Blogtrek

How many people do I know?

I did a lot of stuff today, on my day off on Monday; applied for some teaching positions, planned a trip to the Outer Banks, and planned for a cluster of three meetings that decided that they all wanted to go late in the day on the 24th. For my blog today, I will comment on how many people do we know. Is it 50? 5,000? 700? How could we know? I tried to find the answer several ways. My definition of know is: A knows B if and only if, if B had died in Planeattack, then A would have noticed it. Here is what I tried:

1. Automobile accidents. 40,000 people die each year in auto accidents. This has happened for the past 50 years (since I was 6). That's a total of 2,000,000 people killed in accidents from 1952-2002. I knew 4 people in my lifetime that died in auto accidents. This means I knew 4 out of 2,000,000 people or one in 500,000 people. Since there are 282,921,406 people in the US, it follows that I know 282,921,406/500,000 or 566 people.

2. Random selection. Randomly select people out of my workplace and all the organizations I belong to. Make an allowance for others and then take ratios for each org and add them together. This gives me about 400 or so.

3 Planeattack. This gave me the idea for this blog. I saw an article in the newspaper that criticized a poll that said that 1.2 percent of all people say they know someone who died at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or Pennsylvania. That's 0.012*282,921,406 or 33,890,208. This means the average person who died (there are 3,034 of them) knew 33,890,208/3,034 or 11,170 people; actually, higher, since people know the same people, whereas the division implies they are disjoint. This is also too high. That was the newspaper's argument. Something was wrong with the poll.

4 Look it up in Google. Look up "average person knows * people". The asterisk is a wild card. I get answers of 200, 500, 250, 2000, and 300. Further in a church, according to one web page, the average person knows 62 people regardless of the size of the church; but I would presume that if the church is smaller than 62 people, then the average person knows everybody. Further, a "meganetworking" person knows 3,500 people.

This shows that nobody really has a hold on how many people one knows. My feeling is that I know about 500-1000 people, with about 100 of these fairly well on at least an acquaintance basis. But I still would like for someone to come up with a good figure for this.