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> The problem is that we’re not actually that unique as individuals. As much as we’d like to believe in our special nature, we’re pretty much mostly similar to
by Tade0 4y ago
> The problem is that we’re not actually that unique as individuals. As much as we’d like to believe in our special nature, we’re pretty much mostly similar to other human beings.
I don't fully agree. Most of the population is indeed like that, but truly unique individuals do exist - I had the privilege of meeting a few.
> Any skill or attribute you claim makes you unique—”I’m really funny”, “I’m good at shining shoes”, “I’m an attentive lover”—you can always find someone else better than you on that dimension.
This reminds me of my friend who told me one time that he's seeing someone, so naturally I asked what she's like.
He answered with a set of skills/talents like "perfect pitch" etc., to which I replied "are you dating or are you hiring her?".
It's not the skills an attributes that make us unique and interesting, but what emerges from their combinations.
Case in point: my SO has pretty bad eyesight, but in exchange a heightened sense of smell - I've seen her detect gas being let out of a stove during a routine checkup two floors down. She is also a kind person and a great listener.
What emerges from these traits is (among other things) the ability to tell someone that they should visit a dentist without upsetting them - especially when they're yet not fully aware of their condition.
- edmundsauto 4y ago> truly unique individuals do exist - I had the privilege of meeting a few. The law of large numbers suggests this is false. Unless someone has had an experience with exposure to every walk of life, which I don’t believe is possible given 8 billions. Perhaps more accurately: “I have met tens of thousands of people, and have met singletons in that group.” Sorry to be a buzz kill, but my pet peeve is people extrapolating their individual experiences for generalizable things.
- Tade0 4y ago> Sorry to be a buzz kill, but my pet peeve is people extrapolating their individual experiences for generalizable things. No worries, because I think you're wrong and can prove it to you: Say we have 50 different traits that people can have - just a binary yes or no. You meet a person who has 10 of them. Such an individual has already a lower than 1/10e10 probability of having this exact set, and anyone with the same traits and one additional on top of it has 27.5% of that probability. But that's a simplification, because surely there are more than 50 features/activities in the world and even if that's the limit, when you sort them by proficiency for a given individual, then suddenly order matters and you need just 6 of them to be "probably unique". Of course there are plenty of people who are interested only in e.g. travelling, food and movies - popular culture calls these people "basic". But on the flipside there exist humans who have a large set of things that can be said about them. My take is that we're not exploring even a noticeable franction of those combinations and each one of them generates unique, emergent properties.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]