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.

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/

Obsolescent Knowledge

A new friend writes to me: "One thing that has always frustrated me has been the realization that when I did something like having a kitchen redone I developed a great deal of obsolescent knowledge that I didn't really have a chance to communicate before it became completely obsolete."

I think this may be another way to think about Anecdotal Value -- it is knowledge that may have a short shelf-life (I'd say half-life, but I really don't know what that means, not being a card-carrying physicist) but may also have emblematic or structural value. Still, shelf-life aside, it needs to be communicated and the value is in the communicating. Again, this is like the very bad blind date: there is no real value to telling people at the office the next day about this guy's halitosis or bad manners (they're not going to go out with him) but there is value in reminding people that bad blind dates occur and something good can come of it. You can, as the saying goes, dine out on the story for months.

A funny anecdotal story: years ago, as an undergraduate, I went on a sailing date with a couple of grad students, one of whom liked me a little bit (as might be expected, since it was sort of a date). We were on the Chesapeake and this fellow saw another sailboat with its bumpers -- those tampon-looking things that keep the boat from bumping the dock -- still hanging over the side, not nicely pulled in. The fellow said "I hate that -- it's like people who tuck their shirt into their underwear to keep it from pulling up. Yes you CAN do it, but it's really in poor taste." Wouldn't you know he ended up marrying one of my roommates -- a woman who I know first hand used to tuck her shirts into her underpants. I wonder if she still does?

Back!

Not that I have any readers left, but I'm back anyway. It's a new day.

Gutta-Percha

From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001:

Natural latex obtained from Palaquium gutta and several other evergreen trees of East Asia. The latex, collected by felling or girdling the tree, is allowed to coagulate and is then washed, purified, and molded into bricks for shipping. Like caoutchouc, gutta-percha is a polyterpene, i.e., a polymer of isoprene (see rubber), but, unlike caoutchouc, it is not very elastic; the reason for the difference is that the polymer molecules in gutta-percha have a trans structure, whereas those of caoutchouc have a cis structure (see isomer). Gutta-percha is an excellent nonconductor and is often employed in insulating marine and underground cables. It is also used for golf-ball coverings, surgical appliances, and adhesives.

Malleable, insulating. There are anecdotes here, I believe. And wonderful metaphoric possibilities. This website on gutta-percha is particularly interesting:

http://www.altcorp.com/AffinityLaboratory/guttahistory.htm

"On Anecdotes"

From Charles Brockden Brown, from the Comments below:

"Anecdotes are literary luxuries. The refinement of a nation influences its literature; we now require not only a solid repast, but a delicious dessert. A physician, austere as Hippocrates; a critic, rigid as Aristotle, are alike inimical to our refreshments. We will not be fooled into their systems. We do not dismiss our fruits and our wines from our table; we eat, and our health remains uninjured. We read anecdotes with voluptuous delight; nor is our science impaired, or our wit rendered less brilliant. It is not just to consider anecdotes merely as means of improvement. They serve also the purpose of utility, and deserve to be classed higher on the scale of study than hitherto they have been."

"Voluptuous delight!" How about that!

Oracular

So two non-fatal disasters struck me in the last week. The question is: what does each mean? Do disasters have meaning? (Pat Robertson would of course say yes.) For the purposes of this blog, anecdotal value lies not only in the event but also in the making meaning.

Event number one: a huge tree fell on my guest house, slicing the house in two and shattering to splinters my first marriage bed. There had been a huge rainstorm overnight but the tree did not fall until after 10:30 in the morning. Had it fallen in the night it would have killed my husband, with whom I am separated, and who has been sleeping in the guest house since September. The guest house looks pretty good from the front (except for the roof) but you open the door and it is open to the air in the back and there is a huge gash in the wall cutting down to the floor, where the remains of the bed are strewn, along with insulation and roof shingles. But the bathroom, closet, bookshelves, and rest of the house stand unhurt.

Of course my husband has had to move back into the main house (I am moving out, into the townhouse referenced back in November). So should we read the falling tree as a sign of the final end of the marriage or the end of the separation or something else?

(For the record, nobody--none of our neighbors at least--heard the tree fall.)

Event number two: My computer at work crashed utterly. I never learned how to back up or use the "M" drive or whatever the special saving drive is named. So I lose everything: my writing, student papers, grade histories, etc. Moreover, not particularly loving my job for reasons best not blogged about, I have been actively job hunting on my work computer, and all of my job letters and resumes are now gone forever. (I've asked the helpdesk people to try to see if they can get certain named files, which is unlikely but possible, but I can't really ask them to spend money trying to get a file named "job search."

So is this a sign that yes, I should leave, or that I should stay and forget about my job search?

(For the record, when my hard drive died it made no sound.)

Anecdotal Value (again)

How, two people emailed to ask me (you know, you can comment on the blog), am I really going to win the Nobel Prize for this?

First, let me reiterate that I'm planning to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, not Literature. I want to quantify the value of stories in an economy, or, perhaps, the economic value of stories. A story, like money, ciriculates. I started thinking of this when I was working for The New Yorker and had friends in Wall Street who said that the best jokes start on the trading floor. My first thought was, "I should be paying 1% transaction fees for this?" and then I thought, "why not?"

So the question is: are stories a Public Good, like fresh air and a nice view? Could one articulate a Problem of the Anecdote, like the Problem of the Commons? Does the Coase Theorum apply to anecdotes?

Please, my economist friends: help address this and don't be snarky....

Anecdote, Talmud, and Ethics

Anecdotes, I believe, reside in a space outside of ethics. That is, as a story (small story or integral story or whatever it is that makes anecdotes a subset of the genre story) it in and of itself has no duty to be ethical. An anecdote about something unethical is not unethical; a story about something ethical is not ethical. Anecdotes are amoral, perhaps one can say.

However, one can use anecdotes unethically and one can use anecdotes ethically. A talmudic friend of mind (or, rather, a friend who shares my love of Talmud), remarked recently that the Talmud is in essence a book of anecdotes. Indeed it is: and I would add that it is a book of anecdotes used ethically. Why? Because these anecdotes are used to parse, to understand, to make legible, to apply, to approach -- that is, to understand G-d.

Anecdotes can be used unethically when they are used to persuade. The Talmud itself is clear on this (chapter and verse, as it were, in later posts). The most unethical use of anecdote (or talmudic ethics) is in order to persuade oneself or others that what one is doing is actually ethical, even when it appears unethical. One should take great care not to keep a critical distance from the ethics one is studying, lest one think oneself above ethics.

Parachute Salesman

I met a parachute salesman during my last plane trip. This seems interesting on its face; any further elaboration would be pointless. Or rather, the idea of a parachute salesman is somehow complete without narrative embroidery. But you are probably wondering about this anyway, since I don't usually talk to people on airplanes, let alone salespeople.

But he was very handsome in a twinkly eye sort of way when he was putting his bag in the overhead bin and apologizing for leaning over me. I was reading a medieval history textbook (which who'd have thought would be a real guy magnet?) and he sat down and then left to a seat in a different row (apparently with his boss) and then came back and said "I'd rather sit next to a medieval history book than pages of specs for our new parachute line." I said "you're in the parachute line? how pessimistic." "Au contraire," he rejoined (it is apparently a French parachute company that he works for), and, as you might imagine, very little medieval literature was read until we landed.

This was nearly a week ago and I should add that he apparently listened closely to my name and my college's name and found me and has emailed hello. Despite a wedding ring.

Hm.

The Second Pig

Everybody knows the story of the three little pigs. They are sent out by their mother to live on their own and become responsible pig citizens. The first pig makes his house out of straw -- quick, cheap, and easy -- then proceeds to have fun, at least until the wolf huffs and puffs and blows it all in (or down, whatever). (I'm dispensing with all discussions of hairs on chinny chin chins too, pace purists). The second pig (and it is unclear whether this pig first sees what happens with the first pig or is just a bit more cautious) builds his house with sticks, which would seem to offer more wolf-whistle resistance, but alas no. The third pig builds his house out of bricks, which not only withstands the wolf, but offers refuge to his risk-taking brothers.

The real idiot of this story is of course the second pig. The first pig gets something: playtime and the manifest support of his two brothers when he's in need. The third pig gets something too: the twin satisfaction of being prepared and of helping his brothers in need. But the second pig gets nothing: he takes no playtime, he gets no security. He can't even help out the first pig for very long.

The lesson: people who choose half-measures not only get nothing, they also lose the opportunity to get something. I'm a third pig who appreciates first pigs. But second pigs: ugh. Losers every one.