Sharing Informational Knowledge as a Form of Generosity

[CommonEnlightenment]

I have been thinking about this topic for the last couple of months. It appears that some individuals that I know only 'consider' their type of generosity as the type of generosity that is acceptable or 'worth' anything. I have this small penchant for trying to share information with regards to astronomical events that may be occurring or that have happened in the past.

Here are a couple of examples:

1. I have in the past tried to share information regarding when meteor showers will be happening.
2. In the past I have tried to setup some 'small' events to try to share some of the wonders that exist in our wonderful universe.
3. I have tried to share information regarding the passages of certain objects that orbit our Earth.


Side Note:

On the night of the passing of Neil Armstrong I was fortunate enough to observe the ISS passing (approx 10-15 degrees) above the Moon (I had the telescope fixed upon the approx location of the Apollo 11 landing site). I can't begin to explain the feeling that was running through my body at this time. I was trying to put together a small example of how the first lunar landing and the movement of the ISS shows human ingenuity, perseverance, courage, bravery, and the things that I find to be admirable qualities in the human experience (anyone that has a small understanding of human space flight should realize that huge sacrifices that were made by humans to achieve these goals. Some people even lost their lives for the potential betterment of the human experience. See Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia for examples). These qualities can be expressed in each and every human and the best part about it...... It doesn't take a dogmatic belief structure to experience or feel these human qualities. It was done by humans for all of humankind. So the next time someone wants to keep 'generosity' score with you...... Just SMILE and understand that perhaps they can't or won't put themselves in your shoes.....

 

[Inferno]

I'm not sure what the point of this post is yet, maybe I'm too sleep-deprived to understand. (Did 10h of driving yesterday and another 6 or so today.)

I also try to share information/knowledge as much as I can, but then again my hobbies are nowhere as interesting as astronomy. (At least, not the the public at large.) There's actually only a very small percentage of people that I know that are interested in articles about biology (for example, the oil eating bacteria from the Gulf of Mexico) but every time someone shows interest, it brings a smile to my face.

Most interestingly, the people at my Uni are among the ones who care least.

 

[CommonEnlightenment]

I guess the scope of this post is to get people to think about the many forms of 'Generosity' that exist on planet Earth. I will often hear individuals claim that so and so is a selfish SOB. I guess it's the black and white thinking of the topic that most often frustrates me. But generally speaking, I guess it's the black and white thinking of most topics that most often frustrates me. It also has to do with the subjectivity of the concept of "Generosity".

Let's setup the following case:

Person A gives their time to cause A.
Person B gives some information to cause A.
Person C writes a check to cause A.
Person D donates a specific item to cause A.
Person E purchases a set of raffle tickets and receives a prize that is worth less than the amount that they spent on the raffle tickets toward cause A.
Person F purchases a set of raffle tickets and receives no prize but supplies money toward cause A.
Person G purchases a set of raffle tickets and receives a prize that is greater than the amount they spent on the raffle tickets toward cause A.

Given the above scenario what would you consider to be the most generous act? What would you place second? What would you place third and so forth?

Personally, I would say that on some level all of the participants were generous in this case, with person G probably being the least generous. But can person G be held responsible for his 'winning' as he had no prior knowledge of winning a prize that had greater 'value' than the monetary value he supplied to purchase the tickets?

I would think it would be an interesting study to see how people in specific cultures would 'rank' these forms of generosity.

Personally, at the end of the day, I would state that all participants showed a desire for generosity. Could I break these down and place my own specific 'ranking' system on these scenarios? Sure I could but to call any one of these people greedy (in the black and white sense of the term) would be counterproductive and simply childish.

I also realize that this could be a simplistic case as one person could in fact provide more than one of things stated above but that is not the point of "Information Sharing" form of generosity as described by the title of the specific thread.

Please note that I would define informational knowledge as something different than 'gossip knowledge",and it should not be included in this specific study, as I would find the second form of knowledge to be highly suspect at best.

Does this post make a little more sense now?

 

[Inferno]

Yes, absolutely! Thanks for clarifying.

Everything is to be taken as gender-equal, unless specifically stated.

I would say that you can only rank acts of generosity in two meaningful ways (well, three), everything else depends too much on the personal position of the giver. From best to least:
1) A truly selfless act that "hurts" me as an individual, but is helping one (or more) other person.
2) An act of generosity that does not "hurt" me at all (or only very slightly inconveniences me), but which does help another person.
3) Not a generous act at all.

Note that when I say "hurt", I don't necessarily mean physical "hurt". Giving money would hurt in a sense, so would spending time at a homeless peoples shelter, because I could be spending it with my family.

The problem I have with true selflessness is that I don't think it exists. Gasps of "WHAT" and "OMG". Yeah, I kinda don't. Consider the following:
A group of soldiers are training with grenades, one of them drops a grenade in the middle of the group and one soldier jumps on top, to protect the others from the blast.
That might be the most selfless act anyone can do, but is it completely, 100% utterly selfless? I'm not so sure. The soldier will be talked about, he will "live on", so to speak. In any case, that only takes it from 100% to like... 99.99999999999%.


Now to counter your analysis of your own example, CommonEnlightenment, consider the following:
Person G has an income of 800€ a month, which in Austria would put him under the poverty line. (951€ is the line) This person G has a wife, four kids and a grandmother to look after. Even paying 5€ toward a raffle ticket is a serious amount for that person and may severely inconvenience him.

Now consider Person C, Bill Gates, who writes a cheque for 1bil $. That doesn't inconvenience Bill in the slightest, he's still got more money left than any normal person could spend in a lifetime. And yet, we'd praise Bill for his generosity.

Do you see the problem I have with this sort of ranking? If you don't take into account the personal circumstances of the person, you can't truly grasp how generous the person was. That's why the simplistic overview I gave above seems, to me at least, like a better way of grading generosity, even if it's not as fine a grading as yours would be.


By the way, my way of grading wouldn't make me all too generous, even though I'm generally considered it. Granted, I have a meagre income and I donate that to organisations I consider worthwhile, but at the same time my "greatest" contribution of saving a life wouldn't be ranked all that high if it were up to me, yet it is by societies standards now.

The greatest problem I have with all of this is that people wouldn't even have to do what I described in 1), if all people would do a number 2 (snort), we'd all be better off.

 

[CommonEnlightenment]

Yes, absolutely! Thanks for clarifying.

No problem. This is what makes open and productive communication work (to a reasonable extent, of course) . Now, if this turns into a 'gotcha' type of communication then I reserve the right to step away without explanation. I have no reason to think that it will, I'm just stating a boundary up front.

Everything is to be taken as gender-equal, unless specifically stated.

Alright, fair enough.

I would say that you can only rank acts of generosity in two meaningful ways (well, three), everything else depends too much on the personal position of the giver. From best to least:
1) A truly selfless act that "hurts" me as an individual, but is helping one (or more) other person.
2) An act of generosity that does not "hurt" me at all (or only very slightly inconveniences me), but which does help another person.
3) Not a generous act at all.

Note that when I say "hurt", I don't necessarily mean physical "hurt". Giving money would hurt in a sense, so would spending time at a homeless peoples shelter, because I could be spending it with my family.

The problem I have with true selflessness is that I don't think it exists. Gasps of "WHAT" and "OMG". Yeah, I kinda don't. Consider the following:
A group of soldiers are training with grenades, one of them drops a grenade in the middle of the group and one soldier jumps on top, to protect the others from the blast.
That might be the most selfless act anyone can do, but is it completely, 100% utterly selfless? I'm not so sure. The soldier will be talked about, he will "live on", so to speak. In any case, that only takes it from 100% to like... 99.99999999999%.

I never stated that true selflessness exists either. What I do think exists is a continuum where certain cultures could place a meaningful sliding 'standard' to help guide certain policies or ideas. In your example one could make a possible analogy to a solider that covered a grenade and an astronaut that lost a life due to some unforeseen mechanical failure. The major difference of course would be that the solider is potentially fighting another human being as opposed to 'fighting' nature. And by 'fighting' nature I don't mean destroying the damn planet beyond recognition. I wouldn't like to see either of these two things happen but I would rather see human beings banding together to take on the elements as opposed to each other. I also think that the option of taking on the elements could potentially bring nations together in a way that could lessen nationalistic animosity (depending on the resource of course because certain resources should be limited according to reasonableness). I'm not stating that this would cure all of the world's problems but I think it would be a step in the right direction. Country A could supply a specific resource to a project that could get the countries talking about greater trade as opposed to going in and taking something for next to nothing. I think that if more people were 'in-tune' with the sliding 'standard' then perhaps wrong ideas could be flushed out more quickly and perhaps good ideas would actually be discussed and possibly implemented. This would take continuous vigilance to help place acts according to some 0-10 rated scale. Where a 0 would be true selfishness and 10 would be true selflessness. Applying this principle to your Bill Gates example or person G example could be done by each individual of a specific 'culture'. Just for the record, I have a hard time thinking that true selfishness exists as well. But given the 0-10 scale, I would place all of my potential scenarios greater than 5.

Now to counter your analysis of your own example, CommonEnlightenment, consider the following:
Person G has an income of 800€ a month, which in Austria would put him under the poverty line. (951€ is the line) This person G has a wife, four kids and a grandmother to look after. Even paying 5€ toward a raffle ticket is a serious amount for that person and may severely inconvenience him.

Now consider Person C, Bill Gates, who writes a cheque for 1bil $. That doesn't inconvenience Bill in the slightest, he's still got more money left than any normal person could spend in a lifetime. And yet, we'd praise Bill for his generosity.

Do you see the problem I have with this sort of ranking? If you don't take into account the personal circumstances of the person, you can't truly grasp how generous the person was. That's why the simplistic overview I gave above seems, to me at least, like a better way of grading generosity, even if it's not as fine a grading as yours would be.

At what point do you draw the line between a person's right to privacy and a person divulging certain information? If person G or person C did not want to share their financial information, possibly because not enough trust was gained or trust has been previously eroded, then how could you possibly make an informed decision. Would it not be a more rational approach to hold judgement until further information is known..... And would it be your right to 'know' the financial information of a person that does not care or want to share it? I can see the point you are trying to make with your examples but in a real life scenario it appears to be a bit far fetched. Again, I would place a higher standard on knowing what a certain country is doing as opposed to an individual. If we are to use history as a guide....... Countries and groups of people have a larger potential to do more damage than a single individual. This is in part why it is difficult to asses this specific topic.

By the way, my way of grading wouldn't make me all too generous, even though I'm generally considered it. Granted, I have a meagre income and I donate that to organisations I consider worthwhile, but at the same time my "greatest" contribution of saving a life wouldn't be ranked all that high if it were up to me, yet it is by societies standards now.

The greatest problem I have with all of this is that people wouldn't even have to do what I described in 1), if all people would do a number 2 (snort), we'd all be better off.

I do see the point you are trying to make here. I will have to think about this in more detail.

 

[Inferno]

DD: I don't think you understood what I said. For example, the paragraph about information... My point was that your rating system was both unfair, too complicated and relying on information you don't have or at least expecting insight into another mind.
My system is unfair in completely different ways, it's not complicated and it's once again relying on info I don't have.

My point being: There isn't any way of "grading" generosity, not even for countries, unless you know absolutely everything.

For the time being though, I think my system is slightly easier to handle. Don't know if a person giving money is straining his/her finances? Take one look at the sum, take one look at the person and their job and you can make a fair estimate.