Imposter Syndrome

This morning in the library the checkout machines were out of order, so I had to do something retro: speak to a librarian at the desk. I was checking out four books for Clare.

The librarian scanned my library card, addressing me by the title printed on it: “Dr Nigel Seel.” It caught me off guard: no one usually calls me that - I rarely use the title, and when I do, it feels faintly fraudulent, like I’m impersonating some more serious person.

On the walk home, I told Clare how odd it felt. She dismissed it briskly. “They just think you’re a medical doctor,” she said, “and no one likes them anymore - they spend all their time debating pro-Hamas resolutions at their conference.”

This seemed both a little unfair and entirely in character for her.

I did feel faintly important for a second or two; I mentioned that to her as well.

But the encounter set me thinking about the PhD itself. There was a trope back in the mid-1980s, when AI was in one of its episodic summer periods, when languages like Prolog were in vogue and researchers were flushed with optimism. It was said with some truth: “what used to be a PhD thesis ten years ago is now a three-week programming project for a keen grad student and a minor paper in a conference.”

I sometimes feared my own thesis might have fallen into that category.

And yet, it was properly examined by a real logician, Professor Raymond Turner of the University of Essex: a respected name in modal logic, author of several books, an influential presence in the field. He read my thesis closely, and deemed it worthy.

What amused me at the time was that the part he found most interesting - the computational agent model I’d used, inspired by the work we were doing at STL - was something I had considered quite secondary. For me, the substance was in how the research grounded logics of belief, knowledge, perception and action in the world of situated, interacting agents. He, however, was more intrigued by the model-structure than the language-semantics.

In AI circles Turner was seen with a fond detachment. “Oh, Raymond,” they’d say. “A proper logician; he doesn’t really understand AI.” He was viewed as not quite of the community. And yet, because his work was so technically formidable, there was a sort of grudging respect, even awe. That he agreed to examine my thesis gave me a degree of credibility: borrowed gravitas.

Looking back now, I don’t think the work was as intellectually heroic as I believed at the time. But that’s how time works, with its mix of belated sense-of-proportion, misty nostalgia and hard-headed realism.