Never thought of it like this before.

No it fucking doesn't. If a student dodges the homework but does aces his exam, that student is smart but disobedient. On the other side of the coin, an absolute idiot who just pukes what he remembers onto exams and barely passes is obedient, but is an absolute idiot. Stop trying to make these Tumblr revelations a real thing, because if they were, the world would be very different.

I think you kinda just proved the point man

Octopi don't obey for shit. They're one of the smartest animals in the kingdom. Intelligence isn't measured by how much they're willing to obey humans. We feed animals to do tricks for us, and to obey us, it's not ownership as much as it is a symbiotic relationship, and once the food cuts off it doesn't take long for animals to want to abandon their owners and look for other sources of food. You could argue that dogs are loyal even without food, but remember we bred dogs into existence from wolves, meaning that their loyalty was as well. Intelligence in it's simplest form is coming up with solutions to problems. It can be measured by how well an animal learns, as well as how well an animal performs at tasks.

These 3 tumblers obviously didn't do well in school

Intelligence should not be confused with memorization.

I wish people would stop with the school crap. Your intelligence in school just as in anything else is determined by what you get from it. If all you learn is how to follow directions you've demonstrated to yourself and the world that is all you can see in the situation or are capable of. An intelligent person would find a way to make it productive for themselves. That's the test of school- using it in a way that helps achieve intelligent goals.

I'm a zookeeper and I can say if an animal doesn't always listen he isn't considered stupid...quite the other way around. I constantly joke that I prefer to work with Sea lions over dolphins because "they're too smart they try to train me LOL". An animal is considered intelligent by how quickly it solves puzzles...not by how often it does as it's asked