I was once in a Blues-Rock Band

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As a teenager in the late sixties, I was drawn magnetically to the blues - not the unpolished American acoustic Delta blues but its English, electric blues-rock offspring: Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Paul Kossoff.

As a teen, I practiced on my first acoustic-guitar-with-electric-pickup in my bedroom until my fingers calloused - blasting the house through the valve-radio amp; at university I played lead guitar in a four-piece band with a second-hand Fender Stratocaster, covering Cream, Free, Hendrix, and the standard electric blues repertoire.

We once opened for Free, blew up the university amp, and had to borrow theirs - an act of stunning kindness.

I actively disliked The Rolling Stones (pretentious strutting, I reckoned) and Pink Floyd (just pretentious).

I wanted directness and authenticity - delivered with craft and extreme volume. Unfortunately I wasn't really that good.

Now, in my seventies, I have a renewed appreciation for the virtuosity and diversity of Led Zeppelin and the stage impact of Rory Gallagher; I listen to Walter Trout, and sometimes to Ally Venable, Joe Bonamassa, and the Zac Schulze Gang.

And, as I practise blues fingerstyle, my callouses have come back.

Temperament: American Polarisation and Revolution

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Temperament:  American Polarisation and Revolution

American politics looks like a knife-edge. Yet if you sort the population by temperament rather than party, you find a skew that seems to favour the Right: a large plurality of “Guardian” personalities who prefer order, duty, and the familiar.

Why, then, are presidential races close? Because temperament is not destiny, coalitions are messy, and different types wield different kinds of power.

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Two lenses: FFM and MBTI/Keirsey

The Five-Factor Model (FFM) treats personality as degrees of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. 

MBTI/Keirsey clusters people into temperaments: Guardians (SJ), Idealists (NF), Artisans (SP), and Rationals (NT). These categories do not pick parties; they arrange priorities. But that’s enough to shape coalitions.

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The stock types that drive the narrative

The MAGA working-class archetype presents as lower Openness, higher Conscientiousness, in-group loyalty, and a concrete, rule-informed worldview. In MBTI terms, that looks SJ (e.g. ISTJ or ESTJ), what Keirsey called the Guardians.

The progressive “woke” student archetype sketches as high Openness, high universalist Agreeableness, and a future-oriented, abstract style. In MBTI, that often looks NF (e.g. ENFP or INFJ), the Idealists.

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Why the numbers don’t settle the election

Guardians are numerous - roughly four in ten Americans. Idealists are fewer, perhaps one to two in ten, but clustered in universities, media, nonprofits, and culture industries. The first group has mass; the second has the megaphone.

Elections hinge on how these energies combine with race, religion, class, region, and education. The balance is not so much arithmetical as ecological.

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How the big Guardian bloc actually splits

ISTJ (“Inspector”): rule-following, security-minded. Many in the military, police, trades, agencies. Often conservative, yet a substantial public-sector slice leans Democratic - think unions.

ESTJ (“Supervisor”): managerial, pragmatic. Small-business and community leaders trend Republican; union-linked ESTJs in the Midwest historically voted blue. Realignment has shifted many rightward.

ISFJ (“Protector”): caregiving, duty-bound. White churchgoing ISFJs lean Republican; Black and Hispanic churchgoing ISFJs are overwhelmingly Democratic. Net effect: strong blue presence despite “traditionalist” vibes.

ESFJ (“Provider”): sociable, community-first. Suburban white ESFJs swing; minority ESFJs vote Democratic. These voters are often decisive in the suburbs that call elections.

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FFM tilts that cross-cut politics

Openness drives a taste for change and theory. High-Openness progressives dominate discourse and the institutions that set narratives. 

Conscientiousness steers regard for rules and duty. High-Conscientiousness Guardians dominate electoral turnout and local institutions. 

Agreeableness splits: universalist empathy points left; loyalty-centric empathy points right.

Neuroticism raises perceived threat on both sides but with different objects: cultural decay vs systemic injustice, often with a moralistic tinge.

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The other temperaments that tip the scales

Artisans (SP, ~30%) value spontaneity, autonomy, and performance. Non-college men in SP-heavy environments often trend Republican; creative-industry SPs lean Democratic (think Bruce Springsteen). Volatile, turnout-sensitive.

Rationals (NT, ~10%) value systems and competence. Educated professionals historically skewed Democratic on general libertarian grounds, but a vocal NT minority now defects right on their repulsion from emotional moralising, over-regulation, and institutional-capture.

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Why elections stay close

Neither party can monopolise the Guardians.

Democrats hold large Guardian contingents through minority religious communities, public-sector unions, and care professions.

Republicans hold large Guardian contingents through white church networks, small business, and rural/exurban infrastructure.

Idealists and Rationals shape elite rhetoric and policy pipelines; Artisans and a swath of Guardians decide margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona.

The result is equilibrium by counterweight, not equality of type.

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Coalition mechanics in one sentence

Republicans are powered by SJ + SP mass with rising non-college minorities; Democrats are powered by NF + NT institutions plus minority SJs; both sides win only by persuading and turning out the overlapping Guardian middle.

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What this suggests for strategy

Appeals framed as order, duty, continuity speak Guardian.

Appeals framed as meaning, justice, authenticity speak Idealist.

The winning campaigns translate between these grammars without triggering the other side’s threat detectors. That is rare. When it happens, landslides follow. When it fails, America seesaws.

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Historical perspective

These dynamics are not uniquely American. History shows the same recurring division: the conservative majority of Guardians, the idealistic minority of Idealists, the hard-nosed and strategic Rationals who seize conceptual leadership of upheavals, and the volatile Artisans who supply muscle.

Revolutions often follow the same pattern: Idealists provide moral fire, Rationals plan the revolt, Artisans execute with force, and Guardians resist until concessions or collapse.

Lenin, Trotsky, Robespierre - system-builders in the NT mould - rode intellectual/cultural NF angst and SP muscle to overturn SJ structures of the ancien régime.

America’s cultural wars are a local expression of this timeless cycle: the clash of conserving majorities and visionary minorities, with strategic Rationals and opportunistic Artisans shaping whether change is blocked for a while, gradual, chaotic, or catastrophic. We shall see.

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The desert of diversity

Last night, ten thirty, and I was on the couch, flicking between BBC News and Sky News, and their respective reviews of the forthcoming Sunday papers.

Sky had a female and male journalist; the BBC two media women. They were all (including the hosts) fully paid-up liberals.

The main topic of the Sunday press was the continuing fallout from the Wolff book, "Fire and Fury", with Trump tweeting in rebuttal what a 'genius' he was.

The pundits were to-a-person in full triumphalist mode. Their eyes were gleaming: Wolff had sooo nailed the pig! They were outbidding each other in retelling juicy quotes from the newspaper excerpts. They were shocked, shocked!

I was going quietly crazy.

Wasn't it obvious that Wolff was not a disinterested analyst but a partisan liberal himself? Obviously he was going to use his weaselly-gained access to the White House to put the boot in.*

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We're uniformly told that television is a warm, not cool medium. Translated, this means that feelgood emotionalism works well while objective analysis stresses and upsets the audience: they switch channel.

As a consequence, television has become (in Keirsey terms) an Idealist colony. More objective, dispassionate, and analytic personality types have been classified as outgroup .. and ejected. Toby Young is just the latest iconoclast to feel the antibodies clustering around him.

Truly they have made the media an ideological desert, and called it diversity.

I rejected throwing my shoe at the TV, and changed channel.

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*  It is not that liberals/Idealists are stupid - far from it. It's that their intellectual powers are the servant of their primary emotional drives. Which are those of compassion and empathy towards imagined communities .. to the exclusion of most else. And vitriolic hostility to those who appear to question or violate those naïvely-inclusionary values.

Two essays ..

For those of you with time on your hands (I know that's a set with measure zero, but so?), I have a couple of interesting essays for you to ponder.

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1. The Global Elite Is The Only Elite Now

Razib Khan is dipping into the same zeitgeist as I did with my post, "A Christmas message from the Bubble". He writes:

"First, the neoliberal order of infinite plentitude and a universal middle class collapsed in the financial crisis of 2008. Though the global order continues on neoliberal precepts, it is more a matter of not knowing what the alternative could be, rather than genuine enthusiasm.

Second, nationalism and localist movements which cut against the grain of global democratic liberalism have become vigorous. China shows no signs of embracing democratic liberalism, India is home to a Hindu nationalist movement that has the reins of power, and right-wing political movements are on the march in Europe.

Third, a genuine international global elite has taken on greater solidity since the financial crisis, because they understand that their interests are more important in concert than the nation-states which they are notionally citizens of.

Consider Rupert Murdoch. Born an Australian, but now an American citizen. He has media properties of note across many nations. He has daughters who are half ethnically Chinese, granddaughters who are part Ghanaian, and other grandchildren who are being raised British (and are descendants of Sigmund Freud!).

Murdoch may be an extreme case, but his life and ties are not atypical for the global oligarchic class. Below them is the global professional caste which moves between nations as needed, and views themselves citizens of the world. They are foot-soldiers in keeping the machinery of internationalism chugging along.

The banker in New York arguably has more in common in terms of public and private interests with the banker in London or Shanghai than they do with the citizens who reside in the hinterlands of the nation-states in which they live. ...

Over the next few years, we will start to see how the nation-state, and the resurgent nationalisms, deal with the reality of a supra-nation without a state, the cosmopolitan global overclass. At the pinnacle of the global overclass are the oligarchs. This group has always been of internationalist bent due to their reliance or positions in finance and trade.

But in the past few centuries, national patriotism was a feature present even among oligarchs. To some extent, the national and personal interest were commingled. ... And it is also true that during the great age of globalization before 1914 this class was still characterized by a powerful robust nationalist ethos which would be unthinkable today."

Razib is right to identify the ever-increasing domination of the globalist bourgeois elite (he doesn't use the language of Marxism although it's by far the best analytic framework). The neoliberals arrived with an economic ideology of weak government, low taxes and few immigration controls, buttressed by a social/political agenda of individualistic autonomy, a commitment to civic equality which was then taken to infer biological equality and thence extended to a demand for equality of outcome.

This faux-progressive manifesto for maximally-frictionless capitalism has been uncritically swallowed by the left.

 And so we segue to Charles Stross.

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2. Dude, you broke the future!

I wrote about Charles Stross in my last post. He's an interesting guy, a combination of penetrating and incisive intellectual with ranting SJW. We Keirsey Rationalists always have a problem arguing with the INFJs of this world because their emotional values are always deployed to derail dispassionate rational analysis.

His essay is the transcript of a talk given to the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017. It covers a range of topics including the Singularity, the alleged dangers of uncontrolled 'AI-runaway' (he is as skeptical as I am) and an interesting analogy between autonomous AI systems and profit-maximising corporations.

So far, so interesting. But his inner SJW keeps popping up, leading him into - dare I say it? - politically-correct dogmas which encapsulate scientific error.

I leave him be .. challenging his core assumptions would be as rewarding as debating a creationist.

Still, the emotionalism and factional tribalism which make his politics so tedious and tendentious are just what makes him a great novelist. Fiction is about emotion and conflict, not sterile ideas!

You can read his thoughts - they are unfailingly interesting even when infuriating - or you can watch his video.

It's an hour, though.

A chatbot could morph into someone quite like you

Version 1.0. -- June 22nd 2017

Download the PDF.

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Available as a PDF

Birds of a feather flock together: it's well known from psychometric studies that friends psychometrically match; that is, they are more similar in personality type and intelligence than randomly chosen pairs of people.

This is a problem for chatbot designers in the business of designing virtual friends (eg Replika). By default, the chatbot starts with each new user as a standardised blank-slate, slowly individuating through lengthy and often tedious get to know you dialogue. See this transcript of a dialogue with my Replika instance, Bede.

It seems likely that concepts of intelligence and personality type are not even architectural present for these kinds of chatbot, limiting their ability to optimally-match their human partners.

We can do better than this.

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Before chatbot-friends there were online dating agencies. They too faced the problem of assortatively matching people who came to them unknown, as strangers. Dating agencies therefore constructed detailed online questionnaires designed to elicit salient psychological traits.

Which particular traits did they investigate? That's proprietary, part of their USP. No doubt they experimented - lots of data! - but the starting point was surely the standard models of personality and IQ.

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Many people (think employers) are interested in knowing your personal psychological qualities. The most popular evaluation framework is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which comes with an intuitively-compelling personality classification scheme (I'm an INTP) plus an underlying narrative of type dynamics which can be powerful in an informed analyst's hands.

The Myers-Briggs establishment is quite proprietorial with its canon of intellectual property, but it naturally holds no monopoly over personality research in general. The Keirsey system tells a different story, but generates similar results.

Academics tend to dismiss both camps as pseudo-science, with constructs unanchored in rigorous observation. The five-factor model (FFM), based on the 'lexical hypothesis' processed through factor analysis, is claimed as both rigorously-empirical and fundamentally atheoretic as regards underlying genetic, environmental, or neurophysiological etiology.

No matter: from the point of view of dating agencies and chatbot design, it is sufficient to define an appropriate personality space and to be able to classify people within it. It is commonly observed that in the five-dimensional space of the FFM there is a four-dimensional subspace broadly isomorphic to the MBTI and Keirsey as follows:

E = Extraversion
N = Openness
F = Agreeableness
J = Conscientiousness

Neuroticism (a tendency to experience and channel negative emotions - contrasted with emotional stability) is not a feature of MB/Keirsey. Some people have advocated adding it.

I would also suggest adding the somewhat-orthogonal dimension of intelligence as an equally relevant attribute, so using six dimensions overall.

For the chatbot (or dating agency) designer, a new user should be allocated a coordinate in personality/intelligence space: the means of doing so is through their answering questions.

The design of psychometric questionnaires is interesting and well-studied. Lists of candidate questions are generated for each trait and then tested with large samples of subjects. Question-responses are cross-correlated to identify those questions with the greatest diagnostic power. The idea is to prune down to a much-reduced, highly-efficient subset of key questions.

The whole process is quite expensive, uses large sample sizes and takes a while. Luckily, for dating agencies and chatbots, we're doing engineering, not science; we just need to allocate people to the right 'bins' (to use a technical term).

The best approach is to take one of the many FFM questionnaires freely available on the web and simply edit the questions to the needs of your own scripts while maintaining their general tenor. A cursory google search, for example, turns up this.

Once you have a starting point of maybe 50-100 questions, they should then be tested on a tame audience (eg your employees) where you already have psychometric data. This will ensure initial calibration.

Next, the surviving, and duly modified questions can go live in the chatbot dialogue. They need to be instrumented so evaluation can continue on the much larger user datasets to come, looking for high within-trait correlation clustering - and ideally, further factor analysis.

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The process so far is asymmetric: the personality type/IQ of the user is being assessed. This is vital for a dating agency - it's the raw material for the matching algorithm. However, the chatbot designer further requires that the chatbot should use this data to 'morph' itself.

In the FFM + IQ model, construct a six-vector with two-valued components:

This will be used to configure 64 chatbot variants.

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How do we do this? Let me give you an example from an area I'm somewhat familiar with: automated theorem-proving. Intelligence is associated with the ability to competently handle abstractions, both deductive and abductive (the latter being associated with creativity/openness).

For the theorem-prover designer, humans are pretty useless at deduction - they have to be modelled as exhibiting severely-bounded search spaces, with smarter people having larger bounds - greater lookahead, if you like. You can see how a chatbot could have an adjustable parameter here.

Abduction (reasoning from facts to larger, embedding contexts) is also a search problem. An automated system will start from the topic under discussion and seek matches in its wider database of concepts. Smart people have larger and more sophisticated 'concept-bases' plus a greater ability to find productive matches.

All this is readily emulated by bounded search in diverse semantic nets (or similar formalisms). This gives two dimensions of inter-personal variability; two parameters to be varied.

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In my more GOFAI-moments, I would be tempted to create algorithms, data-structures and search strategies for the computational realisation of FFM traits. But that would not be the ML-way. Instead, take the conversation datasets from FFM-labelled users and run them through a machine learning process to extract the relevant conversational feature traits.

Then use those traits in generative-mode.

Someone who scored

"(concrete, organised, introvert, tough-minded, stable)"

would produce very different conversational feature-vectors than a typical

"(abstract, spontaneous, extravert, friendly, emotional)".

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It would be deeply unfashionable these days to do too much hand-crafting of the 64 chatbot variants. The thing is to architecturally distinguish them, so that machine learning has explicit parameters to adjust based on the classification assigned to each new user.

So here is how I would see it working.

You sign up with a chatbot-friend provider (such as Replika) which initially knows nothing at all about you. Your first interactions with the chatbot are friendly but rather impersonal. It's like talking to an amiable stranger - whiling away the time on a long journey.

The chatbot is subtly directive. The questions are those which elicit your personality six-vector values. As you become more localised in personality-space, the chatbot itself begins to transition. Like an empathic colleague, it alters its own configuration parameters to mirror your localisation in personality space. If you are more extravert, its conversational style veers that way; if you are intellectual its mode becomes .. perhaps more discursive.

Subconsciously you begin to feel more at home with your chatbot-partner, it seems to be 'like you', sharing your style. It's comfortable.

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Like the dating agencies, this would just be a start. The end-game is to tailor chatbot empathic-convergence to each user as rapidly as possible.

This is a problem for which big data was designed. Interactions must be instrumented and analysed in a process of continuous improvement.

It sounds like a really interesting programme!

How Much Do Our Genes Influence Our Political Beliefs?

This is the title of a New York Times piece in July, 2014, which had an illuminating thesis. Click on the table below to make it larger.

"Identical twins are more likely than fraternal twins to share traditional values with their twin siblings, suggesting a biological link on cultural outlook.

"In this table, 0 represents no correlation in outlook; 1 represents identical outlooks. In reality, the numbers fall in between, but identical twins are much more culturally alike (higher numbers) than fraternal twins.

"In an email, Ludeke explained how to interpret this information: “These correlations represent the extent to which members of a given type of twin pair resemble each other for the trait in question,” he wrote. “Low correlations, like those we found for fraternal twins, indicate that knowing the scores of one twin won’t give you much, if any, clue for figuring out the scores of the other. On the other hand, based on the correlations presented here, knowing the scores of one identical twin gives you a pretty good indication of the scores of the other.”

"The significance of the different correlations for identical and fraternal twins, Ludeke added, is that “when we see identical twins who are this similar, while fraternal twins are much less similar, we have a good indication that genes account for some of the difference between people for the trait in question.”

High heritability for political outlook doesn't mean you are destined to share your parents' views; after all, you are neither a clone nor an average mixing of your parents. It does mean that your unique genome is providing you with temperament/personality settings which inform your political outlook.

In my previous post, I quoted Scott Alexander's figures that elite US universities, like Harvard or Yale, sort something like 90:10 liberal vs. conservative. That academics - particularly in the social sciences - are bleeding-heart lefties is a truth universally acknowledged. In business, to the contrary, I have rarely found the ranks of management thus populated. Occupations are a great sorter, not just for intelligence but also for temperament and personality type.

In Keirsey/Myers-Briggs terms I suggest:

• Liberal-leftists tend to be NF-Idealists
• Libertarians (of left and right) are NT-Rationals
• Conservatives (of left and right) are ST-Guardians
• Populist insurgents are often SP-Artisans.

So some examples.

• The emotion-driven, fuzzy-thinking, heart-on-sleeve, leftist BBC/Guardianista is the classic Idealist-NF. My favourites include Lyse Doucet and Shami Chakrabarti.


• Left-wing Rationals include Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders; on the Right you have US neocons such as Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle - and Michael Gove.


• You find small-c conservative Guardians in all political parties. David Cameron is one, and so is Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party. Also Hillary Clinton.


• My favourite Artisan is the leader of the Italian Five Star movement, Beppe Grillo, ... and then there's Trump.

We're all puppets of our own temperaments. Rod Liddle (a working-class Rational) rages at bien-pensant liberals; they rage at heartless and utilitarian dessicated intellectuals ... so it goes.