Are systematisers better guitarists?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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'Empathising and Systematising' - a short story by Adam Carlton

Antoinette and myself at my agent's office

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She walked across while I was waiting to see my agent.

Antoinette: I remembered just in time. One of the readers of the slush pile. Bottom of the food chain in the business.

But Antoinette stood out, I thought: she had sparkle.

"Hi Adam," she said, showing me a printout, "I came across this and I'm puzzled. My first thought was, well, it's not for us; but something about it - the argument - it piqued a bit of interest..."

She gave me a charming smile, with only the slightest flicker of irony, and handed me the document.

"I thought of you."

Like I said, smart girl.

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The Evolution of Elite Cognition: Systematizers vs. Empaths in the March of Civilization

By Dr Henry Lutending

Human society was once small, tribal, and violently xenophobic. Hunter-gatherers operated in tight-knit bands well below the Dunbar limit, where social trust was personal, reciprocity was direct, and there was little requirement for abstract reasoning or large-scale cooperation. The only selection pressures at play were for basic survival skills—strength, cunning, a capacity for immediate social bonding, and a deep suspicion of outsiders, who, given resource limitations, were almost certain to be hostile.

Then came agriculture, surplus, cities, and suddenly, a new game. Societies grew beyond the size where direct reciprocity was possible. Elites—those who could manage complex societies—emerged. And to do that, they needed two things: (1) systematizing intelligence, to plan taxes and economies, develop legal codes, and run administrative structures; and (2) high-level prosociality, to negotiate, defuse conflict, and create the ideological glue that held populations together. In short, enhanced intelligence and empathy became adaptive in a way they simply hadn’t been before.

Selection responded accordingly. Over the last ten thousand years, elite classes across civilizations—from the Middle-East to China—developed traits that were alien to their peasant underclasses. Elites had to think long-term, manage abstract systems, and suppress impulsivity in favor of diplomacy and reputation-building. These traits, culturally vital, were biologically selected. The best networkers and system-builders left the most descendants, shaping gene frequencies over time. (Peasants also adapted away from their hunter-gatherer forebears, to a life of sedentary drudgery and endemic disease - a different set of adaptations).

Selection was fast, messy, and polygenic. Just as rapid selection for intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews produced both extraordinary cognitive abilities and a cluster of neurological disorders [1], so too did the selection for high-trust, high-intelligence elites produce its own variety of pathological byproducts—over-systematization, over-empathizing, and the various maladaptations we now call autism, anxiety disorders, and elite neurosis.

Fast forward to today, and we see the consequences all around us. The class structure of modern Western societies forms a cognitive and temperamental cline.

At one extreme, the criminal underclass: impulsive, aggressive, low-future-orientation, thriving on immediate dominance rather than delayed reciprocity.

At the other extreme, the hyper-refined elites: measured, strategic, highly networked, masters of abstract thought but often physically timid, conflict-averse, and tempted toward comforting illusions at the expense of harsh realities they are often insulated from.

Within those elites there has always been a schism: between the systematizers, who think in hierarchies, structures, and long-range planning; and the hyper-empaths, who seek to create moral consensus, enforce ideological norms, and suppress overt aggression in favor of soft power.

This schism is the backbone of our present culture wars. The progressive elites—the hyper-empaths—dominate institutions that rely on moral framing: academia, media, HR bureaucracies. They create narratives, enforce taboos, and attempt to neutralize dissent through social pressure rather than direct confrontation - repressive tolerance, in Marcuse's words [2]. 

Their failure mode? Paralysis in the face of real conflict, an inability to handle reality when brute force is required, and the consequential destruction of high-trust norms when predatory actors exploit them. As the phrase goes: when the bullets start flying, the liberals leave the room, in tears, wringing their hands.

Meanwhile, the systematizing elites—the pragmatic, hierarchical, and meritocratic—lean toward finance, tech, the military, and entrepreneurial domains. Their failure mode? Brutal, zero-sum thinking, a tendency to ignore social legitimacy, and, in the extreme, a return to old-fashioned coercion when persuasion fails.

Every current civilization oscillates between these poles. When the systematizers dominate too completely, society hardens, becomes rigid, loses social legitimacy, and collapses under its own brutal hierarchies. When the hyper-empaths dominate, society feminizes, unmoors itself from reality, loses its ability to defend itself, and becomes prey to external or internal predators.

The pendulum swings. And right now, after decades of progressive dominance, it’s swinging back. The liberal consensus, built on high-trust norms and an almost pathological aversion to direct power, is fracturing under the weight of its own contradictions. The coming era will be more masculine, more systematizing, and, inevitably, more coercive.

AI adds a new factor to the mix.

If elite cognition has been honed by centuries of intense selection for specific traits—systematizing, empathizing, problem-solving, and navigating complex social structures—what happens when you begin to outsource those very traits to machines? Artificial intelligence, for example, could decouple cognitive labor from biology entirely, allowing for a kind of disembodied, almost immortal competence that doesn't have the same evolutionary pressures we do. The very nature of "elite" ability could shift radically, and potentially in a direction that doesn’t favor the long-standing human social fabric.

This has been explored in a fictional setting by the author S. M. Stirling in his sequence [3], The Domination of the Draka. The books explore an alternate history where the Draka, a brutal and highly militarized society, dominate much of the world.

Draka society is not simply a dystopia in the sense of a broken system, but rather an alternative hyper-competent, brutal, and authoritarian regime that has achieved a form of success. The Draka operate on the mastery of domination through genetic servitude to create an order that is efficient, stable, and terrifying.

It's not the only future we can envisage. Once technology has improved on mere human labour, it may occur to elites to simply let the working classes fade away to extinction. With the total fertility rates we see in modern economies, that's probably the default option, anyway.

The abilities of elite populations to genetically optimise their own systematizing and empathizing traits has never been greater. Paradoxically as genome engineering makes that imminent prospect enticing, the arrival of superhuman embodied AI may render it unnecessary. 

The elites will transition to something new, to be sure: it may even be their own extinction.

References

[1] "The Ten Thousand Year Explosion". Cochran and Harpending, 2009.

[2] "Repressive Tolerance". Herbert Marcuse, 1965.

[3] "The Domination". S. M. Stirling, 1988-96.

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I looked back at Antoinette in disbelief.

“Where to begin? References to genetics in social science, fascistic regimes cited without obligatory moral condemnation?

"Does this guy even have a job?”

Antoinette shrugged, her tight, translucent blouse shimmering in the sun, “There's no affiliation on his manuscript - maybe he's an independent researcher. So what do you think? The circular file?"

I thought about it. Normally yes, of course. But perhaps the times were changing; perhaps a smart agent could get ahead of the curve...

"I think you should go for it, it's kind of interesting, after all. But to be on the safe side, make sure you frame it as satirical fiction...”

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