Occasionally Cogent

I think we can take it as axiomatic by now that one shouldn’t be basing their sense of self-worth on what other people think of them — that sort of thing leads to some pretty pathological behaviour. On the other hand though, if you completely disregard what other people think, you run a pretty fair chance of deluding yourself into thinking you’re better than you are (viz. the douchebag pandemic).

Instead of going all-or-nothing, my current approach is to attempt to perform a sort of statistical analysis on the opinions of others: This way we can get the advantages of external viewpoints, but aggregated in such a way that we don’t need to get too hung up on what one particular person may think; something like the following:

$$ W \propto \sum_i \left( C_i \prod_j V_j \cdot S_j \right) $$

where \(W\) is self-worth, \(C_i\) is the number of compliments received from the \(i\) th complimenter, \(V_j\) is the perceieved “value” of the compliment (\(V_j \in \{x| x \in \mathbb{R}, -1 \le x \le 1\}\), with -1 being an extraordinary cutting insult and 1 them more-or-less proposing you be named ruler of all humanity), and \(S_j\) is the perceived sincerity of the \(j\) th compliment.

The following issues are left as an exercise to the reader.

Issues With the Above

• Are there other factors we are missing?
• It seems likely that some people may have different prior probabilities of delivering a compliment regardless of merit — should this be separately considered, or is it encapsulated sufficiently in the “sincerity” term?
• As a generalization of the above, what does the general distribution of compliments look like? Is it normal/student-t? Perhaps Poisson? Is it the same for everyone? This requires a great deal more investigation.

Postscript

Yes, I am completely insane.