There are many different types of people in this world:
1. Those that are clueless about dots;
2. Those that are informed about dots;
3. Those that are misinformed about dots; and
4. Those that can connect the dots.
Those that are clueless about dots may have good reasons for being disadvantaged. They may have a poor start in life due to poverty or their parent’s ignorance. Or, it could also be due to self inflicted disadvantages as a result of their poor attitude to education and learning. However, this is in the minority, few and far in between.
To be informed about dots is to know about them. But it doesn’t mean you know the full facts about them. To illustrate, if you don’t read the Straits Times you will not get to know about dots. In other words you will not be informed about dots.
On the other hand if you read the Straits Times you will be misinformed about dots. This is a newspaper not in the business of reporting the dots. It is in the business of painting the dots as the ruling party would like the people to see it. Its sole raison d’être is to agree with everything its paymaster put out for public consumption and play the role of cheerleader par excellence.
Those that can connect the dots are a rare breed in Singapore or anywhere else in the world. When you are bombarded daily with self serving propaganda advocating hidden agendas by mainstream media it is difficult not to be influenced to a certain extent even if you have a scholarly Mensa grade intelligence quotient.
I quote Wikipedia in full on the subject of proof by assertion:
Proof by assertion, sometimes informally referred to as proof by repeated assertion, is an informal fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes, this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases, its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.
This fallacy is sometimes used as a form of rhetoric by politicians, or during a debate as a filibuster.
In its extreme form, it can also be a form of brainwashing.
Modern politics contains many examples of proof by assertions. This practice can be observed in the use of political slogans, and the distribution of “talking points”, which are collections of short phrases that are issued to members of modern political parties for recitation to achieve maximum message repetition.
The technique is also sometimes used in advertising. An example is a quote by Lenin:
A Lie told often enough becomes the truth.
To avoid such insidious media influence you must train your mind to watch what people are doing rather than what they are saying. It is easier said than done not least because our education system doesn’t teach us to connect the dots. It may teach us a lot about dots but they are taught in isolation using a compartmentalised pedagogical approach.
For example when we think of an architect, lawyer, doctor, accountant or a professional from any one of the academically rigorous tertiary programmes we tend to hold them in high regards and give them undue respect. There is nothing wrong in respecting the hard work and effort they have endured to master their profession. But it is wrong to give them more credits than they deserved simply by virtue of them belonging to a profession that command a high income.
The important point to note is that they are a trained person. Not an educated person. An educated person is someone who can connect the dots. To do that you need a lifetime of experience. It is not measured in years but in the different experiences you encountered during all these years. Some people claim they have twenty years of experience when they actually meant they have one year of experience repeated twenty times. After the first year they closed their mind to new experiences and new learnings. They just happily cruise along thinking they already know everything there is to know about their job.
There are very few educated people in this world. A polymath like Leonardo Da Vinci is qualified to be classified as one. A Minister moving from one ministry to another and screwing all of them up is anything but.
In Singapore our Ministers voted to connect their salaries to the salaries of all the top earners in the country in various profession and industry and this is their idea of connecting the dots. As if to make such they are well connected to various industry they connect their yearly bonuses to GDP growth. There is nothing more widely connected than GDP which encompasses all activities in the country in one index.
Can the people connect the dots? I am not hopeful. There are too much haze in our society and too many hasty people trying to reach the top of the food chain with those already at the top kicking away the ladders.
Life is like a fish caught in a feeding frenzy: eat or be eaten!
Deep Art Valley