Uniqueness

[thoughtsmile]

I'm thinking about how hard it is to be unique in this big world. According to psychologist William James, "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." So, appreciate people. But..it's so hard to do well. Appreciation often comes off as a cliché (but as my Mom said, some things are cliché because they are so often true

Comments

[q42]

If we are all unique... there's nothing unique about it, contradiction in terms sorry to say. I know what you're getting at, we're all individuals. But there are always character traits we will notice about people. If you want to see how similar most are, you have to meet the most diverse and far apart groups, to realise people are like eachother. They also mold to the circles they run in.

Comparing uniquenesses

[jwh2o]

Maybe uniqueness can be formulated in another way.

The uniqueness you describe seems to be this: A person n has a set of characteristics enumerated say with an index i such that they can be described as Pni=1, Pni=2, ... , Pni=k, for k properties. The probability that someone would have exactly those properties is small for a large k as a human would likely have. But this is a near useless description of uniqueness, for even among pizzas say if there are 30 toppings that can be applied in any way, then there are more than 1 billion combinations -- assuming you can't have the same ingredient twice.

Maybe the better way is to calculate the total generic probability of a person like you appearing -- the smaller the better. For example, if you have only two properties, say 'liking Madonna' (p=0.57) and 'like pasta' (p=0.83) then you are if a total probability of p~=.47. But if your two properties are 'not liking Madonna' and 'not liking pasta' then your total probability is approx .17 (the other 2 probabilities should sum the total to

[mini_smg]

Hmmm, inspiring. I'm still pondering all of that, so I'm not quite sure what to say - except insightful and inspiring.