Ask HN: What does "vast majority" mean to you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does "vast majority" mean to you?

3 pointsosigurdson7 comments

I see this phrase a lot. For me, it roughly equates to > 98%. However, for some I could imagine it meaning > 99.9% or perhaps much lower like > 85%. Or, even worse, is context dependent (the vast majority of pop bottles in the pop machine did not contain pure hydrochloric acid).

I kind of feel it is a cop out on the part of the person using the phrase as is conveys a quantitative value with actually specifying it. It is a lot harder to commit to writing down a concrete number as then the reader expects a reference or more information to back it up. "vast majority" just kind of slips into the brain unexamined.

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ANSI handwaves are delineated as follows:

  few          10% 
  some         20%
  many         30-40% 
  half         50%
  most         60-70%
  vast         80%
  anyone       90%

A good way to think about this in social terms like polls etc (where %ages come up a lot) is to imagine the relative strength of two teams in a tug of war. 80% might seem low for the vast majority, but if you think about it as 4 people pulling against 1 it's easier to appreciate it viscerally.

How does that differ from the ISO handwave?

That's always sounded like a weasel phrase to me. Someone trying to quantify something -- like an opinion or a user base -- for which they don't have any numbers, but which they want to use as a key part of an argument.

It's absolutely hand-wavy. When I've used the phrase, though, what I've meant is that I'm claiming that it's at least 3/4 of the set, but I don't have hard data.

A simple majority is 50% + 1. This is a specific, mathematical term with no debate.

A supermajority is usually 66% (can be 60% or 75%, etc: more than a simple majority anyway). The exact value is context-dependent, but the concept is commonly defined, and the range is broadly represented.

So I think, in my mind, a "vast" majority would be something like 90%, perhaps as low as 85%. But it's not a defined term.

I don't think it needs to be 98% or 99% (I'd describe that as "basically everyone").

I would have said "more than 90%", but from ChatGPT:

Prompt: "What does vast majority mean?" Answer: "The term "vast majority" refers to a very large portion or segment of a given group or quantity, often implying much more than a simple majority or over half. It suggests an overwhelming or significantly large percentage, typically used to emphasize that the subject in question constitutes the bulk or main part of the whole. For instance, if one says "the vast majority of people support a certain policy," it means that significantly more than half of the people, possibly upwards of 70%, 80%, or even more, favor that policy."

Vast majority: portion of a population that forms a consensus.

Consensus: agreement among a vast majority of a population.

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