“percentage of…” zeitgeist

by DRM

Some­times you type the begin­ning of a query into Google search and as the sug­gested terms appear under the box you get pulled into the zeit­geist like Alice fell into the look­ing glass.

I was look­ing for a global demo­graphic info bit and typed “per­cent­age of” into Google.

The fol­low­ing list appeared as suggestions:

  • Per­cent­age of black peo­ple in America
  • Per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans with col­lege degrees
  • Per­cent­age of obese Americans
  • Per­cent­age of com­ple­tion method
  • Per­cent­age of homo­sex­u­als in America
  • Per­cent­age of Chris­tians in America
  • Per­cent­age of a number
  • Per­cent­age of water in a human body
  • Per­cent­age of men who cheat

These are the things that we won­der about.

Black peo­ple, smart peo­ple, gay peo­ple, godly peo­ple, and men who cheat: the five spe­cific queries designed to mea­sure the indi­vid­ual against the whole.

You can only imag­ine what the per­sonal sto­ries are behind the mil­lions of queries that prompted Google’s algo­rithms to offer up these queries. Peo­ple look­ing for val­i­da­tion; stu­dents research­ing papers; some guys look­ing to set­tle a debate at the end of the bar.

The next step was obvi­ous:  What were the answers?

First, though, I wanted to guess.

The table in this post shows my guesses, and the facts from the pri­mary source that Google offered up in the search.

I was on tar­get with black peo­ple and col­lege grads.  I over­shot on obe­sity (although more than 65% of Amer­i­cans are overweight.)

The num­ber of homo­sex­u­als is much lower than I esti­mated.  My 10% num­ber comes from a fact that I first heard dur­ing my fresh­man ori­en­ta­tion for col­lege in the late 1970’s.   Surf the web and you find that the num­ber of homo­sex­u­als is a highly politi­cized.  The world would be a much eas­ier place is every­thing was defined as pan-sexual…

There are a lot more Chris­tians than I thought, and I picked a pretty high num­ber.   There is a Chris­t­ian major­ity, with­out ques­tion; it’s just not a very uni­form def­i­n­i­tion of prac­tic­ing faiths.

About 37% of men have cheated in a com­mit­ted rela­tion­ship — a lot lower than my 55% esti­mate.  This was the loos­est data point, and one that requires, like homo­sex­u­al­ity, that a per­son iden­tify them­selves truth­fully to whomever is doing the count­ing.  And, in life, some things are best left private.

Oh, about two-thirds of the human body con­sists of water.  My guess was 96% and I don’t know what I was thinking.