Sacrifices : The unbiased effect of Mind

Sacrifice is defined by Google Dictionary as, "to give up (something valued) for the sake of other considerations". Often in our day to day lives, we come across various sacrifices. Some people might agree that they live a life of sacrifice, some may not. Believe it not, sacrifice is an essence of how prioritize various aspects of life. Sacrifice, is the key decision which is an unbiased marker of how the mind of the person who commits the sacrifices prioritizes the actions. I hope to keep the technicality in this post to minimal. Why not give it a technical aspect. Let us define sacrifice as a function, S(x|y) as the sacrifice of y to do x, i.e. you prioritize the event/emotion/action x over the emotion y.

There shall be many cases, where you study people try to understand them. You can judge them by their actions, however there is a chance that your judgement will be biased by what you think regarding the action, or how you perceive the action. I will give you an example, of how this method of analysis fails. A person is feeding a dog with a packet of biscuits, an observer A can claim that the person is generous, an observer B can claim she is wasteful as she is throwing away resources, an observer C can claim that both that the person in reference is both. However it is a matter of chance like a Hidden Markov Model whether the deduction made from observation, about the nature of the person is true or not. What I wish to tell in this article, is if you see how and what a person sacrifices, you can form a much unbiased view of the person. Let us define some terminology first, let P(x) be the Priority of x, which is an unique mapping from event/action/emotion space to the priority space. When we observe a Sacrifice S(x|y) we can infer in the least unbiased fashion that P(x)>P(y) for the given subject.

You can apply this over a series of Sacrifices observed for the same object as S(x₁|x₂), S(x₂|x₃), S(x₃|x₄) you can make an inference that P(x₁)>P(x₂)>P(x₃)>P(x₄).

I am no pro in psychology, but I assume a sequence of x for a person as X = [x₁ x₂ x₃ ..... x_n]^T  where the x s  are arranged in decreasing order of priority can tell you a lot about the person. The standardization of above and application of Linear Algebra can lead to interesting results, the distance between two X will not be euclidean and the inferences from the same can be many. I would plead you to apply this to the next auto-biography/biography you read about any famous person. Observe all S(x|y) in the script and compare whether you would have done S(x|y) or S(y|x). It doesn't really matter if you do not do this as the other person, it is what makes you essentially what you are. The uniqueness of a very long X can be owed to the precedence in the priority relations of the events.

 Thank you!