Rabies Anecdotes

I've collected them all here:
Awful Rabies Stories

And yes, most of them are awful.

Anecdotal Value is Recognized

Bethanne's Book Blog Barnes & Noble Book Blog notes the value of anecdotes.

so many stories were shared that our table's gross "anecdotal value" (you could look it up; it's a real concept!) would make us millionaires if it could only be translated into cold hard cash.

Take home point: Anecdotes have no value unless and until they are shared. Only after they are shared can the listener appreciate--value--the story.

Krugman cites Anecdotes

Paul Krugman's NYTimes column today includes the following throwaway paragaraph:

First things first: anecdotes about falling wages are proliferating, but how broad is the phenomenon? The answer is, very.

My question for today: can anecdotes proliferate? Is it the anecdote that is proliferating? How do they do it (I'm assuming not parthenogenesis)? I will ponder.

Information--not stories-- in lending

The question of anecdotes (and thus anecdotal value) is discussed regularly but not systemically among the various excellent economic bloggers; there is little distinction made, however, between particular or local knowledge used for a particular and local scenario and a particular piece of emblematic knowledge or information that would function as an anecdote -- by which I mean would function as information pertinent to all other similar scenarios.

Naked Capitalism for example discusses today how lending that assumes a kind of homogeneity of information is less robust than lending that focuses on particular but not emblematic information.

Skill loss in Banking

The problem is that there isn't a good substitute for knowledge of the borrower and his community. Does he understand what he is getting into? How stable is his employer? What are the prospects for the local economy? Those are important considerations, and they require judgment. That may still in the end be used as an input to a more structured decision process. but overly automating borrower assessment has resulted in information loss. It's hardly a surprise that the quality of decisions deteriorated.

This is an excellent discussion and I have yet to articular the difference between these particular information inputs and "anecdotal" information as defined in this blog.

Who was John Venn

Here is a quick bio of a man who knew how to craft stories. I will return to blogging soon.
http://www.theory.csc.uvic.ca/~cos/venn/VennJohnEJC.html

Who was John Venn?

Venn diagrams were introduced in 1880 by John Venn (1834-1923), "M.A. Fellow and Lecturer in Moral Science, Caius College, Cambridge University", in a paper entitled On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings which appeared in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science S. 5. Vol. 9. No. 59. July 1880, [Ve80].

John Venn was born August 4, 1834 in Hull, Yorkshire, England and died April 4, 1923 in Cambridge, England. He came from a Low Church Evangelical background and in 1853 entered Gonville and Caius College of Cambridge University. In 1857 he was named a Fellow of the college. He was ordained a priest 1859 and for a year was curate at Mortlake.

He published his first book Symbolic Logic in 1881 and The Principles of Empirical Logic in 1889. In 1883 John Venn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He wrote a history of his college, The Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College 1349-1897 (1897), and then began to compile a history of Cambridge University. He completed three volumes, and others continue the work, with the eighth volume now in preparation.

A painting of John Venn (196K gif).
The stained glass in Caius Hall at Cambridge University commemorating John Venn. Another view of the stained glass in Caius Hall.
The use of diagrams in formal logic is not an easy history to trace, but it is certain that the diagrams that are popularly associated with Venn, in fact, originated much earlier. They are rightly associated with Venn, however, because he comprehensively surveyed and formalized their usage, and was the first to generalize them. It is worth noting that his book [Ve80] is still in print. For more of the history of Venn diagrams the reader is referred to the articles by Baron [Bar] and Hamburger and Pippert [HP00], and the recent book by Edwards [Ed04]. The first use of the term Venn diagram, according to the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is in the book "A Survey of Symbolic Logic" by Clarence Irving Lewis, 1918.

Still calculating

As previously distinguished, Av1 is the value of the telling of the anecdote for the teller, which could 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.

And as tentatively proposed below, if Av1 = QbCx - C(x-1), where

Av1 = Anecdotal Value (for the teller)
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.

and
Av2 = Qb (my assumption is that there is very little benefit over time)

then AV = Av1 + Av2. Or something like this. I feel like I need some greek letters to make it more substantial. Maybe a sigma.