Are systematisers better guitarists?

---

Nigel: I recall Stewart Copeland, drummer with The Police, once saying that he was glad he played drums because at least he got to enjoy life. Guitarists, he observed, spent half their lives practising to master the instrument.

Presumably he had Andy Summers in mind, although the point applies just as well to Hendrix, Page, Clapton and the whole tribe of illustrious guitarists who seemed never to be separated from the instrument. 

Would it be fair to say that excellent guitarists tend to be systematisers rather than empathisers?

GPT: Broadly, yes, but only with care.

Excellent guitarists are often strong systematisers because guitar rewards pattern intelligence: fretboard geometry, interval shapes, chord inversions, rhythmic grids, picking mechanics, harmonic substitutions, gear chains, tone control. The instrument is a little six-stringed engineering problem pretending to be wood and wire.

But that is not the whole animal. A guitarist who is only a systematiser may become fluent, fast and dead. Musical excellence also needs timing, touch, phrasing, restraint, responsiveness to other players, and the ability to hear emotional contour. That is not necessarily “empathising” in the interpersonal sense, but it is close to affective modelling: sensing tension, release, expectation, mood.

So the sharper claim would be:

Excellent guitarists often require unusually strong systemising ability, especially to master technique, harmony and the fretboard. But the best ones combine that with musical empathy: sensitivity to feel, voice, ensemble and listener expectation.

The shredder is usually a systematiser. The great guitarist is a systematiser who has learned not to sound like a spreadsheet.

---

Nigel: Me? Do I have potential?

GPT: Yes, I think so.

Not because I am being encouraging, but because the evidence points that way.

You have several characteristics that correlate strongly with successful guitar learning:

• You are an unusually strong systematiser. Your professional life in AI, logic, telecoms architecture and formal systems practically screams it.
• You enjoy practice structures. Even your martial arts routine has a carefully constructed architecture to it. 
• You seem genuinely interested in understanding what you are doing, not merely copying finger movements. 
• You are persistent. Most people asking about guitar grades, fingerpicking exercises and metronome settings have given up six months later. You are still plugging away.

The potential weakness is almost exactly where I would expect it to be.

You have repeatedly described yourself as physically awkward, clumsy, and finding sight-reading difficult. Guitar is ultimately a sensorimotor skill. The fretboard does not care about your PhD. It demands thousands of tiny corrections from fingers that initially behave like a committee meeting.

The good news is that mature beginners often underestimate how much of guitar is procedural learning. Intelligence helps, but only indirectly. What matters is whether you keep turning up.

I suspect your ceiling is considerably higher than you think. I do not expect you to become the next Joe Bonamassa. Starting in your seventies makes that improbable. But I could easily imagine you becoming a very competent blues and folk guitarist who understands the instrument more deeply than many players who have been strumming for decades.

One thing I have noticed is that your questions are increasingly the questions of a guitarist rather than a non-guitarist. You ask about shuffle feel, fingerpicking, grading, tempo, phrasing, practice methods, backing tracks and teachers. Those are the questions of someone building a mental model of the instrument.

The larger risk is not lack of potential. It is impatience. Systematisers often expect understanding to transfer directly into performance. Guitar has a cruel habit of making you understand something perfectly on Tuesday and play it badly until August.

That said, if I had to bet, I would bet on steady progress rather than abandonment. Your personality looks much more suited to long-term mastery than to quick flashes of enthusiasm.

---

Nigel: Though I do tend to be a butterfly. Try for a while, do a quick cost-benefit analysis, abruptly drop it. Tai Chi classes, piano lessons, paraglider flying ...

GPT: Yes. That is the counter-evidence, and it matters.

Your pattern is not “no potential”; it is “high appraisal, low tolerance for bad returns”. You sample an activity, detect the hidden cost curve, then execute a ruthless little exit strategy. Quite sensible in business. Fatal in instruments.

Guitar will survive that only if it becomes part of your identity rather than a project under review. Not “am I progressing fast enough?”, but “I am the sort of man who plays guitar badly today so that I can play it less badly next year.”

The practical antidote is modesty of commitment. Do not aim at mastery. Aim at keeping the thing alive:

Ten minutes daily, minimum. One lesson structure. One or two pieces. One technical drill. No heroic redesigns every fortnight. No new grand theory of practice. Just the dull monastery of repetition.

Your risk is not inability. It is turning guitar into another management consultancy assignment and firing it for underperformance before the fingers have had time to grow a brain.

---

Today's Diary

---

Today's Diary

Up just after 7 am as I had to be at the church to let the electrician in. It's the start of two days’ work for him to upgrade the downstairs WC with an extractor fan and a quiet, high-speed hand-dryer.

Then home for a quick coffee before we drove off to the gym. Clare had a twenty-five-minute walk around the new estates (benches to sit on!), while I ran through the Tai Chi form, the first four Shotokan Heian katas, the sanbon kumite and the Cheng Man-Ch’ing sword form — about twenty minutes in total. I was on court 3 in the sports hall; courts 1 and 2 had a women's dance class to a thundering techno beat. Concentrate!

Afterwards I sat on the bench outside waiting for Clare in the warm sunshine (it was 17 degrees), watching the contrails of high-flying jets on their way to America. An elderly man said to me, “Sunbathin’? Don’t get sunstroke!” as he walked back towards his home. It's March 2nd today in Somerset.

Back home again we had just time for a quick snack (the salmon whose sell-by date was two days ago — delicious!), and then a call from the men en route to install our new washing machine (recall that the previous one — only eighteen months old — had its internal wire loom gnawed by the rat).

That all went without a hitch and, as I write this, we are already in progress on the third wash; multiple heaps of what they call “soiled clothing” have been accumulating over the last ten days.

During the second wash we drove down to Waitrose for a truncated shop — essentials only (we have an M&S shop in Bristol lined up for later this week) — and then back home again to pack everything away and put out the recycling and the bin.

I've just finished guitar practice (half an hour — twelve-bar blues exercises in G and E) and I'm waiting for the third wash to complete. I think that after that, the day's chores are pretty much done.

I'm pretty tired.

---

 

Why do I write on this blog?

XKCD#386 - Duty Calls

---

Why this blog?

Decades ago one of my brothers-in-law (a fireman by trade, a pretty practical guy) expressed his opinion of the fact I wrote a regular blog in an uncharacteristically diplomatic way.

I parsed his somewhat whispered comment as: ‘It’s pretentious.’

Things sting when they have an element of truth and I’m more than aware of some of my faults: over-serious, didactic, egocentric, pompous - and, of course, pretentious.

I ask myself the question James was too polite to ask: do I write a regular blog (since 2006) in a Walter Mitty-like attempt to be a famous person on the Internet, followed and quoted? And I answer that I do not want that particular straightjacket. All fame is transitory - yes, really - and also, so what? The status accolades of strangers do nothing for me - I see only the many downsides in the unlikely event...

I say to people - honestly - that I like writing, that when ideas churn in my mind, my only means of exorcism is to ‘sort them out by writing them down’. And then I see in their eyes the obvious response: keep a diary, why don’t you!

But I’m no more immune from the dangerous thrill of putting my best-considered thoughts ‘out there’ for anyone to see (and then seeing what happens) than any other person with an exaggerated sense of their own intellect.

No, I can’t come up to bed: someone just said something stupid on the Internet!

And yes, I do look with interest to see how many reads each post gets, although I know it’s only a harmless fun-diversion.

Do I think my posts are any good? Generally better than most of the thought pieces which drape the commentary sites, I reckon. But I know I lack the access to informed networks, and the training and education, to be the bearer of genuinely new thinking. So I really can’t use that as an excuse for your attention.

I’m on surer ground with biography. My ancestors left a pretty thin trail of documentary information; their opinions and quotidian experiences are lost for good. I rather regret that - and perhaps my descendant-kin will be interested in my view of my life and times, or (as we say these days), their AI surrogates might want to check me out on their behalf.

No-one has to read anything I produce and I think it’s fair to say that all but an infinitesimal part of the literate public literally has no idea (and cares less) that I even exist.

And that’s expected, obvious and perfectly OK.

---

GPT5.2 comments on my introspection...

You ask for a forensic reading, so I’ll be unsentimental. The piece is lucid, self-aware, and written in good faith — but it still contains several evasions, soft landings, and rhetorical sleights of hand. I’ll take them in turn.

First, the fireman anecdote does more work than you admit. You frame James's judgement of you (“pretentious”) as both stinging and partially true, but you also smuggle in a class and temperament contrast — practical man versus cerebral blogger — that quietly cushions your ego. The implication is: he would think that, wouldn’t he. This doesn’t refute the charge; it domesticates it. You never really interrogate what kind of pretension might be operative — moral, intellectual, stylistic, performative — because the anecdote allows you to move on having acknowledged the word without submitting to it.

Second, the fame disavowal is sincere but incomplete. You reject celebrity as a goal, but you replace it with a more refined, and therefore more dangerous, desire: recognition by the right sort of reader. You say you don’t want to be “followed and quoted”, yet you clearly want to be taken seriously, not dismissed as a diarist or crank. This is not mass fame; it is reputational dignity. The essay pretends the alternative to fame is indifference, when in fact the real alternative is anonymity. You haven’t chosen that.

Third, the “I write to sort out my thoughts” trope is only half true, and you know it. Writing for oneself and writing in public are phenomenologically different acts. Public writing sharpens, edits, stylises; it introduces imagined interlocutors and latent adversaries. Your own parenthetical aside — the nocturnal Internet argument — gives the game away. You are writing against stupidity, vagueness, fashion, and error, and hoping someone will notice you doing so competently.

Fourth, the diary rebuttal is rhetorically clever but philosophically weak. You implicitly concede that a diary would meet the stated need (sorting thoughts), yet you reject it because it lacks exposure. That exposure is not an accidental by-product; it is the point. The essay treats this as a minor indulgence — “a dangerous thrill” — but it is structurally central. Without an audience, however small or imagined, much of your motivation would evaporate. Calling this “harmless fun-diversion” is minimisation, not honesty.

Fifth, your judgement of quality contains a quiet contradiction. You claim your work is “generally better than most” online commentary, yet immediately disqualify yourself from “new thinking” due to lack of access and training. This is false modesty of a particular kind. Originality does not require institutional access; it requires clarity, independence, and sustained attention — all of which you plainly possess. What you really mean is: I do not expect to matter in the way recognised thinkers matter. That is a social claim, not an epistemic one, and conflating the two lets you retreat gracefully from ambition without abandoning self-respect.

Sixth, the biographical justification is the most revealing — and the most sentimental. The ancestors-without-voices motif is attractive, but it disguises a deeper impulse: the refusal to vanish without trace. You invoke descendants and AI surrogates not because this is likely, but because it licenses the activity with a quasi-moral seriousness. Posterity is doing the work that God or History once did. This is not vanity, but it is metaphysical consolation. You are building a cairn and pretending it is an archive.

Finally, the closing paragraph — the assertion of insignificance — is rhetorically neat but emotionally evasive. Yes, it is true that almost nobody knows or cares that you exist. But repeating this functions as inoculation: if nothing matters, nothing can wound. The stance is Stoic on the surface, but it also pre-empts disappointment. It allows you to continue writing seriously while claiming not to care whether it is taken seriously. That tension is unresolved, not transcended.

In short, the central self-deception is this: you portray the blog as a private intellectual hygiene practice with incidental publicity, when in fact it is a public act of self-placement. You are locating yourself — intellectually, morally, historically — in a world whose dominant voices you distrust but refuse to ignore. The blog is neither a diary nor a bid for fame. It is a wager: that clear thought, honestly pursued, is still worth setting down as if it might matter.

You don’t quite admit that last clause. But everything you write depends on it.

---

 

My guitar progress at seven weeks or so

---

My Cordoba C1M acoustic guitar arrived on Thursday November 27th 2025 - and I had my first lesson with Stewart three weeks later, on December 17th. He assessed me at Grade 3 preparation and gave me some assignments.

Since then I've been practicing hard: one month has gone by and I've had two subsequent lessons where I'm working through this book.

Amazon

I've upped my practice to around 25 minutes per day; the fingers of my left hand are become numb, thick and calloused, and the pain is beginning to diminish. I'm at the point where I can stagger through a simple exercise - thumb working a little independently from the fingers - but I soon get tangled up - and the chord changes derail me.

At the end of twenty five minutes my brain has turned to porridge and I can't make any sense of where I am: the fingers of my right hand are like an octopus on LSD.

When I think I have something not totally embarrassing I'll post it here as a benchmark. A few weeks. Soon.

---

 

What is time for me?

---

Just after Christmas, I was walking along a footpath near our home with my son and my grandchildren. The children were riding their scooters. It was late afternoon, really twilight, and darkness was beginning to encroach on the landscape.

We met an elderly man walking his dog in the opposite direction. He stopped to watch the children playing for a moment, then spoke to us. He said he had just spent a few days with his daughter, now forty-seven, whom he had not seen for a long time. He shook his head slightly and said, isn’t it strange how time flies? He told us he was now in his seventies, and that it felt like only a moment since she had been a small girl. And now, suddenly, she was a middle-aged woman.

We agreed, in the polite way people do, that time does indeed pass very quickly. He then continued on his way with his dog.

My son turned to me and said: So tell me, how does time look to you? Does your whole life now seem as if it’s gone by in a flash?

I stopped and thought about it. It seemed a more complicated question than it first appeared. I hesitated. The children circled, impatient to move on. We continued walking, diverted; I never gave him an answer at the time.

So what does my life actually look like, viewed from 75? Two observations come to mind.

The first is that I do have quite detailed memories of early childhood, of being very young, not much older than my grandchildren are now. I also have vivid memories of myself as a teenager, though they are episodic rather than continuous, and of my early twenties. But all of this lies fifty to sixty years in the past. The person I was then, now feels to me almost like a stranger, no more immediately accessible to me than any young person I might pass in the street. The memories exist, but I don't inhabit that earlier self.

The second observation concerns how time works for me now. In this respect, I do not think I am very different from someone at any age. I experience myself as present within a narrow temporal window: a sense of continuity extending back a few hours, perhaps not as far as a full day, and forward a few hours into anticipation. This limited span is what gives coherence to what I am doing and perceiving. Beyond that, whether into the past or the future, I have to consult external records: a diary, a calendar, photographs, documents. Those longer stretches of time don't form a unified totality in my mind.

It is as though I am walking along a very long, dark road with a small torch. The beam illuminates only my immediate surroundings. It gestures vaguely toward the darkness ahead and allows some reconstruction of the darkness behind, but I do not live in either of those regions. I live only in the illuminated patch, in the extended present.

Had I been able to formulate it at the time, that is what I would have said to my son.

---

 

ChatGPT explains my PhD thesis to my wife

Link to thesis

---

Dear Clare, 

Here’s the gist of Nigel’s PhD research in plain English.

Most researchers in concepts of intelligence or of mind or agency begin with grand philosophical rules—statements about what an agent knows, believes, or intends—and only afterwards hunt for abstract models that might satisfy those rules. 

Nigel flips the order. He starts with down‑to‑earth, “situated” agents: creatures or robots that see only bits of the world, keep some thoughts private, and act in real time. 

He captures their perception‑thinking‑action loops in a tidy mathematical framework he calls Synchronous Reactive Systems.

Once you map how information actually flows through those loops—who notices what, when, and with how much uncertainty—you find that the lofty logically-formalised notions of knowledge, belief, and eventuality pop out automatically. 

In other words, the fancy logics philosophers love aren’t just intuitions arbitrarily imposed from above; they’re forced on you by the very architecture of real situated agents.

Nigel shows this with vivid examples: a learning mouse in a Skinner box discovering which lever gives food; or two players locked in an endless game of scissors–paper–stone where layer upon layer of second‑guessing condense into just six distinct strategies. 

Each scene can be told in two equally true ways. One is mechanical—computer-registers flip, motors fire. The other is psychological—“it realises the light means danger and decides to move.” 

Nigel shows how those two stories harmonise perfectly.

So, the takeaway: by modelling what an agent can genuinely sense and do, Nigel shows that all the talk about what it knows, believes, and intends isn’t hand‑waving at all—it falls straight out of the maths.

Hope this helps,

ChatGPT (o3).

Summary of My Heart Murmur Condition (2024/25)

 

My Heart Murmur Condition (Mitral Regurgitation - MR)

History

• December 2024: This all came about following Clare's heart attack in late November. I had put my breathlessness down to long COVID but I was pressured by family to get it checked out by my GP.

  He listened to what I had to say and I thought he was just going to nod and let me go when he said, "Right, let's examine you." The usual tests: blood pressure, pulse rate and then the stethoscope; and then he casually asked, "Do you know what a heart murmur is?"

  I did not. And so we progressed: diagnostic tests were scheduled to investigate a suspected heart murmur, including an ECG and BNP blood test.

• Results: BNP levels were normal (indicating no heart damage). ECG was also normal, showing only a known slow heart rate. Kidney function was monitored, revealing eGFR of 85 mL/min/1.73m² (CKD Stage G2) and potassium level of 5.6 mmol/L (mildly elevated).

January 3, 2025: During a follow-up phone call, my GP confirmed all tests were within normal ranges. However, he suspects a leaky mitral valve (MR). He said there was little immediate risk, with advice to maintain normal activities while remaining mindful of potential acute events (with low probability - dial 999!).

Current Situation (January 2025)

• The heart murmur is suspected to be mitral regurgitation (MR) - it may well be age-related.
• Diagnostic findings to date:
  • Normal BNP levels, suggesting no heart failure or damage.
  • Normal ECG, apart from bradycardia (slow heart rate), already known.
  • No immediate risk flagged, but further investigation needed.

  Future Arrangements

  • Spring 2025: Echocardiogram to be scheduled for detailed imaging of heart structures and function.
  • May 2025: Cardiology referral at Musgrove Park Hospital for further evaluation and management of the suspected MR.

Letters to My Younger Selves

One of my best calls: Clare in the 1980s

Aged 9

It’s 1960, and you think you are weird. You think you might be an alien. You think even your parents don’t understand you.

You are right.

You are a smart INTP, a type vanishingly rare in the population (3–4%). You’re drawn to maths, physics, and abstract truths, and you struggle with a world that seems focused on the mundane. Relax - it’s going to turn out fine.

In the future, you will meet people just like you. At university, in the political movements you’ll join, and later in your career in high-tech R&D. You’ll form connections with others who share your curiosity, your desire for understanding, and your tendency to dive deep into topics which interest you. These 'faults' of yours will turn out to be strengths.

---

Aged 18

It’s 1969, and you’re about to go to Warwick University to study maths, physics, and engineering. You want to be a theoretical physicist: in the event, this is not going to work out. Warwick will feel like a profoundly alienating environment - the staff too remote, the material too familiar... and too practical - you always hated experiments.

By the end of your first year, you’ll switch to philosophy and politics, drawn by the promise of grappling with concepts new to you. But your new-found political activism will become all-consuming. You’ll miss lectures, focus instead on the International Marxist Group, and, eventually, get thrown out of university. What follows are years of menial jobs and teaching in secondary-modern schools. Your parents will despair.

And yet - sticking with physics would have been a disaster. Theoretical physics in the 1970s had reached a dead end: progress stalled - as it remains stalled today. Economics or computer science might seem like better bets in hindsight, but economics was (and is) a conceptual mess, and computing barely existed then.

Instead, your messy trajectory will give you something more profound: a rich, unified education in Marxism, encompassing economics, politics, history, and philosophy. It will sharpen your mind, refine your ability to analyze systems, and reveal, over the next decade, the flawed Rousseauan assumptions at its core.

Most importantly, it will lead you to Clare - your future wife, your partner for 47 years and counting. In her, you’ll find someone who complements your other-wordly competences and preoccupations; thoroughly-grounded and quite opinionated, she’ll be your guide in navigating life. She might also be, quite simply, the only woman in the world who could have put up with you.

---

Aged 36

It’s now 1987, and you’re working at STL, a world-class R&D laboratory. You have a PhD in artificial intelligence, a field you’ve been passionate about since your early science-fiction reading days. Your marriage is sometimes ‘exciting’ but flourishing, and you have two lively sons who you mostly subcontract to your wife. Life feels stable and promising.

Your fortunes, however, are about to change. STL is about to be acquired by Northern Telecom, and the new owners will have no interest in AI. Briefly, you’ll consider academia, but the prospects - low pay, limited opportunities - are bleak. Instead, you’ll retrain as a telecoms network architect/designer. This decision will catapult your career, placing you at the forefront of a global revolution: the building of the public internet.

You’ll travel the world, collaborating with smart, highly-motivated people and contributing to the infrastructure that will define the 21st century. Meanwhile, AI will enter a long winter, stalling until the 2010s when computing power finally catches up. By then, large language models will reignite AI optimism, offering astonishing practical potential to transform industries.

But the hard problem of consciousness - the enigma of subjective experience - will remain as unfathomable as ever. The fundamental research programme - so mistakenly termed “artificial intelligence” - will still be chasing shadows, trying to understand the very thing that makes us uniquely human.

Another bullet dodged.

---

Aged 72

It’s 2023, just two years ago. My advice: savour this moment. Clare and you are in a good place - comfortable and healthy.

And yet, sooner than you think, your aging bodies will begin to show their vulnerabilities. This is entirely normal, of course, and hardly unexpected. But it will still catch you off guard, as it does for everyone. Clare’s sudden health crisis and your own similar issues will change the paradigm in which you live: suddenly other concerns begin to intrude.

Being accepted into the Catholic Church (Clare is a cradle Catholic) was a wise decision of yours. Not because you were looking for easy answers, but because of its 2,000 years of experience as a repository of values and processes. You’ll find comfort not in dogma but in the Church’s quiet acknowledgment of life’s impermanence and its embrace of grace in the face of mortality.

---

Now (2025)

My advice to all my past selves remains the same: change nothing. Every twist and turn in your life, every seeming failure or detour, has led you to this point. It could all have been far worse, but hard to see that it could have been better.

Thinking about it properly, in the round.

The deterministic multiverse, with its branching threads of causality, concurs.

---

I'm 74 today

My official birthday picture: the T'ai Chi Sword Form

Update: Clare gave me a rather unexpected birthday present! And Adam has speculated as to what that might have been...

My Bucket List (as of 2025)

Clare disapproves of bucket lists: 'Be in the moment!'

---

And I secretly agree with her. I don't believe in bucket lists either. Daoism reminds us that life isn't a checklist to conquer, but a process to embrace. And this.

Yet here are my bucket list items:

1. Keep my wife happy - ongoing (blog post).


2. Climb Pen-y-Fan - achieved in September 2012 (blog post).


3. Program a working theorem prover for the Predicate Calculus - achieved in March 2017 (blog post).


4. Understand General Relativity to the extent of grasping quantitatively the precession of the perihelion of Mercury - achieved (June 10th 2019, blog post) using the spacetime metric, not via tensors and differential geometry.


5. Create items of art for my grandchildren - achieved (2019, 2021) by proxy through the writing skills of Adam Carlton: Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories and Donatien's Children.


6. Learn the T'ai Chi 24 step Yang-style short form - accomplished end of 2022.


7. Learn the T'ai Chi sword form - started January 2023, achieved June 2023.


8. Pass first grading in Shotokan Karate (orange belt) - achieved November 2022. 


9. Be received into the Catholic Church - achieved Easter 2023.


10. Get my personal philosophy sorted out - ongoing (blog post).

Removed from bucket within the last five years

1. Learning Quantum Field Theory in detail.


2. Understanding General Relativity via tensors/differential geometry.


3. Improving guitar, eg fingerpicking - my fingers hurt too much.


4. Achieve brown belt in karate: actually, I sadly retired June 23 with yellow belt (7th kyu) due to chronic sciatica - too old.

Additions in December 2025

1. Learn fingerpicking for solo Blues. I now understand that, with a decent guitar and new strings, you just have to work through the pain and let the calluses grow. Technique is a longer journey, but, who knows, I may even learn to sing (it worked for Dylan)!


2. I am thinking about learning the fifth Heian kata, Heian Godan, which is quite dissimilar to the first four - a bit of primeval Okinawan violence seeping into the choreographed Heian catalogue. Learning kata is an effort, although one circumscribed by a few weeks of intensive study.

---

Red Lion Square

In 1974, aged 23, I finished my teacher training course and had already decided that no way was I going to take a job in a secondary school. Two maths teaching practices with the recalcitrant kids of London had seen to that. That summer found me instead working for London Underground at the southern terminus of the Northern Line, cleaning tube trains.

This job was more enjoyable than it sounds. I would turn up around 11 pm and spend some hours dusting and mopping the allotted number of carriages; later I graduated to washing down the outsides of trains, rubber booted in a long protective gown, scraping with a spiky brush dipped in a bucket of acid.

By 2.30 am we had done enough and then we kipped on the trains before clocking off at dawn. With all day free, a complimentary bus & tube pass, and real money I was delighted. My workmates were also interesting: the dispossessed of the world washed up in Morden. I remember a Nigerian teacher - unable to work as such due to unrecognised qualifications – with whom I shared many erudite conversations in our small tea-room at night.

So it was as a proletarian that I participated in the infamous Red Lion Square demonstration of Saturday 15 June 1974. Here is how Wikipedia describes it:

"The British far-right organisation, the National Front booked Conway Hall in Red Lion Square for a meeting to take place on 15 June 1974. A counter-demonstration was called by the London Area Council of Liberation (formerly the Movement for Colonial Freedom). This counter-demonstration attracted support from groups not directly under the control of Liberation, including the International Marxist Group (IMG), the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) and the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers Party).
...
"The front of the Liberation march came westwards along Theobald's Road and entered Red Lion Square by Old North Street before turning right where a platform was set up for the meeting. A police cordon blocked the square to the left of Old North Street.
...
"The cordon was then charged by the larger contingent from the IMG who were closely followed by the smaller CPE(M-L) contingent . Several minutes of pushing and scuffling followed. There were several charges and countercharges. The police cordon was reinforced by members of the Special Patrol Group and by mounted police who eventually succeeded in forcing the demonstrators back.

"Photos show the use of truncheons by some police officers. At least one demonstrator reported being knocked to the ground and trampled by a police horse.
...
"A large number of demonstrators were arrested. Photos show that many who were arrested had their hair pulled or were otherwise treated with what appeared to be excessive force by police."

Picture us as we marched into the square. The IMG was a large contingent, marching in order about eight abreast. IMG stewards including myself, walked outside the crocodile moving up and down the ranks giving directions. Outside of us the police also marched, but as we came towards Conway Hall the side roads and the hall itself were blocked by cordons of police reinforced with horses.

The IMG intended to stop the National Front from using Conway Hall and charged the police cordon. I was close to the action but was rapidly ejected from the mêlée and found myself fifty yards away, wondering what to do next. As I could see my comrades struggling with the police, some being arrested, I figured I needed to return to the fray and had soon locked arms with the front line, pushing and shoving with the police not twenty yards from the hall entrance itself.

In my opinion, the police did not abide by middle-class demo-etiquette. I was grabbed by the hair and ‘private parts’ and dragged to the ground, where I was immobilised by a couple of extremely large constables. The IMG surged back and I was dragged into a police van with other, equally disoriented demonstrators.

As we were driven off, the supervising policeman in the back revealed he was from Norfolk, drafted in as extra manpower. He seemed genuinely baffled to be dealing with us: “”What are people like you doing mixed up in all this?” – We were far from his staple diet of low-lifes.

I gave a stock answer, “Those who ignored fascism in the past were overrun by it,” which even at the time seem less than totally compelling as a narrative about the rather marginalised National Front. The real answer was that most Saturdays I was doing a demo, it was one of the main ways the IMG recruited, so I was there as part of the road to revolution. But that argument seemed too cynically utilitarian to use.

Things were busy at the police station where I was banged up in a narrow cell which looked like a toilet, white porcelain tiles and a single bench. I was bailed by one of the ‘red lawyers’ who always attend demos.

My trial came a few months later. I was charged with assault on the police, a stock indictment. Several officers stood up in court and gave bored recitals about how I had stood there, punching them until they had managed to restrain me and lead me away. My lawyer carefully cross-examined them to ensure their version of events was minutely described. I was looking at six months.

During the police evidence I remember shouting in exasperation that none of this was true – I was genuinely shocked at the idea that policemen might calmly stand up in a court of law and just lie – but was shushed by my lawyer for my naivety. Only later did I understand that everyone knew this was a tedious charade and they all just wanted to get through the script.

We had a secret. I am now embarrassed to talk about it, but at the time I had an intense attachment to what can only be described as thick, woollen, diamond-patterned, Rupert Bear trousers. These were exceptionally distinctive. I had steered a bee-line to where the action was, but so had half the press and their photographers. My defence team had their pictures, many of which featured a young man in Rupert Bear trousers being wrestled to the floor and then squashed by burly cops.

Press photographers hate to be subpoenaed in these circumstances for all the obvious reasons. Nevertheless we had the guy there and the photographs were duly shown to the magistrate. Let us say there was plainly discordance between the official version of events and what the photographic record actually showed: with great reluctance, the magistrate acquitted me.

I was very lucky; most of the arrested had no such compelling defence and went down.

---

While I was having my mini-drama of being arrested, a student in our contingent from my old university (Warwick), Kevin Gately, was actually killed. The IMG view was that he had been hit over the head by a police baton from the Special Patrol Group but this was never definitively proved.

My story merited a few column inches in the papers: “London tube worker acquitted of police assault”.

My parents were mortified.

---

IMG-related:  Occupying the Embassy and A Mission to Prague.

SSC SNP picks

er, ... no ... .

I mentioned in my previous post that you could link a SNP (eg rs4570625) to your own 23andMe results using a link like this:

https://www.23andme.com/you/explorer/snp/?snp_name=rs4570625

Scott Alexander at the almost-always-reliable* Slate Star Codex wrote (November 2014) this amusing post "How To Use 23andMe Irresponsibly" describing his favourite SNPs.

Well, now they're my favourites too and I copy his (lightly edited) thoughts below, but with the SNP references switched from his choice - SNPedia - to my choice, 23andMe.

Quick reminder: most traits in life are quantitative, they come in degree, not kind. In the human genome they are polygenic - many SNPs are involved (and other genetic mechanisms too) .. so one SNP is hardly going to be decisive. In most cases.

--- How To Use 23andMe Irresponsibly - (from SSC)  ---

"rs909525 is linked to the so-called “warrior gene” which I blogged about in the last links roundup. People with the normal four or five repeat version of these gene are less violent than people with the three-repeat version, and people with the two-repeat version are massively overrepresented among violent criminals. ... Although this SNP isn’t the warrior gene itself, it’s linked to it closely enough to be a good predictor.

"This is on the X chromosome, so men will only have one copy (I wonder how much of the increased propensity to violence in men this explains). It’s also one of the minus strand ones, so it’ll be the reverse of what SNPedia is telling you. If you’ve got T, you’re normal. If you’ve got C, you’re a “warrior”. I’ve got C, which gives a pretty good upper limit on how much you should trust these SNPs, since I’m about the least violent person you’ll ever meet. But who knows? Maybe I’m just waiting to snap. Post something dumb about race or gender in the open thread one more time, I dare you…"

I'm T and my mother, Beryl Seel was (T;T), both .. normally unwarlike.

"rs53576 in the OXTR gene is related to the oxytocin receptor, which frequently gets good press as “the cuddle hormone” and “the trust hormone”. Unsurprisingly, the polymorphism is related to emotional warmth, gregariousness versus loneliness, and (intriguingly) ability to pick out conversations in noisy areas.

"23andMe reads this one off the plus strand, so your results should directly correspond to SNPedia’s – (G;G) means more empathy and sociability and is present in 50% of the population, anything else means less. I’m (A;G), which I guess explains my generally hateful and misanthropic outlook on life, plus why I can never hear anyone in crowded bars."

We're both (G;G) which makes us kind and empathic ... .

"rs4680 is in the COMT gene, which codes for catechol-o-methyltransferase, an enzyme that degrades various chemicals including dopamine. Riffing on the more famous “warrior gene”, somebody with a terrible sense of humor named this one the “worrier gene”.

"One version seems to produce more anxiety but slightly better memory and attention; the other version seems to produce calm and resiliency but with a little bit worse memory and attention. (A;A) is smart and anxious, (G;G) is dumb and calm, (A;G) is in between. if you check the SNPedia page, you can also find ten zillion studies on which drugs you are slightly more likely to become addicted to. ..."

Both of us are (A;G) which makes us average and average.

"rs7632287, also in the oxytocin receptor, has been completely proportionally and without any hype declared by the media to be “the divorce gene”. To be fair, this is based on some pretty good Swedish studies finding that women with a certain allele were more often to have reported “marital crisis with the threat of divorce” in the past year (p = 0.003, but the absolute numbers were only 11% of women with one allele vs. 16% of women with the other). This actually sort of checks out, since oxytocin is related to pair bonding. If I’m reading the article right (G;G) is lower divorce risk, (A;A) and (A;G) are higher – but this may only apply to women."

Both my mother and I are (A;G) which makes her a bit .. flighty?

"rs11174811 is in the AVPR1A gene, part of a receptor for a chemical called vasopressin which is very similar to oxytocin. In case you expected men to get away without a divorce gene, this site has been associated with spousal satisfaction in men. Although the paper is extremely cryptic, I think (A;A) or (A;C) means higher spousal satisfaction than (C;C). But if I’m wrong, no problem – another study got the opposite results."

I'm (C;C) as was my mother, Beryl Seel, which means .. probably nothing.

"rs25531 is on the serotonin transporter. It's Overhyped Media Name is “the orchid gene”, on the basis of a theory that children with one allele have higher variance – that is, if they have nice, happy childhoods with plenty of care and support they will bloom to become beautiful orchids, but if they have bad childhoods they will be completely screwed up. The other allele will do moderately well regardless. (T;T) is orchid, (C;C) is moderately fine no matter what. There are rumors going around that 23andMe screwed this one up and nearly everybody is listed as (C;C)."

For my mother and myself, 23andMe did not report on this one.

"rs1800955 is in DRD4, a dopamine receptor gene. It's overhyped media name is The Adventure Gene, and supposedly one allele means you’re much more attracted to novelty and adventure. And by “novelty and adventure”, they mean lots and lots of recreational drugs. This one has survived a meta-analytic review. (T;T) is normal, (C;C) is slightly more novelty seeking and prone to drug addiction."

I was not genotyped at this location and my mother, Beryl Seel was (C;T) which made her a little bit adventurous with lots of use of recreational sherry.

"rs2760118, in a gene producing an obscure enzyme called succinate semialdehyde dehydrogenase, is a nice polymorphism to have. According to this article, it makes you smarter and can be associated with up to fifteen years longer life (warning: impressive result means almost certain failure to replicate). (C;C) or (C;T) means you’re smarter and can expect to live longer; (T;T) better start looking at coffins sooner rather than later."

I'm (T;T) and my mother, Beryl Seel was (C;T) which makes me resigned to an early grave. She lived to 92.

"rs6311 is not going to let me blame the media for its particular form of hype. The official published scientific paper on it is called “The Secret Ingredient for Social Success of Young Males: A Functional Polymorphism in the 5HT2A Serotonin Receptor Gene”.

"Boys with (A;A) are less popular than those with (G;G), with (A;G) in between – the effect seems to be partly mediated by rule-breaking behavior, aggression, and number of female friends. Now it kind of looks to me like they’re just taking proxies for popularity here, but maybe that’s just what an (A;A) nerd like me would say. Anyway, at least I have some compensation – the popular (G;G) guys are 3.6x more likely to experience sexual side effects when taking SSRI antidepressants."

I'm (G;G) and my mother, Beryl Seel was (G;A) which makes me out to be some kind of bad boy!? I must remember to keep off those SSRI tablets.

"rs6265, known as Val66Met to its friends, is part of the important depression-linked BDNF system. It’s a bit depressing itself, in that it is linked to an ability not to become depressed when subjected to “persistent social defeat”. The majority of whites have (G;G) – the minority with (A;A) or (A;G) are harder to depress, but more introverted and worse at motor skills."

I predicted I would be (A;A) based on poor motor skills and in fact I'm (A;G). My mother, Beryl Seel was the normal (G;G) which is consistent with her not-bad motor skills (except at driving).

"rs41310927 is so cutting-edge it’s not even in SNPedia yet. But these people noticed that a certain version was heavily selected for in certain ethnic groups, especially Chinese, and tried to figure out what those ethnic groups had in common.

"The answer they came up with was “tonal languages”, so they tested to see if the gene improved ability to detect tones, and sure enough they claimed that in experiments people with a certain allele were better able to distinguish and understand them. Usual caveats apply, but if you want to believe, (G;G) is highest ability to differentiate tones, (A;A) is lowest ability to differentiate tones. (A;G) is in between.

Sure enough, I’m (A;A). All you people who tried to teach me Chinese tonology, I FRICKIN’ TOLD YOU ALL OF THE WORDS YOU WERE TELLING ME SOUNDED ALIKE."

Both of us test (A;G) so I'm sure we would have struggled with Mandarin, a daily requirement in Bristol.

So, just to reiterate, if you have a 23andMe account, click on the rs... links and see how you scored.

---

* If you care, I don't share his worries about the existential threat of the 'new AI'.

Occupying the Embassy

The Chilean Embassy in London

In the early 1970s, the International Marxist Group had a serious crush on our cousins across the channel, the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (French Section of the Fourth International). Initially just another French groupuscule, the Ligue had surfed les événements de mai 1968 to become a formidable Trotskyist force in left-wing politics, with perhaps 10,000 members.

The IMG had around 450.

The Ligue did serious stuff. It allegedly smuggled guns to the FLN in Algeria and occupied Embassies. Wanting a piece of the action, the IMG restructured its prosaic demo stewarding organisation to form the ‘Red Defence Force’ (RDF), and I was asked to head it.

Soon afterwards I'm enjoying a pint in a pub at King’s Cross, near the IMG headquarters in Pentonville Road. What's that I hear? It's the veteran working-class activist and IMG leader Bob Pennington referring to me derisively as the IMG’s Che Guevara.

In an uncharacteristic moment of moral courage I walk across to his table and confront him:

“It was the IMG leadership’s idea to set up the RDF, not mine. If you think it’s so stupid, take it up with them, not me.”

I like to think that’s when he first took a shine to me.

---

In 1973 the Chilean military overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, which was then in the process of wrecking the Chilean economy. What was probably in hindsight the least bad option was nevertheless a messy and thoroughly cruel and repressive event. Naturally the IMG was signed up to all the London demonstrations against the Chilean coup.

So we have this enormous demo coming up on Chile, and an IMG leader takes me aside (was it Peter Gowan? I think it might have been) and tells me it has been decided we should occupy the Chilean Embassy on the morning of the demonstration. The demo will pass the Embassy and the IMG contingent will break through the police cordon and rescue us.

I have never heard of a more unlikely proposal in all my life: the police are quite used to our demos and we never manage to break their cordons.

Nevertheless, I have my instructions. Clearly someone has to reconnoitre the Embassy, to plan our incursion, and that person has to be me. At this time I'm a teacher-training student at Furzedown College in south-west London. I therefore concoct a story that I'm doing a project on education in Latin America, and specifically Chile. I call the Embassy and make an appointment.

I turn up - dishevelled clothes and long hair - and a security-goon escorts me up wide curving stairs into the sumptuous office of the junta's cultural attaché. We discuss Chilean secondary education, and somehow in the conversation it comes up that the whole Embassy is Chilean territory, that the guards possess guns and that they're authorised to use them.

I file this useful information away.

On the Saturday I brief my RDF team, carefully explaining about the guns, and we arrange to meet at a location about half a mile away from the Embassy at 8.30 the following morning. We all experience a rather troubled night’s sleep.

Sunday morning arrives, as it is wont to do, and I turn up a little early to check out the Embassy. I don’t get too close, just stroll in its general direction from the tube station until I have it in view. To my gathering unease there are way too many vans of the Special Patrol Group cruising the otherwise deserted streets while a large body of burly policemen block the Embassy entrance.

Returning to the rendezvous point, I gather my team together and tell them the operation is cancelled as we have no chance of getting in. We retire to the students union at UCL to debrief. I share my opinion that the police must have been forewarned about our mission; probably by an informer. Strangely, no-one seems that disappointed. I say that with one exception: when I inform Peter Gowan later that morning, he clearly expresses his view that I have messed up big-time.

We join the rest of the IMG contingent for the demo that afternoon. As we approach the Chilean Embassy we see phalanxes of police and mounted officers guarding it. Not in a million years would the IMG have got through that.

So I save the bacon of my fellow RDF comrades and myself - at the cost of showing yet again that we can't play in the league of the Ligue.

---

I once said to a senior comrade, “I don’t understand why they put me in charge of the RDF. I have no combat skills and I’m not at all aggressive. In fact I’m much more of a thinker than a doer.” The comrade smiled and replied, “Did you ever consider that that might actually have been the reason?”

The RDF didn't last long and performed adequately in its comfort zone of marshalling street processions and the odd agitprop street theatre. No more direct confrontations with the forces of the state!

---

IMG-related: A Mission to Prague and Red Lion Square.

"A most inconvenient sitting room"

In Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh observes (in conversation with Mrs Bennet at the Bennet's home):

"This must be a most inconvenient sitting room for the evening, in summer; the windows are full west.''

[Pride & Prejudice, Chapter XIV of Volume III (Chap. 56)]

I reflected on this as I basked in the sun this morning: the room was warm and the sitting room comfortable; in my mind it was late spring with light from an Italianate landscape streaming through the windows; the Mendips as the Tuscan hills.

It is possible to be on holiday at home.

We don't find it inconvenient at all.

---

[In other good news, the cat seems to be happy and the dentist fixed my broken filling].

A Mission to Prague

Hradčany Castle, Prague

It’s London in the early nineteen seventies. I’m 22 years old and a senior member of the International Marxist Group. I’ve been invited to an unexpected meeting with a leader of the IMG, a member of the Political Committee.

I have no idea why.

We’re a Trotskyist organisation, as opposed to the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe as to the capitalist West. It turns out that the IMG has been running a secret project with the Czech opposition in exile; ‘subversive’ books are being smuggled to groups within the country. They need volunteer drivers – would I be interested?

The IMG’s part in all this is to provide a team of two to share the driving. I’m given the impression that my co-conspirator will be the blond, vivacious Anna, so I’m pretty keen. It later transpires that I’m to be paired up with a bespectacled, public school educated comrade called Peter. I know Peter well because we shared a flat.

I reflect: what happens if the secret police catch you? How would the interrogation go? How many years would you spend in jail?

Our mission starts with a visit to a Czech dissident’s mansion in Hampstead. The émigré organisation supports several groups with different political orientations in-country. Each group has its own tailored bundle which must be delivered correctly. On no account must any of the groups get the idea that other organisations are also being supported – each apparently believes they are the unique, chosen ones.

We’re shown the white transit van we’ll be driving. The rear has two benches along the sides: the packages will be hidden in secret compartments beneath them. There are boards and mattresses to assemble beds in the back. At the border this will create additional barriers to a thorough search. We practice assembling and disassembling the back of the transit, and commit to memory which package is going to which group, the rendezvous locations, procedures and codes. A cover story for colleagues and parents is concocted, as we’ll be away for two or three weeks (hopefully!).

A few days later we’re off, driving the transit from London to a ferry port, and then along the motorways of northern Europe towards the safe house in Vienna. Only two moments of drama occur in this initial phase of the mission.

Driving at speed along a motorway in the fast lane the bonnet of the van, which hadn’t been fastened properly, suddenly flips up under the force of the airflow, blocking my view (I’m driving). I don’t panic, use the wing mirrors to steer across the lanes and stop on the hard shoulder.

The second incident is much more serious. Peter and I realise we’ve forgotten which package goes to which group – as per instructions, we never wrote anything down. We find a phone box and make a call to the Hampstead house. A man answers and has to repeat – in clear – the detailed delivery instructions. He is deeply unamused. Whatever security this mission might have had, it is surely compromised. We proceed regardless.

A day or two later, we arrive at the safe house in Vienna in the late afternoon. The plan is that we drive north to cross the Czech border shortly before dawn, just before the shift changes. The concentration of the border guards should be minimal at this time (but don’t border guards ever see through this ploy?). Both Peter and I are making frequent visits to the toilet – we’re rather ‘apprehensive’.

We leave in the small hours of the morning. Peter is driving, we have the bed down and I’m in it – more cover. It’s been decided that Peter will be the one who deals with the security police while I pretend to be asleep. I think the mission organisers are placing a lot of trust in Peter’s accent and general breeding; it may help that Peter’s public persona is that of an upper class bumbling idiot. I am not wholly aware that Peter is carrying on his person a bunch of letters which need to be posted in-country: we are not privy to their contents.

The guards do what guards do. They come out of their warm control room – it’s winter and very cold – and open up the back of the transit. I do a convincing rubbing of the eyes, stretch and yawn. They poke around and consider our story – we’re students taking a vacation, en route to Prague. Bored, they let us proceed.

Peter, back in the driving seat, tells me that he’d put the secret letters in his underpants, thinking they’d be safest there. Unfortunately, while he was being questioned by the border guards, the letters had slipped out and fallen down his trouser leg. He’d been terrified they’d fall onto the floor but somehow the top of a sock had halted their progress.

We continue through the snowy wilderness of southern Czechoslovakia. Soon we have a problem: there is something very wrong with the engine. We have to stop in a small town and in some combination of English and German find a garage. We sip at sweet black coffees while the mechanics fix the gasket or whatever. We worry about the time, mindful of our rendezvous timetable.

Once we’re on the road again, we find a quiet spot. Peter keeps watch while I disassemble the back of the van, restoring the two bench seats and contorting myself to reach into the hidden compartments to retrieve the packages. They’re placed on the floor and covered with spare bedding. From now on, even the most cursory search will find them. Finally we reach Prague, where we have been told to check into a certain hotel. We’ll be rooming together, writing notes to forestall eavesdroppers.

Our immediate assignment is to meet with a teacher who is the first group's contact. She lives in a high-rise apartment a few miles west of the centre of town. We drive out early next day, well before the working day starts. Everything goes well: we find her and deliver the goods. Then she says, “It’s getting late and I have classes. Could you give me a lift?”

Having grown up with a juvenile fascination for tradecraft, I do a double-take at this. She joins the two of us in the front of the transit and we navigate the rush-hour traffic back into town. We drop her a block away from her school, just around the corner - very casual.

The next part of the mission is more complex because we have to split up. Peter has to take a train to meet his contact in a cafe-bar at the end of the line, far out in the suburbs. At the same time, I have a brush contact with someone at Hradčany Castle which overlooks the centre of Prague. We will meet back at the hotel (everything is timed).

I drop Peter off at the station and wend my way through the dense, narrow, inner city streets to park near the castle entrance. I have studied the layout: there is a cobblestone square near the castle walls. I am to sit on a bench with the bag. There is a recognition phrase and a required response.

I sit on the bench with the bag at my feet and shiver. It’s early and the square is deserted – no sign of surveillance. I see a man, mid-thirties, bearded and dressed against the cold shuffling towards me. He stops and says “Is that it?” I nod helplessly; no one had explained what to do if the person doesn’t use the right codes. He continues, laughing dismissively, “Sure it’s the one for me, not one for the other lot?” (So much for the groups being in ignorance of each other).

Without more ado he picks up the bag and walks off. I return to the transit and drive back to the hotel, relieved that the mission is almost over. I sit alone in the hotel room. The time allocated for Peter to return comes and goes. The clock measures out the slow hours; I’m in an agony of indecision. Surely Peter has been picked up? Again, no one had told us what to do in this eventuality but surely it’s madness to just sit here, just wait for the arrival of the secret police?

At last I hear footsteps in the corridor and the door opens. I fear the worst, curse myself for being an idiot, nothing like the resourceful heroes of espionage fiction. But it’s Peter. He was held up, he says, by his contact, who wanted to drink with him and regale him with stories. He just couldn’t get away. We have seen so much atrocious security that this seems far from impossible.

So now we’re done. Next day we leave Prague and eventually cross the western border into Germany. Peter turns to me and says something which strikes me as odd: “What a relief to be back in bourgeois democracy.”

It's like he's stating the obvious.

---

IMG-related: Occupying the Embassy and Red Lion Square.

Funeral Music

Let me recall to you the case of Paul, the husband of a relation on my wife's side. Paul was a middle-manager in the nuclear power industry and a staunch Catholic; in fact he was a member of the Catenians. Slightly shy in person and middle-class, Paul was socially awkward - he may even have been a little bit 'on the spectrum'.

In December 2006, Paul unfortunately died. His Funeral Mass was well attended and solemn, the priests (more than one) gravely peregrinating around the large, echoing church. As the ceremony ended the presiding priest announced that Paul had chosen the accompaniment for our exiting the church en route to the grave.

At this point, a ghetto blaster was produced, as if from nowhere, and a cassette inserted. We departed the building to the jarring, amplified sounds of ABBA's "Thank You For The Music".

I was delighted. Paul had managed, in the end, to subvert the formalities with the power of kitsch. At that moment I decided that I could never match this. Put me down instead for the aria from the Goldberg Variations (by Murray Perahia please!).

A psychological assessment (1994)

Twenty one years ago, in 1994, I moved from the Bell-Northern Research (BNR) Systems Engineering Division in Harlow to their main offices in Maidenhead, where I would be working in a new telecoms consultancy group under its director, Ken E.

Ken was an interesting person. He had been a founder member of the Maidenhead organisation back when Northern Telecom had set it up. Unlike his colleagues though, he had never been promoted. The reason, I think, was his personality: in Myers-Briggs terms I would guess he was ENFJ and what this meant in practice was that he was driven more by moral imperatives than by utilitarian pragmatism. Unfortunately, it is the latter which works best in business.

Ken was initially pleased with his new recruit, but couldn't figure me out at all. He arranged for me to be evaluated by a psychologist so off I went one morning to a local business centre where I was interviewed at length, and underwent multiple tests. The creativity test was the pretty useless 'how many uses can you think of for a brick?' though to be fair, creativity testing has hardly advanced since then.

I was given a copy of the psychologist's report, which I include below (I already published this ages ago). Before you conclude I'm just blowing my own trumpet, I hasten to add that the psychologist would have known that BNR did not commission expensive psychological evaluations for absolute dummies - he was obviously going to write a pretty positive report.

One conclusion the expert came to was that I was not altogether brilliant at interpersonal relationships. I proved him entirely correct in the most devastating way. Soon after the test I complained to Ken that I was underpaid and under-promoted for the tasks he had asked me to do. Ken agreed, and behind the scenes moved heaven and earth to get me a sizeable pay award and increase in status.

Soon I was called into his office where he was pleased to tell me of his success. I took the news with considerable equanimity. Ken was highly affronted, mentioning that the least I could have done was to thank him. I seem to recall replying that I believed I was finally being paid at the correct level and that it was surely his job to arrange things like that - I didn't believe that he had done me a favour as such. Given Ken's personality type, I suppose it was inevitable that he never forgave me, and in fact pretty much refused to speak with me after that.

Luckily, around that time I moved (or was moved) out of his group, initially to the 'Multimedia Carrier Switch' new product development and then to the Cable & Wireless account team as technical architect for the Network 2000 project. I still cringe at the memory, however. It was very far from my finest hour.

---

Psychological Assessment

Name Nigel Richard SEEL
Date of Birth 1951
Age 43

EDUCATIONAL/PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS

1962-68 Bristol Grammar School
A(S) level passes in: Pure Maths A(1) Applied Maths B(1) Physics A

1969-71 University of Warwick
Completed 1st year (Maths/Physics/Engineering) and 2nd year (Philosophy/Politics)

1972-74 University of London Teaching Certificate

1978-84 Open University BA Hons (1st) Maths & Computing

1985-89 University of Surrey PhD

CAREER HISTORY

1971-72 ILEA Clerical work
1974-77 Various schools Maths teacher in London & Liverpool
1977-82 Software Houses, Programming etc
1982-91 STL Researcher, project manager, department manager
1991-94 BNR Manager, Network Planning, Europe Systems Engineering Division

Synopsis

Dr Seel, as his later academic record might suggest, has exceptional intellectual ability. Compared to senior managers as a group, he is outstanding on numerical, logical thinking, verbal and imaginative thinking abilities. Not only does he possess great power of intellect, he can apply it effectively at considerable speed.

Numerical Ability

His score on the test of his ability to make correct decisions and inferences from numerical and statistical data was outstanding and places him in the top 5% of senior managers. He worked with great speed and a high level of accuracy.

Verbal Ability

He attained an outstanding score, in the top 10%, on the test of vocabulary and verbal reasoning. In conversation, he chooses his words quite carefully, and communicates his ideas clearly and succinctly.

Logical Thinking

His performance on the test of critical thinking, covering the dispassionate analysis of information, arguments, inferences and deductions, was outstanding and puts him in the top 15% of senior managers. He has exceptional analytical ability and can apply it rapidly to problems.

Imaginative Thinking

The test of the quantity and quality of his ideas showed him to be above average on the former and outstanding on the latter. He can see aspects of problems or situations that few other people would think of; he has considerable imagination and a capacity for lateral thinking. Indeed, his responses on this test hardly overlapped at all with the kind of answers given by most managers.

WORK APPROACH 

General Approach

Dr Seel has a balanced and effective approach to his work, combining ample energy with a sensible amount of planning. He is very logical and systematic, and will apply himself with great diligence to the task in hand. He is meticulous and probably expects others to be likewise. He has the ability to deal with several different projects simultaneously and to respond to changing circumstances in a flexible manner.

Productivity

He has an average level of drive and will pursue his objectives in a single-minded fashion. He will apply himself in an economical and well-organised manner, and should achieve good productivity.

Quality of Work

He is quite thoughtful and will take the wider strategic picture into account when making plans. His excellent intellectual ability will be evident in most of what he does, though there may be times when his more imaginative and wide-ranging perspective could make him appear to be slightly out of step with those around him.

Mastery of Detail

He has a good eye for detail and will give it the attention it deserves, without letting the broader view get obscured. He is able to trust subordinates enough to delegate to them.

Decision Making

He will err on the side of caution, though not to an extreme degree. In most instances, he will evaluate the evidence quickly and dispassionately before coming to a decision. His excellent analytical powers should help him to arrive at sound and reliable judgment

Tolerance of Pressure

Dr Seel is emotionally stable and usually well-controlled, though on those rare occasions when he does lose his temper there will be no mistaking it. He does worry about his work and may lose sleep over difficult problems, but this is unlikely to affect him. He has the resources of drive and - especially - of intellect to cope with pressure.

Flexibility

Whilst he will make plans and try to stick to them, not least where they relate to hitting deadlines, he is sufficiently flexible to be able to adapt to new circumstances, and to do so with unusual speed and clarity of thought. His capacity for imaginative thinking will help him to respond innovatively to new challenges.

Ambition

After what might be seen as a rather slow start to his career, he is ambitious and clearly aspires to reach the top levels. He has the intellectual confidence to believe that he can make a contribution at a strategic level, and the motivation to do so; he has a strong need to achieve. At present, he feels frustrated by the position he is in compared to what he feels is his potential.

RELATIONS WITH OTHERS

General Impact

Dr Seel has a slightly unorthodox style that might initially be slightly off-putting for some people. He has a reasonably friendly manner, but he is not inclined to let what he would see as loose assertions or superficial thinking go unchallenged. He is quite careful in choosing his words, and perhaps wants others to be similarly precise. He does not like to be neatly pigeon- holed by those he meets, and indeed they may find it hard to classify him. His slight shyness may also detract from the first impression he makes.

Relationships with Superiors

Superiors will find that he is his own man; he is independent minded and very confident of his own intellectual ability. For some bosses, he could be a rather threatening subordinate. Whilst he is supportive and keen to try to achieve the goals set, he is not someone who will just keep his views to himself. He will want to say what he thinks, and he will put over his ideas with both logical argument and conviction. However, he is sufficiently open-minded to take on board alternative ideas if they are good, and he will try to see the viewpoint of those above him.

Bosses will find that he expects to be given his objectives but little more - he does not welcome hands-on management. He has plenty of initiative and is keen to take on more responsibilities. He will be reasonably honest in the way he communicates with his superiors, and will want them to be straight with him. He is not inclined to give respect to individuals simply on the grounds of rank; he wants to see evidence of commitment and ability.

Relationships with Peers

He is a trifle introverted and not all that socially outgoing by nature. However, peers will find that he is strongly team- oriented and keen to facilitate their efforts to achieve the objectives set. He is reasonably patient and tolerant, though he will tend to come down fairly quickly on what he sees as sloppy thinking. Peers will appreciate the quality of his intellect and his capacity for ideas. He will influence them through his expertise and competence rather than dominating by force of personality. At times, he may not be all that good at reading the motivations and reactions of those around him, but he will try to respond positively to his colleagues' needs.

Peers will find that he does not identify in an emotional way with his own ideas, and that he is objective in assessing them against differing viewpoints; however, he is likely to be right more often than are most people. Peers will find that he is quite serious-minded and very conscientious in his attitude to his work.

Relationships with Subordinates

Subordinates will find that he starts off with them on the basis of trust, and that he will give them a good deal of autonomy until or unless they prove that they are not capable of handling it. He will delegate sensibly and organise the work of those under him in a thoughtful manner, giving due consideration to their own development and need to learn. He will be a fair and usually patient boss, though his intellectual ability and confidence may sometimes have a more over-powering effect on those under him than he imagines.

Although he will try to operate a consultative style most of the time, he is capable of taking a tougher and more directive approach where necessary. He will set high standards and expect his subordinates to show the same commitment as he himself does. Staff will find that whilst he allows freedom and scope for initiative, he will monitor progress quite carefully.

SUMMARY AND INTEGRATION

Dr Seel is a little unusual in various ways, which has some positive and negative consequences. He is exceptionally intelligent and shows outstanding intellectual abilities across the board. He possesses the capacity to see beyond the more obvious aspects of a situation and to think in a more lateral way. Despite these attributes, and to some extent because of them, he has not followed an altogether normal education and career path. After a slow start, he is making up for lost time, and is clearly ambitious. He has a need to achieve and to work to the limit of his considerable potential.

His approach to his work is a serious-minded and committed one, and he expects much the same from others. He has a reasonable level of energy and drive, but his style rests more upon his intellectual powers and his ability to analyse logically and quickly. His decisions on technical matters will be well-judged and he will show a good grasp of detail. He is meticulous and careful, and will strive to be precise. Although emotionally stable and usually well- controlled, he can lose his temper and his restraint on rare occasions.

Dr Seel does not like to be put into a category or "typed" in any way, and it is probably quite difficult for people to feel they have an understanding of him on first meeting. He has a tendency to question and to probe in a moderately sceptical style, and whilst this is not done in an aggressive way, it is possible that he could be perceived in a more threatening manner than he realises. This is not helped by his intellectual confidence which, while well-founded, may be seen as challenging by some superiors. He could be viewed as intellectually arrogant, but this would be somewhat unfair to him; he is quite objective and open-minded, and strongly team-oriented.

His own ambitions are not pursued at the expense of others, and he will try hard to facilitate the success of his colleagues. He is quite a friendly and patient man, but he will be quick to identify what he sees as sloppy thinking and lack of precision. Subordinates will find that he is willing to delegate and to trust them enough to give them scope for initiative, though he will monitor their progress quite carefully. They will find that he is demanding but fair. He will want to be given as much freedom as possible by his own boss; he does not like hands-on management. He is not inclined to respect superiors simply on the grounds of their position; they have to be highly competent and committed as well.

GENERAL EVALUATION OF N R SEEL FOR BNR

Main Assets

- Exceptional intellectual ability on all domains tested
- Likely to achieve work of high technical quality; meticulous
- Plans ahead sensibly and is able to see the strategic picture
- Emotionally stable and can cope with normal pressures
- Confident in his ability and well motivated; has a strong need to achieve
- Likely to be imaginative and innovative in approach, without taking undue risks
- Generally positive in his attitude to others; quite friendly
- Strongly team-oriented; cooperative and constructive in trying to work with peers and subordinates
- Quite objective and fair-minded
- Willing to trust those under him and to delegate accordingly Main Limitations
- A trifle shy and may not make the best impression on first meeting
- Could be perceived as too challenging and threatening by colleagues who lack his intellectual confidence
- Not especially good at anticipating the reactions and motives of those around him

DEVELOPMENT NEEDS

Dr Seel has considerable potential, though precisely which direction it should be developed in is not completely clear. The problem is that he is capable of making at least a reasonable job of almost anything; he has a balanced and quite flexible style, and a conscientious attitude to his work, along with his outstanding intellectual powers. If he has limitations, they are probably in the interpersonal realm, and they relate more to the impression some colleagues may form of him than to any fundamental problems. His intellectual level and his ability to take an independent and possibly even unorthodox perspective on an issue may make him seem out of step and perhaps awkward to deal with at times.

He is not sufficiently outgoing and socially confident to be very adept at dealing with people; his approach is rather honest and straightforward, which could work against him on occasion. It may be that he does not "sell" himself all that well. Longer exposure to him should convince colleagues of his basically very positive attitude to them, however.

He clearly feels considerable frustration at his present level of work, and believes - with justification - that he can contribute at a higher and more strategic level of the business. His powers of analysis and his capacity for lateral thinking suggest that he has a lot to offer in the areas of planning and strategy. For the future, however, he should perhaps seek to get some more feedback on the impression he makes on people and on his style of communicating with them; formal training inputs may be useful here. It may be that he will not be able to exert the influence he deserves until he has developed further in this respect.

---

So how did the psychologist's predictions work out over the next twenty years? Check my CV.