Widening the Circle

I had an excellent conversation over the weekend with one of my brothers and my sister about quantifying -- or perhaps modeling would be more precise -- the ways that one makes and retains friends over the course of a lifetime. We identified certain categories such as Pfs (permanent friends, which can really only be discerned over time) and Tfs (Temporary friends that may very well be very good friends for a short period of time but may disappear when the contingent circumstances of the friendship disappear). We didn't spend much time on the idea of what a Good Friend is -- I'm not even sure I know, but friendship can mean anything from the person who you will leave your LP collection to to the person who you'll ask to watch your kids in an emergency.

Quantifying friendship and friendship patters seems to me to have some sort of relationship to the question of quantifying anecdotes but I haven't figured this out yet.

More calculations

Okay I am going to start having to differentiate between two (2) kinds of "value" for anecdotes.

Av1 is the value of the telling of the anecdote for the teller. The dining out on a story, as it were. The value of a story as social lubricant, as icebreaker, as establishing the value of the teller of the anecdote. This would be measured in goods or services (as far as they can be quantified) accruing to the teller.

Av2 is the measure of the ability of the anecdote to change the outcome of something, in a choice model, let's say. So the value of Av2 is measured by the change (quantifiable) that it produces, which does not necessarily accrue to the teller.

Hm. I have to take this into chambers.

The heft of anecdotes

When thinking about the term value of anecdotes, it might also be helpful to think about heft or influence. Influence is a complicated word (as used by Harold Bloom), so I'll stick with heft for a bit. Heft means to left but it also means weight -- influential weight, that is. When something has heft, it declares itself present. It will not be ignored.

There are anecdotes with heft. I'm trying to think of them.

Oh, we're on Wikipedia!

Calculating Anecdotal Value

I suppose it's time that I stop writing anecdotes about my various bad dates and start actually trying to quantify the value of anecdotes generally. Nobody's really done it yet.

Maybe a formula would help. I propose this, to start: Av = QbCx - C(x-1)
where Av = Anecdotal Value
Qb = Quantified benefit (say the price of a dinner bought for you)
Cx = Circulation (number of times you tell the story successfully)
C (x-1) = the number past which you didn't get any benefit from telling the story.
In other words, Anecdotal value is the benefit times the number of times you can tell the story before it starts having negative value.

Hm. I'm not sure this makes any sense but it's a start....

Bad Date

Bad dates are the proverbial gold mine of anecdotal value. I had one of the worst last Thursday. It was a second date, even though I'd dined out (meaning amused my friends) with the particulars of the first date. Short version of that one: fix up, nice restaurant, he was there first, excellent manners, good looking, well spoken, blah blah, and then somewhere close to dessert it came out that a) he believed in astrology (not as a lark, but seriously) and b) that he smoked pot daily. Ah. Two strikes is enough. I figured I'd let it die on the vine and I took the "delay in responding to emails" route.

But after a few weeks (and at the end of a bad week for me) he emailed me and asked out again. Maybe I'd been hasty, I thought. A couple of days before the date he said he wanted to have the first dinner in his new house with me, would I like that. Uh oh, I thought. There Will Be Pot. Ok fine, I thought. As long as he doesn't require that I partake. I don't really care, but I covet my own cognitive abilities AND memory AND custody arrangement with my son and I'd rather not self-impair if it's all the same with you. But he was high as a kite when I got there and proudly displayed a half-eaten pan of hash brownies that he kept nibbling at (semi-surreptitiously) while he prepared dinner. It was the sneaking that really began to annoy me. If you're embarrassed about it, why not just forsake? If you want to do it, do it. Oy.

I left as soon I got the skinny on what was up: why he was so high and yet didn't seem to enjoy my being there. Turns out he's in love with a married woman in NY he can't have and his friends are telling him to move on and date. Ah, I said. Makes sense. Next time pick a stupid woman. It was obvious that he was not enjoying himself yet still hoped for sex. Then I walked out. Unfortunately I couldn't see my car and I had to go back and make him turn on the porch light which ruined the drama but whatevah.

Cognitive Surplus

Since my last post -- almost a year ago! Someone has beaten me to the "useless knowledge" market -- the excellently named named Clay Shirky, who posts here: http://www.shirky.com/