about genetics, I take Mintea’s comment to mean that even genetics does not support Eugenics. In short, not only is it an repulsive idea, it is just plain dead wrong.

This photo was taken on the way from Jurong East MRT station to Chinese Garden MRT station. The empty seat between this scum with the PSP was previously occupied by me. (Note the position he is sitting and also the distance the guy next to him has kept.)

I do not know where this scum boarded. But at Clementi MRT station, I was jarred awake when this sack of human excrement dropped into the seat with a part of him crushing my left arm. Throughout the trip from Clementi to MRT, this guy was rocking his thighs left and right as he enthusiastically continue with his game on his infernal device, oblivious to the rest of the people around him.

I am adding the PSP to the list of infernal devices I think should all be burnt in a pyre along with Sony and Samsung ‘walkman phones’.