As I re-read the
astonishingly good book on the new science of cause-and-effect – The Book of
Why – a fascinating insight into a celebrated man is revealed.
Karl Pearson, disciple
of Francis Galton, is considered to be one of the founders of the science of Statistics
and the man who gave shape to the idea of correlation. Writing about him in an obituary for the
Royal Society in 1936, one of his assistants, George Udny Yule, said this (note
that he tried to write this in as polite a language as possible):
Quote:
The infection of his
enthusiasm, it is true, was invaluable; but his dominance could be a
disadvantage….This desire for domination, for everything to be just as he
wanted it, comes out in other ways, notably the editing of Biometrika – surely the
most personally edited journal that was ever published.
Those who left him and
began to think for themselves were apt, as happened painfully in more instances
than one, to find that after a divergence of opinion the maintenance of
friendly relations became difficult, after express criticism impossible.
Unquote
A micro-manager, who
demanded dissent-free, unquestioning loyalty (are these related traits?).
I put the book down,
for this – instantly – reminded me of two, no three, actually four people of my
acquaintance. Perhaps there are more I will
recall in good time. Yet, let me take two
immediate examples, the first being an excellent wildlife scientist of
international repute, who has done more for conserving India’s wildlife in the
last thirty years than anyone we recall.
He is also among the
most unpopular cult figures in the field.
Aggressive in the
guise of ‘talking straight’, dismissive and strongly opinionated, the man first
spawned a generation of fans, most of whom then broke away when the heat under
his umbrella grew too hot to bear as they began to think for themselves,
question and express – even mild – dissent.
He picked up fights – for the right reasons – with senior officers of the
Forest Department, who were entirely incompetent to take him on scientifically
and were driven by the imperative to show ‘performance’, which meant that they
inflated success and suppressed bad news.
Yet, their egos needed molly-cuddling and gentle aggrandisement. His did too!
The result was – and remains – meanness and conflict and his success has been through
the stress and grind of this attrition.
There’s more: young
people would love to learn from him and therefore want to work in his team, but
they are terrified of saying anything that would show them up as inexperienced,
ignorant or both. Or worse, what if they
were seen as having independent thinking skills (fate worse than death, note). I wonder about his early years, was he always
this way? Did he suffer humiliation and
take it all too personally, when choosing a field outside his initial
competence? Or was it – in his case – a storied
family of stalwarts that gave him the assurance to be, well, blunt and acidic
in tone?
The second person is
an architect, one I have known for years, a prima donna, with fandom in her
circs, who believes in micro-managing the window dressing of homes she builds,
because that is her signature and it must be perfect, just perfect,
practicality be damned. She is contemptuous
of folks who wonder as they question (Ask me.
I was at the receiving end for quite a while) and disdainful of those
who are slow – what can be worse than being slow? (Answer: being fried in hell). Her anxious team takes notes and scurries around
like rabbits awaiting execution. She
differs from the wildlife scientist in her speed and impatience, but that is of notional interest. The essentials
are the same.
Karl Pearson is hardly
unique, as we can see.
There is another
person I would love to talk about, but will not. What goes around, comes around…..
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