Hello everyone and welcome to the third installment of our continuing series of Rules Roundtables! This project is an effort to demystify what the rules of the subreddit are, to explain the reasoning behind why each rule came into being, provide examples and explanation why a rule will be applicable in one case and not in another. Finally, this project is here to get your feedback, so that we can hear from the community what rules are working, what ones aren't, and what ones are unclear.
Today's topic is addressing the rules concerning "No Personal Anecdotes", which while briefly touched on in the post regarding sources as a whole, also deserves its own post for discussion. So first, the rule. As stated, it is quite brief and too the point:
Personal anecdotes are not acceptable answers in this subreddit. They are unreliable, unverifiable and of very little real interest.
But what does that mean? Well, there is a lot more too it than just that, but we all agree that it has been better said than any of us can muster, so credit for the following is fully due to /u/American_Graffiti, a former flaired user who has since left reddit, but not before giving us this gem of a response, among others. We're replicating it in full here though to, as noted, provide a refresher, as well as a platform for all of you to ask questions and seek clarification.
First, people's memories are unreliable; it has been repeatedly, conclusively demonstrated that human memory is not a process of recall, but rather a process of reconstruction and association - people will very often "remember" the past in a particular way because they think that's how they should remember the past, or because they have already been exposed to specific narratives of the past which they feel their experiences should conform to. This isn't conscious in most cases - people can wholesale fabricate "memories" of past events, and be totally convinced that those memories are real, without even realizing it. Psychologists have done experiments where they can get people to recount elaborate "memories" of past events that never happened, simply by having a trusted family member suggest to them "hey, remember that time when X happened?" So that's the first, biggest reason; we really can't trust people's memories of the past - especially about events like the Challenger explosion, which have a lot of emotion attached to them, and which have an established narrative that we're all already aware of and assume to be true. There's a perfect example of this in the thread on the challenger disaster - in defending the posting of anecdotes, /u/jeremiahfelt writes that "there is an ineffable quality to the spirit- the substance of the moment, and the time this tragedy took place in" - this kind of comment sets of huge alarm bells in the mind of trained historians, because it's evidence of a widespread assumption that there was only one "real" or "true" response to the challenger disaster. The statement is evidence that a particular narrative/account of the challenger disaster has already become privileged, and is widely regarded to be "correct" - this makes it all too likely that (whether consciously or unconsciously) people sharing anecdotes in that thread will be sharing memories that have been altered to conform to that narrative and those expectations.
Second, anecdotes posted on reddit are too far removed from the events they supposedly describe. This is related to the the first point, but a bit different. Historians tend to prize a very specific kind of source when we're researching the past; sources that were created at the time of the events we're interested in. The longer the period between when the event happened and the source we're using was created, the more likely it is that the fallibility of human memory and various other factors (ie, political, social, cultural forces that tend to privilege one account/version of past events over another) will have distorted the account that the source gives. Memories of the challenger disaster are years old, but the journal you describe in your example is totally different - it is an awesome source because it was written at the time - probably the day of the events it describes. The writer's memory of those events is fresh and more reliable, and it is less likely to have been warped by other considerations.
Third, we must be able to contextualize primary sources. The journal in your example is useful because we know who wrote it, when, and under what conditions. We can anticipate and account for the ways in which that person might have been dishonest or biased in their relation of events. This is what historians spend a great deal of their time doing; weighing one source against another, comparing them, thinking about what different people's relation to (and stake in) the events they're describing was. All of that effects how we interpret the source and what kind of weight we give to the account it presents. A comment by an anonymous redditor, in contrast, is pretty much impossible to contextualize; we have no idea who this person is, how old they are, where they grew up, what socio-economic class they are, etc, etc... All of those things are absolutely critical for us to know if their account of events is going to be of any use to us at all.
Fourth, we can't trust redditors. This site is an anonymous internet forum. People are notorious for trolling, telling lies, and pretending to be someone they're not on reddit and other similar forums. Reddit (in general) is infested with people who are attempting to manipulate the opinions of others and advance a particular point of view/world view. And what's worse, on reddit people have a powerful incentive to tell people what they want to hear in the form of karma and upvotes.
Fifth, no one single source is really of all that much use. One thing that historians-in-training learn very quickly is that there are 2, 3, or 30 sides of every story; even if we have 10 different eyewitness accounts of a past event, that were written on the day it happened - you can bet your ass that those accounts will conflict or be contradictory in some way. One of the core skills that historians need to develop is an awareness that really any telling of a past event is just one of many possible views of that event. Our job is to collect many of those views, put each of them in context, compare them, and weigh them against each other in order to try to understand what actually happened in the past - and what those events meant to people at the time - as best we can. The people who post anecdotes here seem to be of the opinion that because they experience the past in a particular way, that must mean that "that's how it happened" - that their account is "true" and therefore proves that past events occurred in a particular way. As historians, we know that this is hogwash; I can guarantee that no matter what past even we're talking about, people saw, experienced, and thought about that event in a wide variety of dramatically different ways. One person's account (and again, especially one that we can neither trust nor contextualize) is just one perspective. It "proves" nothing. To understand the event we're interested in, we need to assemble many different sources representing many different points of view - and preferably sources (as I've already said) that we can trust.
Sixth, (a more practical consideration) - everyone who was alive at a given time probably has a memory of that event. Which is fine, but if we let everyone who had a memory of the challenger disaster post their own story about it here, whole threads would become clogged with reminiscences that we can't really use or trust, rather than actual analysis. This is /r/askhistorians not /r/ask-grampa-what-he-did-during-the-war. The sub's readers are interested in hearing about the past from people who've spent much of their lives training and practicing to properly interpret the past, and the academic experience/skills/authority of those historians are what gives this sub its cachet. In other words, people come here to do the equivalent of reading a history book that someone's written after researching the subject in depth. They don't come here to wade into fileboxes full of documents or decipher centuries-old manuscripts to try to figure out history for themselves. Allowing anecdotes to pile up in every thread where someone is still around to remember the event is really no different from telling someone who asks "how did the Vietnam war start" to go to the national archives and figure it out for themselves, rather than telling them to read one of the many well-researched and well-sourced books that historians have written on that question.
A quick addendum, since I know this might come across as harsh or disconcerting to some people: don't mistake my pessimism about the reliability of people's anecdotes on reddit for pessimism about the reliability of any memories. We can make effective use of people's memories of the past - we just have to do it in the right way. Historians use written memoirs and oral histories all the time - but we use them in a specific, very careful way. Memoirs are used very critically, and cross-checked with other sources like newspapers, government records, and even other memoirs to try to get an understanding of how reliable they are and when (or if) we can trust that account of the past. Oral historians have developed a whole set of very sophisticated rules and procedures that they use to collect people's memories of the past while minimizing the chance that the account they get will be too distorted. It takes years of training just to learn not to ask leading questions or the wrong questions in oral history interviews. And even then, we are very critical in the way that we analyze oral histories, always putting the source in context and cross-checking the account it gives with other sources. In other words, people shouldn't feel like their memories are invalid because of what I wrote above - it's just that reddit is emphatically not the place for those memories to be properly collected, preserved, and analyzed.
If you have any further questions, please ask them here, and the mod team (or other users!) will be happy to help you out.
This subreddit really does have the best mods......no bullshit.
As a fan of this sub who has never ever said anything, I am really, really grateful for the work this modteam puts in this sub! I really enjoy the content here, as I'm sure I'm not the only one. you guys set a high standard for this sub and yourself, and it pays off.
so,
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Thank you guys so much for being awesome!
First, people's memories are unreliable; it has been repeatedly, conclusively demonstrated that human memory is not a process of recall, but rather a process of reconstruction and association - people will very often "remember" the past in a particular way because they think that's how they should remember the past, or because they have already been exposed to specific narratives of the past which they feel their experiences should conform to.
Taken by itself, this is a great reason to be suspicious of personal anecdotes. I (and many other mathematicians) have spent quite a bit of time reflecting on how easy it is to fool ourselves into remembering things the way we want them to have happened, particularly in the context of precedence disputes in mathematics and physics. There, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that it is quite hard to understand our own mental processes. Sometimes what appears like an innocuous remark over coffee at first turns out to be the key to solving a problem. Often, neither the person making the remark nor the one who eventually unlocks the problem realize it's importance until much later.
However, reading the paragraph again makes me wonder what constitutes an "anecdote". In other words, don't all those caveats against the shifting nature of our memories call into question a lot of what we consider history? The Challenger example is atypical, in that it was a major event that was experienced simultaneously (thanks to modern media and communication), and widely commented on, by all manner of observers. In such a case, we really can collect "2,3 or 30 sides", and look written records from thousands of publications. However, as my narrow amateur interest in history has revealed, even widely accepted interpretations of historical events rely on a single, sometimes incomplete source. Sometimes, this is because alternative sources are lost. Often, it is simply because of the very nature of the event: a private conversation, a secret meeting, etc. When
When examining something like the priority dispute over the invention of special relativity, an object of tremendous importance for all of modern science, we can look at the dates on letters and papers sent to journals, but ultimately we have to rely on the faulty memories of the 4-5 main protagonists, all of whom had great interest in portraying their own contributions in a favourable light.
Of course, I am not calling the rule into question. Just sharing a thought that crossed my mind reading the excellent explanation.
I have left reddit for a reddit alternative https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/wiki/index due to years of admin mismanagement and preferential treatment for certain subreddits and users holding certain political and ideological views.
The abuse of downvotes to silence opposing viewpoints with the automatic 9 minute delay on comments prevents fair flow of ideas and thoughts when only the approved may speak.
As an act of protest, I have chosen to redact all the comments I've ever made on reddit, overwriting them with this message.
If you would like to do the same, install TamperMonkey for Chrome, GreaseMonkey for Firefox, NinjaKit for Safari, Violent Monkey for Opera, or AdGuard for Internet Explorer (in Advanced Mode), then add this GreaseMonkey script.
Finally, click on your username at the top right corner of reddit, click on the comments tab, and click on the new OVERWRITE button at the top of the page. You may need to scroll down to multiple comment pages if you have commented a lot.
After doing all of the above, you are welcome to join me on a reddit alternative https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/wiki/index!
That reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about his time in the war...
I am strongly reminded of this quote from The Recognitions by Gaddis:
How…how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that while they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is, when really...why what happened when they opened Mary Stuart's coffin? they found she'd taken two strokes of the blade, one slashed the nape of her neck and the second one took the head. But did any of the eye-witness accounts mention two strokes? No... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man along in a boat changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this... all this... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and...Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it's just... sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.
David Reynolds has a great example of the problems with first-person accounts from memory in "The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century", starting around page 359:
Although the recollections of ordinary participants can often provide fascinating and important historical detail that is not recorded in official archives, scholars cannot treat such “testimony” as intrinsically more reliable than any other source. Consider an example from Lyn Macdonald’s book about the battle of the Somme—the recollections of Lieutenant F. W. Beadle, an artillery officer, about a British cavalry charge on July 14, 1916:
It was an incredible sight, an unbelievable sight, they galloped up with their lances and with pennants flying, up the slope to High Wood and straight into it. Of course they were falling all the way . . . horses and men dropping on the ground, with no hope against the machine-guns, because the Germans up on the ridge were firing down into the valley where the soldiers were. It was an absolute rout. A magnificent sight. Tragic.
Military historian Richard Holmes has dealt clinically with this vivid piece of apparently eyewitness testimony. First, as photographic evidence from 1916 makes clear, British cavalry units had dispensed with frills such as pennants. Second, a cavalry charge right into a wood that was full of summer foliage and had been heavily shelled would have been virtually impossible: High Wood on July 14 was hard enough for the infantry to get through. Finally, the war diaries of the units in question show they incurred very light casualties on that day, while inflicting considerable damage on German machine-gunners. The cavalry had been used, in effect, as mounted infantry, rapidly moving against German emplacements before dismounting and digging in. In short, High Wood was “not the Charge of the Light Brigade,” even though that was how, half a century later, Lieutenant Beadle saw it in his mind’s eye. * In Holmes’s words, Beadle “tells us precisely what we expect to hear,” given our assumptions about the archaic futility of the Somme, but “it is something that did not actually take place."
With all due respect to the mods and the motivations behind this sort of rule, I think this rule creates a number of missed opportunities. The nature of reddit has disadvantages, but the advantages are being cancelled by the existence of the rule.
In my view, the main problem is that the rule discourages contribution and participation.
The value of the contribution may be low on average given the valid expressed concerns about memory, honesty and relevance, but surely there is a way to separate discussion and anecdote from properly sourced answers?
Someone's grandfather's story about service in a tank battalion my have historic value, and may be verifiable if investigated. The journal you describe may exist - we won't know if the comment is deleted rather than questioned.
While I can understand the logic and method governing this ruleset as valuable to a point, I also find it quite disconcerting and disingenuous.
It appears that history is being treated here as a science, and then attempting to use the scientific method to validate its points. History is not a science, as it is near impossible to repeat a historical condition for validity testing.
Having worked closely with several noted historians at a national historic site, I can assure you that they highly value and cherish anecdotal evidence from participants and survivors of an event. If it were not for these people, and their memories of the event, we would be left with a much more sparse and incomplete history of the event.
In point of fact, these individuals and their collective memories have helped change erroneous information that many historians thought was solid evidence and fact.
One example of this was it was widely believed for many decades that when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor a main strike force flew through the Kolekole Pass on the west side of Oahu to suppress detection of the invasion. However, this never happened, and at a 2006 symposium held at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese fighter pilots, they corrected this historical error. It was a fairly stunning revelation.
Another example of this event is that we have multiple eyewitness accounts, and a highly disputed photograph of a minisub firing on the USS Arizona during the battle. We are fairly certain the minisubs were in the harbor that day, and at least one likely fired on the USS West Virginia & USS Oklahoma. While still being investigated as circumstantial evidence of the event, it was the eyewitness accounts that continued to spur the exploration for the missing sub, which is now believed to have been found. This continues to be a very controversial and hotly debated topic among historians at the present, and may not have been pursued if it had not been for the anecdotal evidence of eyewitness accounts to the event.
This anecdotal ruleset appears far too restricting in its very nature, and I feel confidant in saying it is a view not held by all academic historians, nor is it conducive in helping to expand and solidify information of a historical nature. After all, didn't Ralph Waldo Emerson espouse that, "All history is biography."
Thanks, I really appreciate the Subreddit. Definitely won't post anecdotes again!