
Why are your friends more popular than you? (2013) - miraj
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/04/economist-explains-why-friends-more-popular-paradox
======
netcan
Related effect observed by J Spolsky here:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html)

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' while your 1% accepted pile is
unique to you.

A more entertaining (and oddly intuitive) variant is the slut paradox: your
average partner has been more promiscuous than you.

~~~
komali2
As someone who spent yesterday firing off 38 job applications (with
personalized cover letters!), this terrifies me.

~~~
strictnein
Cover letters are the worst. Do hiring managers really read them?

~~~
baus
When I was doing recruiting I absolutely read the cover letters. If you can't
describe why I should consider your background, why should I consider hiring
you? I think it is an important indicator on how a developer communicates.

~~~
djcapelis
Do I really have to spell out the answer to your question?

You should consider hiring people because good candidates are hard to find.
And if you want to know whether or not they're a good fit for the position,
engage them in a conversation and _ask_. Don't expect applicants to do your
job for you, the good candidates have better things to do than write you a
letter before you even bother to talk to them.

~~~
paulsutter
One characteristic of a good applicant is a sincere interest in working for
the company. A resume with no cover letter is a sign of a candidate who is
blindly spraying out resumes.

You can increase your chances of getting hired at a specific company by
tenfold of you focus your efforts. Usually this means getting to know people
at the company, understanding which departments and projects you may fit.

~~~
djcapelis
Are you honestly telling me you can't tell the difference between a candidate
spraying out resumes and a candidate worth talking to without a cover letter?

Are you honestly sure that writing a cover letter is a good signal?

The standard advice is to submit a cover letter, so many standard candidates
spraying applications do. There's someone just a few comments over who wrote
53 cover letters when applying to jobs.

You still think cover letters are about focus?

I absolutely agree with your last sentence though. Bypassing the initial
resume screen by talking to an actual engineer makes far more sense, but
frankly you don't want to be too aggressive about it because then random
people will start pestering your engineers all the time just to be considered.

~~~
komali2
>There's someone a few comments over

That's me, we're in the comment chain for it right now. I don't understand
what else I can do to get a job as someone a.) new to the city and b.) a
graduate software engineer with no prior experience other than personal and
group projects. None of my "passion about" companies will take me - dropbox
rejected me in 30 minutes flat, probably automatically. What can I do but
spray out absurd amount of resumes? What can I do but have an auto-generated
cover letter that swaps out COMPANY_NAME and JOB_TITLE so I can crank out
enough resumes a day to ensure I get a job before my bills swamp me?

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

~~~
personjerry
Ah, this is not the quality content I like to see on HN but was written with
such... charm?

~~~
adrusi
It's the me_irl charm.

Edit: before anyone else downvotes me for — what, being superficially too
meme-y? — I'll clarify that the purpose of this comment was to point out that
the "charm" that personjerry found in the toplevel comment can be found all
over the place, and that it's down to a formula. Personally, I'm fond of it
regardless.

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jastr
Reminds me of the surveys that found that men have more partners on average
than women. Mathematicians then jump in and show that's not mathematically
possible.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html)

~~~
gleenn
The devil is definitely in the details. What do people mean when they say
"average". In your paper, the "average" has a denominator of all people,
whereas I think some people think the denominator is the number of people of
each gender.

Imagine a scenario where there was 1 man on earth, and 100 woman. Say that the
man slept with half the woman. Now he has slept with 50 women, the male
average is 50 partners / 1 male or 50. Half the woman had 1 partner, so 50
woman / 100 total woman slept with 1 man, average 0.5 partners.

Easy to show that the average could be swayed one way or another with this
average.

Cue the mathematicians to show me pedantically why I'm wrong, but it's not
about that. It's about the imprecision of English in Buzzfeed articles when
using math terms.

~~~
pixl97
Isn't it actually a sampling problem?

Take your 1:50 50:1 ratio, and now only sample 5 people out of the entire
group. If those 5 questioned were women which only had one partner you would
miss the 'black swan' that had 50. I would think the question comes if your
sample size is large enough to encompass all the outliers that can
significantly influence the results.

For example in Parent comment a few female sex workers could have sex with
hundreds of men, but if not questioned they would be missed. The article 'hand
waving' the prostitute effect away without further details is disingenuous.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory)

------
eloisant
tl;dr

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.

In other words, everyone is friend with Tom from MySpace so you have a hugely
popular friend, but you don't know any loner with no friend (because they're
not your friend).

~~~
dsacco
In other words, the friendship paradox.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox)

------
ysavir
Lesson learned: When you set up the equation's terms to get the most dramatic
results, you get dramatic results.

~~~
andrewclunn
Yeah, they actually took this one step further than "my friends have more
friends than me on average" to "my friends have more friends than me total."
As f somebody were going to compare their friendship network with the sum
total of all their friends' as a means of comparison. It really took a
legitimate mathematical point and distorted it.

------
JoeAltmaier
Same reason all the other lines at the supermarket go faster than the one
you're in?

~~~
trentmb
I never made the connection between me being a loser and supermarket line
speed before!

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rdlecler1
> "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."

Isn'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's more likely that one's
friends will get sick before the randomly selected person. If so what's
suprising about that?

Does anyone have a link to the original paper?

~~~
pizza
I think it's saying that peoples' friends are better predictors of illness
than just people.

~~~
rdlecler1
But isn't that just a function of the larger distribution that gives you more
resolution on the tail? I assume I'm missing something here because that seems
obvious.

~~~
Scarblac
I assume they meant that _on average, per person_, friends became ill before
the random people. Because friends have more contacts on average, and contacts
give you a higher chance of becoming infected.

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z3t4
When you introduce two people to each other, your own network _page-rank_
increases as both of them get one extra connection.

~~~
amelius
Page-rank is based on eigenvalues, so it is more complicated.

But an interesting question still is: do your friends have, on average, a
higher page-rank than you?

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mschwaig
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.

[https://youtu.be/Z_15zbgNpHk](https://youtu.be/Z_15zbgNpHk)

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pathikrit
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).

~~~
hexane360
Coupled with the fact that your friends are likely to be in the center.

------
kron
People'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.

Aside from club promoters, most people's social circle is small. Even rich
people who'd you think would be happy, often have mostly transactional
unfulfilling relationships.

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.

------
davidgrenier
Saw the title, asked my boss: "Why are my friends more popular than me?".

The cold hard truth came back quickly: "Cause' you're not very social".

Here's your tl;dr.

~~~
chefkoch
"You have friends?"

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shae
Isn't this obvious because if you are friends with someone, it's likely they
have more friends? A friends graph would end up with many branches and just a
few roots, right?

~~~
dlubarov
What is the root of a graph?

~~~
jcoffland
If you have to ask you're probably a root/leaf.

------
dredmorbius
Sampling bias, or rather, experience/observer bias, is another aspect of this.

In 2015 I explored the question of how much user activity there was on
Google+. My initial approach was to look at the _public posting_ activity
(which is most visible), but a criticism was that there might be some massive
amount of _private_ sharing going on (apparently by accounts which had never
posted publicly). I did a follow-up analysis looking at the listed _followers_
("friends" in FB parlance) of publicly inactive and publicly active profiles.

 _The most overwhelming impression was how many profiles -- publicly active or
otherwise, had a shockingly small number of followers._

The _median_ for publicly inactive profiles: 2. For publicly active ones: 5.

The 95%ile: 33.5 for inactives, 69 for actives.

This jarred with the experiences of those I was hearing criticism from _simply
because they were, virtually by definition, extreme outliers._

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq)

Public vs. non-publicly posting profiles summary data

Publicly Inactive

Followers:

n: 88, sum: 561, min: 1, max: 53, mean: 6.375000, median: 2, sd: 10.953730

%-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

Views:

n: 88, sum: 638656, min: 265, max: 119442, mean: 7257.454545, median: 1012.5,
sd: 17720.702361

%-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

Publicly Active

Followers:

n: 1890, sum: 125539, min: 1, max: 67855, mean: 66.422751, median: 5, sd:
1579.404405

%-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

Views:

n: 1890, sum: 66647773, min: 252, max: 21088213, mean: 35263.371958, median:
3419.5, sd: 522757.797486

%-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

More:
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnK...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnKkfTNPKR)

------
300bps
From 2013 behind a paywall.

~~~
daveguy
Web link circumvents the paywall.

Web -> First link in results.

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mhurron
What friends?

