Dyslexic distinction

Over the last week, I’ve been watching some Monty Python compilations. As an adolescent, I remember the watching parts of each show creased up in laughter, and failing to see anything funny at all in other parts. That hasn’t changed. Some of the hilarious passages have not withered at all with age, still seeming edgy and original. Wow, how far ahead of its time this material was. But many of the animations and a few of the sketches still leave me as cold as they did forty years ago. Python set many trends. One was pacey progression within a sketch. Before Python all sketches had a theme, a beginning, a middle and an end. Python often started with one theme but then deviated, as the saying goes, into something completely different. This must have frustrated ordered minds, but, watching it again now, I love it, as it maintains momentum and enables the team to get full value from their time. Nowadays, the Python way has become standard, though I would say few do as well as the Python team even now. A stranger thought from watching the sketches was that Python may somehow have been the forerunner of reality TV, or at least celebrity TV. Many times the sketches revolve around the ridiculousness of people with one strength doing something else. Remember the philosophers playing football? Or, in a similar way, Marx and Mao being asked when Coventry last won the FA Cup? Brilliant. And not so different from celebrity Mastermind, or Strictly Come Dancing, or many other popular shows of today. Should we thank Python for this or curse them? Make up your own mind on that, but at least remember the laughs they gave us. One thing that was never pleasant about Python but which sticks out like a sore thumb now is their attitude to stereotypes and to women. Poor old Connie Booth is never anything but a dumb sex object, and the boys seem strangely attracted to women’s clothing and hag characters that might just be their own mothers in psychological disguise. Gillam’s animated women seem to lose their clothes all the time. This sort of stuff has been relegated from the mainstream by now, and a good thing too. Well done, Pamela Stevenson and Tracey Ullman, I think you were the first two women to break into sketches and sketch-writing as equal partners. There is a lot of cruelty and disrespect in Python for other groups, including homosexuals, which seems strange since Graham Chapman was gay himself. Perhaps we have become over-sensitive now. In any case, I don’t think Python helped tolerance. We have moved forward in these areas despite them rather than because of them. And then there is disability. The 1500m for the deaf, where no-one hears the starting gun. The 100m for people with no sense of direction, where they all go off in random ways. Various other examples. Brilliant, and hard not to laugh. But over some line of acceptability? How far is this from the paralympics? With physical disability, we have made a lot of progress in Western society, even if I am still always knackered after pushing Mum’s wheelchair along the uneven streets and unfriendly curbs of Eastbourne (of all places). Sometimes, it does seem almost Pythonesque in its tokenism. On Sunday, I saw a news piece about a warship fitted out for a disabled crew. OK, the armed forces should indeed make space for disabled people (after all, they create a lot of them), but on a warship? I couldn’t but think of what Cleese and Chapman would have made of that, with the Chinese or Al Qaida attacking with mortars or bombs while the crew were patiently queuing up to use the lift. Still, there are now many relevant and brilliant applications of the special skills of the physically disabled in our lives, which we can celebrate. But then I read Schumpeter in this week’s Economist and was completely taken aback. The article focused not on physical disability but on people whose minds worked differently, like dyslexics and autistic people. It included stunning statistics from a recent survey. Dyslexics make up 10% of the population, yet only 1% of professional managers. Wow. Then, dyslexics make up as many as 35% of successful entrepreneurs. Wow again. Many of the entrepreneurs that we admire the most are dyslexic. There is a parallel story with Asperger’s syndrome, ADD and autism. Here, the link is to IT, software and so on, as well as to entrepreneurism. Apparently, Zuckerberg and many in silicon valley show some of the associated symptoms. The IT link is maybe understandable. Great memories, focuses on numbers and facts not nuances. Not easily distracted. This makes some sense. All the positive of features of geeks combined with natural talent will lead to a great software professional. But dyslexia? That is more complex. One possibility is that those dyslexics who happen to be smart and commercial and ambitious are excluded from many fields, so gravitate to entrepreneurship. That makes sense, based on the statistic about professional managers. Most smart non-dyslexics end up as lawyers or bureaucrats or whatever else. Dyslexics are disadvantaged there, so start their own companies. Even if this is the only factor at work, that says a lot about most companies. Dyslexics seem to prove that companies can succeed without the skills which companies demand of their professional managers. So some of those skills most be over-valued, or indeed counter-productive. If we couldn’t write reports, we wouldn’t. Perhaps the reports are useless, or at least less useful than the other things we could do with our time. But perhaps there are other factors at work too. I have seen this myself, since I work closely now with a dyslexic. I can see ways he has used it to help him. He hates reports, so makes fast and simple decisions, asks good questions and uses great examples. But he is also unusually commercial. My own arithmetic is very strong, but compared with this guy I am slow, especially when money is involved. A company may have 40,000 customers per day who could be persuaded to spend 30 Romanian lei more; what is that worth in US dollars per year after tax? It is useful to be able to rapidly compute things like this to a rough order of magnitude, and I find I make mistakes, but my friend does not, almost seems to know the answer intuitively. Is that just him, or does dyslexia help him somehow? He also has a great feel for what customers might want. Might it be that while the rest of us are poring over useless market research or analysis, he is just observing? Just like a blind person hears well, does a dyslexic observe well? This whole area must have massive potential for business. We have worked out how many different types of diversity benefits businesses, even if we don’t yet always embrace it willingly. But we are still quite narrow in how we typically view categories of diversity. These examples show clues to a multitude of new categories based on our mental indicators. The potential in this field seems almost unlimited, and the advantages for those ahead of the game huge. Now I’ll go and enjoy some more Python.