Have you ever read an article and at the end of it wondered just what it was about? If you have experienced such writing by supposed intellectuals, you are not alone.
There was once a hoax perpetuated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University in 1996. The hoax, called the Sokal affair, was basically an attempt by him to show that intellectuals had become ensconced in their ivory towers of intellectuals. He showed that as long as you wrote something intelligent sounding that was actually full of obtuse balderdash and sprinkled with random esoteric facts, it would actually be published in a scientific journal, even if it was absolute rubbish.
That one hoax so embarrassed the intellectual community that they closed ranks, and walled themselves off even further in their ivory castles of intellectualism by instituting the system of peer review. That is effectively a system where smart people give backslaps and backrubs to other smart people while others die trying to get a look in.
I tried to read the article, a link of which is posted here. I didn't understand one bit of it, and for once I didn't even have to pretend to, because the owner admitted just as much that it was absolute nonsense. But I have read other things that actually made me realise that for all of my education, I am not even scratching the surface of smart. I think that is the hallmark of genius, when something is just so ridiculously difficult to understand that it is just about complete rubbish to most people, but makes perfect sense to a special few.
As to what I mean by not even scratching the surface of smart, try understanding this esoteric programming language. It is called brainfuck, and with good reason. Don't feel sad if you read the whole thing and did not understand a word. And people actually code in that, some of them for fun. And while reading up on that I learnt about a formula that supposedly plots itself on a graph, called Tupper's Self-Referential formula. I thought it was cool enough that this was possible, nevermind that I did not understand one iota of what it was all about. Then you get some Indian genius (and yes he had to be Indian because this is IT stuff) who debunks the whole thing here.
This is why I end up reading Reddit and 9gag in my office. It is so lame at times, it makes me feel happy. I feel like I belong to the community.
In this age though, where so much information is now readily available on so many things, is there really an excuse for anyone to claim that they could not learn or do something because they never learnt it in school? You can learn just about anything off the Internet these days. I've learnt half a million things off Youtube.
Granted, there are some things you can't learn on Youtube, like how to increase Singapore's birth rates. That is one problem so difficult, you can put all of Singapore's best brains in a thinktank, and the best solution you have in the end is to give extra baby bonuses and to get the old man to exhort (yet again) for married couples to have more babies. Which is the same solution that has been used all these years that has proved ineffective.
I guess the government doesn't get that raising a family is not just about getting the baby out there, which is effectively all the one time baby bonus is good for. There is the bigger question of having to raise the kid for 21 years, which the government cannot do for you, and it is perfectly understandable if couples don't want to have more kids because they don't want to commit to anything like that.
Have you seen how families here have to fight for Primary 1 school places? Would you want to raise a kid in a place where you can't even get a place in a school that's right next to your overly expensive flat, which means you have to pay even more for school buses, an additional financial strain next to your already crushing housing loans. And all that because you paid a premium for the flat as it was near to the school, so you could get your kid into that very same school? Oh, the fuckery.
I'd actually go with creating a department in some ministry somewhere for married civil servants to dance the horizontal tango during work hours to create the kids, but I am not sure Singaporeans are ready to pay the government to have babies for them. I am sure glad that I'm not a policymaker, because there are some problems that cannot really be solved.