Why are your friends more popular than you? (2013)

Related effect observed by J Spolsky here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;items&#x2F;2005&#x2F;01&#x2F;27.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;items&#x2F;2005&#x2F;01&#x2F;27.html</a><p>Tldr: everyone thinks they hire the top 1% of applicants because some applicants spam hundreds of jobs (and never get hired) while others (typically the better ones) apply for very few and get hired immediately. Your 99% rejected pile is the same as other employers&#x27; while your 1% accepted pile is unique to you.<p>A more entertaining (and oddly intuitive) variant is the slut paradox: your average partner has been more promiscuous than you.

Because my friends code in python and JavaScript whilst I code in lisp and try to get everyone to convert to functional programming?

Reminds me of the surveys that found that men have more partners on average than women. Mathematicians then jump in and show that&#x27;s not mathematically possible.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;weekinreview&#x2F;12kolata.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;weekinreview&#x2F;12kolata.html</a>

tl;dr<p>people with many friends are overrepresented in social networks (because many people have them as friends) so people who are friends with you have more friends than the average.<p>In other words, everyone is friend with Tom from MySpace so you have a hugely popular friend, but you don&#x27;t know any loner with no friend (because they&#x27;re not your friend).

Lesson learned: When you set up the equation&#x27;s terms to get the most dramatic results, you get dramatic results.

Same reason all the other lines at the supermarket go faster than the one you&#x27;re in?

&gt; &quot;Remarkably, the friends became ill about two weeks before the random undergraduates, probably because they were, on average, better connected. With the world only imperfectly prepared for a pandemic, being able to spot trends in this way could be useful.&quot;<p>Isn&#x27;t this just because you have a larger sample (N people * Y friends) than if you are looking at just N people? In which case it&#x27;s more likely that one&#x27;s friends will get sick before the randomly selected person. If so what&#x27;s suprising about that?<p>Does anyone have a link to the original paper?

When you introduce two people to each other, your own network <i>page-rank</i> increases as both of them get one extra connection.

There is also a Number Hub video where Hannah Fry talks about this exact phenomenon. This also gets into applications of this result to limiting the spread of diseases.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Z_15zbgNpHk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Z_15zbgNpHk</a>

Basically in a social graph, you are more likely to be in the edge (because there are more vertices in the edge) than in the center (visualize how in a balanced binary tree there are more leaf nodes than inner vertices).

People&#x27;s social connections are far more concentrated than they seem. Someone that appears to have a great life often is as bored as anyone else.<p>Aside from club promoters, most people&#x27;s social circle is small. Even rich people who&#x27;d you think would be happy, often have mostly transactional unfulfilling relationships.<p>Your job, by far, determines your social circle. And if you happen to work in tech, you likely know a far greater number of intelligence and nice people vs some trendy scene of high finance or entertainment.

Saw the title, asked my boss: &quot;Why are my friends more popular than me?&quot;.<p>The cold hard truth came back quickly: &quot;Cause&#x27; you&#x27;re not very social&quot;.<p>Here&#x27;s your tl;dr.

Isn&#x27;t this obvious because if you are friends with someone, it&#x27;s likely they have more friends? A friends graph would end up with many branches and just a few roots, right?

Sampling bias, or rather, experience&#x2F;observer bias, is another aspect of this.<p>In 2015 I explored the question of how much user activity there was on Google+. My initial approach was to look at the <i>public posting</i> activity (which is most visible), but a criticism was that there might be some massive amount of <i>private</i> sharing going on (apparently by accounts which had never posted publicly). I did a follow-up analysis looking at the listed <i>followers</i> (&quot;friends&quot; in FB parlance) of publicly inactive and publicly active profiles.<p><i>The most overwhelming impression was how many profiles -- publicly active or otherwise, had a shockingly small number of followers.</i><p>The <i>median</i> for publicly inactive profiles: 2. For publicly active ones: 5.<p>The 95%ile: 33.5 for inactives, 69 for actives.<p>This jarred with the experiences of those I was hearing criticism from <i>simply because they were, virtually by definition, extreme outliers.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;post&#x2F;naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;post&#x2F;naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq</a><p>Public vs. non-publicly posting profiles summary data<p>Publicly Inactive<p>Followers:<p>n: 88, sum: 561, min: 1, max: 53, mean: 6.375000, median: 2, sd: 10.953730<p>%-ile: 5: 1, 10: 1, 15: 1, 20: 1, 25: 1, 30: 1, 35: 1, 40: 2, 45: 2, 55: 2, 60: 3, 65: 4, 70: 4.5, 75: 6.5, 80: 7, 85: 10, 90: 19.5, 95: 33.5<p>Views:<p>n: 88, sum: 638656, min: 265, max: 119442, mean: 7257.454545, median: 1012.5, sd: 17720.702361<p>%-ile: 5: 298.5, 10: 335, 15: 368.5, 20: 408.5, 25: 477.5, 30: 503, 35: 570.5, 40: 689, 45: 912, 55: 1211, 60: 1340, 65: 2027.5, 70: 2824.5, 75: 5245, 80: 7893.5, 85: 12777.5, 90: 21663, 95: 48144.5<p>Publicly Active<p>Followers:<p>n: 1890, sum: 125539, min: 1, max: 67855, mean: 66.422751, median: 5, sd: 1579.404405<p>%-ile: 5: 1, 10: 1, 15: 1, 20: 1, 25: 2, 30: 2, 35: 2, 40: 3, 45: 4, 55: 6, 60: 7, 65: 8, 70: 10, 75: 13, 80: 18, 85: 24, 90: 34, 95: 69<p>Views:<p>n: 1890, sum: 66647773, min: 252, max: 21088213, mean: 35263.371958, median: 3419.5, sd: 522757.797486<p>%-ile: 5: 576.5, 10: 855.5, 15: 1076, 20: 1311, 25: 1566.5, 30: 1847.5, 35: 2153.5, 40: 2518, 45: 2947, 55: 4045, 60: 4890, 65: 5982.5, 70: 7645, 75: 10157, 80: 13468, 85: 18576, 90: 27814.5, 95: 54290<p>More: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;0&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;RhnKkfTNPKR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;0&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;RhnK...</a>

From 2013 behind a paywall.

What friends?