The Blog of anonyc

What are the chances that someone you know in real life is on EP and you don't know? Your aunt? Someone you went to high school with? The clerk at your grocery store?

I'm sure there are some of you out there who are open about your EP participation with your real life friends, but I'm thinking about those of us who keep quiet about it and are anonymous on here. What are the chances that someone else on here is someone I know in real life? What are the chances that I would end up interacting with them on here? And what are the chances that we would recognize each other? How strange would that be?

Let me do a little math here. Facebook has about 130 million active users (unique users within a one month time span in June 2008, citation Wikipedia). I have about 100 friends on Facebook.

How many active users does EP have? I haven't found a number posted anywhere, so I'll have to estimate. The total number of EP accounts you can find by looking at how many Favorites the user ExperienceProject has, which is 1,037,842 right now. But that's probably many times more than the true number of active users. The front page of EP says there are almost 2 million experiences shared and the statistics page says there is an average of 36 experiences per person. So to get that average, they used about 55,500 as the number of active EP users.

So if I know (in RL) 100 out of 130 million facebook users and I assume that I would know in RL that same fraction of EP users.... then on EP there should be 0.04 people who I know in RL, which is basically small enough to be safely none.

Of course this analysis is overly simplified... How many people on here do you think you would know in RL?

I just read this interesting article suggesting that our political leanings can have a physiological basis:

www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/02/born_to_party/

It was interesting to read, in light of political discussions I have read on here. Here, where everyone is totally open about their mental illnesses, kinks, etc. I imagine one of those researchers would be able to take the data from this community and correlate, say, conservatism with the pee fetish, or liberalism with ADHD, and then find that each has a common signature in the limbic brain. It blows my mind.