Rare Talent and Huge Salaries

In an earlier blog I doubted whether the ability to run a large business is rare enough to necessitate the vast salaries many directorships attract, and suggested that people were often mistaking good luck for business acumen.

I’m now having second thoughts.

Even if running a business does not require any single very rare skill, it might still still require a rare combination of common skills.

I’d expect the successful captain of industry to be well above average in each of the following.

Intelligence (1/10)

Power of concentration (1/5)

Stamina and perseverance (1/5)

Co-ordination - ability to avoid muddle and confusion (1/2)

Memory (½)

Ability to assess people (½)

Ability to manage people, to delegate, supervise adequately without overdoing it, to judge when to listen, and when not. (1/3)

After each I’ve put an estimate of the proportion of the population who meet the standard.

Assuming independence, the probability of someone qualifying in all respects would be the product of all those probabilities, namely:

(1/10)*(1/5)*(1/5)*(½)³*(1/3) = 1/(6000)

Senior posts are usually taken by people in the age range 40 to 60, who I guess amount to less than a third of the population, so the proportion of the population qualified by both age and ability is at most 1/18000.

The population of Great Britain is around 60 million, so the number of people is between 3000 and 4000. That number must be further reduced to remove people of the requisite abilities who have not chosen business careers - some will have chosen instead to be doctors, lawyers, academics, journalists, computer programmers, soldiers or civil servants.

How many people are needed to run our large companies? I’m not sure how many companies are involved. 1300 companies are quoted on the main market of the London Stock Exchange, though not all those a British. All companies in the FTSE 350 index have their primary listing in Britain, so I guess that at least 350 companies need directors of high ability and each company will need several. With fewer than people 4000 available, leadership talent may be rare after all.

Terrified by Batch Files

Recently several emails have not reached their destinations, though they were sent to valid addresses, and I received no error messages.

All the messages had a particular attachment, consisting of a file created by zipping a folder containing instructions for connecting to a web site that I manage. There were three files in the folder. A batch file that opened a DOS window to make an ftp connection to the site, a text file that contained information required by the batch file, and another text file giving instructions. I needed to send all that to other officers of the association that owns the web site so they can operate it in the event of my sudden demise.

Other emails, including ones in which I assured intended recipients that I’d sent the information, were delivered promptly, but the messages with that attachment disappeared without trace; they weren’t even in the recipients' spam traps.

The destination addresses unable to receive the emails in question were on either Google, or ntl. When I sent a copy of the problem message to my icuknet mail box it arrived safely.

Eventually I renamed the batch file by changing its extension to ‘txt’ and changed the instructions to include a specification that the name should be changed back again before use, and the message was safely delivered with its attachment.

Google and ntl seem so terrified of batch files that they are even peering inside zipped folders in case one should be lurking there, and they hide the evidence afterwards.

Faith and its Consequences

The Archbishop of York recently objected to proposals to allow marriage between people of the same gender.

As reported in the media, his argument stressed the linguistic impropriety of using the word ‘marriage’ in a different sense from the customary one, but I suspect that his objection was not primarily a defence of linguistic usage. It is in some places the custom for one man to have several wives, so there is an established use of ‘marriage’ in which it does not imply the monogamy that I’m sure the Archbishop favours.

I think his primary grounds for objecting are religious. That raises the question of the grounds for religious belief.

It is common for religious people to say that religious belief should not be assessed according to the same criteria we apply to other beliefs. Faith, they say, is at least as important as evidence. It is common for religious people to extol as a virtue having faith in what cannot be justified by evidence.

Insofar as religious faith reflects a personal choice of a world view that someone finds reassuring, that is all very well, until that world view affects the way the people of faith deal with others who don’t share their faith.

The Archbishop was not just advising members of his flock not to marry partners of the same gender, he was objecting to anyone at all contracting such a marriage, whatever their faith or lack of faith.

That is an example of a systematic intellectual dishonesty found in much religious thought. The evidence put forward to support belief is weak, but once the belief is considered to be established it is used to justify conclusions much stronger than the original evidence justifies. Thus can an personal whim be magnified into a moral imperative.

Temperature Inversion

While I was in town this morning, it seemed very cold, but when I returned home it seemed relatively mild, suggesting that the City centre was colder than the Eastern suburbs - quite the opposite of what one would expect.

More early flowers

I spotted some crocuses in flower today, they looked as though they'd been out for several days but they were in a tub tucked away behind a shrub where they weren't easily spotted during my brief January incursions into the garden.

I wonder why 'crocuses' doesn't have a double 's'.

Why doesn't God hold a Press Conference?

It suddenly struck me that if there were a God, he'd have no need to communicate indirectly through the ambiguous words of ancient revelations, but could just call a press conference.

As there's no divine press conference, there is no God. All the poring over sacred texts, and puzzling over metaphysical arguments, are quite useless except perhaps as exercises in linguistics and logic.

Noisy Celebration of an Abstraction

I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of fireworks, and noticed it was 4:20 am.

I thought it strange that people should show such enthusiasm for celebrating nothing in particular. That a new year begins today is a mater of convention, an artefact of our measuring system. I don't find it at all exciting.

It makes sense to have a few parties to relieve the gloom of the long nights and short days, but we had parties for Christmas. Another set a week later is excessive. The second lot of celebrations would do us more good around the end of January, when the effects of Christmas euphoria have warn off.

What has become of Light Pens ?

In the 1980's we had high hopes for the future of light pens, but I had't seen one for many years, until a bank asked me to sign on a screen with one.

The problem seems to be price. An internet search suggested prices of the order of 150 dollars, much much more than even a very elaborate mouse.

Early Flowers

I've just noticed that my daphne is coming into flower. It usually flowers early in the year, around February or March, but I don't recall it ever flowering as early as this.

A Quiet Christmas Eve

I was surprised how quiet it was in the city centre this afternoon. Despite the fine weather there were far fewer people milling about than on a normal Saturday, and many shops were almost empty.

Legislative ‘Truth’

Yesterday I read a news flash to the effect that the French National Assembly has legislated to make it illegal to deny that the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Turkish soldiers was genocide.

‘genocide’ is a slippery term with no precise generally accepted precise, and there is room for differences of interpretation. This legislation makes it illegal to discuss the question in France. It also makes any assertions that the massacre was genocide worthless if they are made in France, because anyone there expressing that opinion might be doing so for fear of punishment, not out of conviction, and the judgement could not be tested in open debate.

Indeed, it I hard to understand how the legislators could have made the decision they did, unless they thought the judgment of genocide was open to doubts that they wished to suppress.

Christmas Cards

This year I decided not to send any Christmas cards. Eventually I did send a few, mostly to accompany presents, but the total must be in single figures.

For a long time I’ve been irritated by the way the postal service is swamped by pieces of expensive cardboard, so that letters that matter are delayed. More recently I started to wonder what Christmas cards are supposed to achieve.

When I started to send my own cards, in my mid teens so far as I can recall, I sent them to friends and relatives - people I met quite frequently. However, once one starts exchanging cards with someone, the annual exchange tends to continue indefinitely, even when one gradually loses touch, and the card exchange is all that is left.

I find it most depressing to receive annual reminders of people whose company I used to enjoy, but who gradually stopped answering my letters and emails, yet still add the gloom of mid December by tantalising me with reminders of lost friendships.

There is also the custom of sending annual letters. Those are often quite interesting, but to have them all arrive around the same time makes it a considerable chore to reply to them all as I’d like to.

Perhaps we could spread out the illumination through the year by all writing annual letters on our birthdays, though as I use this blog for the sort of news most people put in those letters, I don’t need to write one at all.

Incidentally I can arrange for entries in this blog to be automatically emailed to up to ten people, so anyone who’d like that service just has to let me know.