Anecdotal Evidence

To a friend: You and I were discussing many things in the Wellington Chinese restaurant as I sipped on a Tsing-Tao waiting for my take-away. And yes, you did indeed anticipate everything I was going to say. And yes indeed to you it would have been anecdotal.

But I now realise what was irking me about that classification. I had, as the General Semanticists would say, confused orders of abstraction.

I have heard that in some Buddhist sects, acolytes are encouraged to say either ‘I know ...” or “I have heard ...”. Let me call the passing on of something that I know directly from my experience a 0-order anecdote. It is not anecdotal to me but it will be to you. And let me call something I have heard about or read about a n-order anecdote. That would be anecdotal to both of us. It was this 0-orderness that made it uncomfortable for me to accept your “anecdotal” tag.

So you may well have heard the things I was going to say before from others. But in my case they would have been 0-order. I suspect that where you had heard those same things before from others they were often if not always n-order. Or perhaps I am taking bets on myself.

Either way, it is the difference between being told a current situational joke face-to-face by Billy Connolly or Eddie Izzard and being told a joke by a bloke in a pub who heard it from a mate who got it from a stand-up routine. It is still funny if you have not heard it before. But the one is 0-order and the other is n-order and they are different.

Here is a 0-order joke: A Palestinian, an Arab and an Israeli walked into the pub. They looked at each other and said “We must be in the wrong joke”. 0-order albeit derivative.

So thank you, my friend, for helping me to sort this out.

And, perhaps you might like to consider whether there is a different “weight” you can apply to what people say, depending on the order of the anecdotal offering. Just ask them if it is anecdotal to them.

And perhaps I can be a bit more rigorous in saying “I know that ...” and “I have heard/read that ...” as appropriate, providing I am not cut off before speaking.

I think that I could rarely be / in a talk as helpful as with Tree. (Apologies to Joyce Kilmer).