In my opinion, there are three types of people:
1. If they do some good act, they will let everyone know about it
2. If they do some good act, everyone will come to know about it
3. If they do some good act, no one will know about it
Now the third point got me thinking. It is a very interesting statement from a mathematical point of view. Will we ever be able to prove that there are people of the third kind in this world?
Is there some way to know that a person is of the third kind? I think it is not possible.
Whenever you find out about a person who is of the third type, he automatically becomes a person of the second type, and ceases to be the third type! This means that you will never be able to prove the existence of the persons of the third type.
May be you will have to rely on some kind of Nonconstructive Proof to solve this problem of existence.
You can see that Schrödinger’s cat is a similar thought experiment. Both of these examples talk about some type of Observer effect.
Now if we say that there is nobody such that if he does something good, no one will know about it, it becomes a Self-fulfilling prophecy.
While you are right in a literal sense. I think in an actual meaning sense you are wrong because it depends on scale. One person knowing about a person’s deeds doesn’t constitute enough people in the actual sense. So if I give money to the homeless and only you know about it, I am still actually type 3 in the intended sense, even though mathematically or semantically I am not type 3.
Adam,
Yeah you are right. I was just interested in the mathematical aspect.
One way to measure is to measure all other types and take a difference from 100%. I hope you get my point.
Other way is to have some other act similar in number, backed by some theory. Like, I don’t remember if it was Socrates who said this, if you want to count the thieves or robbers, you count beggars. Those are approximately equal in numbers of beggars.
Adeel,
Interesting solutions. Thanks for that.
I disagree with these three types, you can make it 6 types by replacing “some” with “no”. And then 3 more types by replacing “good” with the word “bad”. I don’t know how many. May be after this there would remain no other types; assuming there is not a type of “all good” or “all bad”. It is not well said to cover the types of people, perhaps.
Or may be we should make it, “There are three types of good people”, again assuming there is no type of “all good”.
Yeah, I know, I am stupidly pedantic.
You are right. There are many more types of people than these three.
In the post, people is in italics, i meant to talk about only good people..anyways, i liked ur post giving a mathematical touch to my simple post..good..
Thnks..
Niyaz,
http://dreamz.kera.la/2009/01/29/lesson-2-act-of-goodness/#comment-73
{Technical question: instead of posting this here, is there anyway you can add track/ping back from your blog???}
Reply to your comment against my comment on Asha’s blog:
Niyaz, what if I am managing his (the person falling in the 3rd group) bank accounts and I see the money transfers to genuine charity funds? What if I am the person on the other side of the road and see this man helping a child cross the road? Are these not act of kindness?
See, Niyaz there are a lot of things that science and maths cannot prove in ordinary lives. It was just not right of you to judge my statement as lie and even thinking that I wrote some comment there without giving it a second thought.
Good luck with your mathematical analysis of life!
Aliberatedsoul,
As I said before, you are right. I was just talking about the interesting property of the “statement” and not about anything else!
Aliberatedsoul,
You cannot say like that, “Good luck with mathematical analysis of life”. Mathematics doesn’t need your luck baby. It’s so perfect. To analyse people you need to either “floor(x)” or “ceil(x)”.
suppose there are only 7 people in this world(Asha, Niyaz, Adam, Adeel Ansari, Mahesh E P, ,{The one who reads this blog}). only “Aliberatedsoul” knows about the good man. Then the ratio becomes 1/7 = .143.
when apply those two function you will get two answers for the x=3. what happened was you tried only to ceil(x) and niyaz tried only to floor(x).
so it’s our choice to whether floor or ceil. not only our choice but also the power of the one. suppose you are Indian president what all things can you do for that third kind of person or on the other way if you are poor in “every means” what can you do?? nothing. So that’s my point. 123.. classification is not actually a list but a “n-dimensional Matrix”. But Asha saw from only one side(index-0). That’s why we argued.(This is my dimension
)
Indeed it’s an interesting one.
As others have hinted at, you can trivially prove the existence of 3 by, say, looking at the income for a given charity and observe that it is X,then find all the people of type 2 and 1, relating to that charity, and consider if the sums they donate = X. If they do, there are no type 3, if they don’t, then clearly there is a type 3 in existence.
What else is interesting is, are the type 3 people really, although seemingly ‘good’, bad as they may be hiding their goodness and thus not setting a good example? Or are they also sitting on their high-horse saying “I donate anonymously that makes me better than those that publicise their donations”.
Obviously an interesting problem is how much you publicise the good deeds you do. I think you should, personally.
I think it is a gracious man who tries to talk as much as he can about the good that he does, and force others to do the same, even at the risk of seemingly hogging the spotlight or wanting attention. If you do it at the risk of that, perhaps you are of a very good type. Or perhaps again it is you just sitting on your high horse
Interesting anyway.