Ask HN: What is the average number of hops in your social network to 9-11 death?

2 points·MrCoffee7··6 comments

What is the average number of hops in your social network to someone living who knew someone who was killed in the 9-11 attack? I am particularly interested in how the answer would vary depending on the age of the first person in the social network graph?

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From a couple cursory convos with AI chatbots without stratifying by age group of the first node, it looks like the average number of hops in the social network would be around 1.7 to 2 hops (just counting those who knew someone killed immediately on 9-11). But the average number of hops probably has a bimodal distribution depending on whether the first person has a lot of people in their social newtwork from either NYC or Washington, DC area.

Seems unlikely. There’s 400m people in America and the average is two hops away from one of the few thousand that died?

Of all the people on the Earth who were alive on 2001/09/11 a very large percentage have by now died.

About one in five of the people who were alive on 9-11 would have died by now. But my original question is about the average number of hops in the social network of everyone alive today (in the U.S.), which would include people born after 9-11. I would have made my original title longer but HN seems to have a limit on the number of characters in the title.

Does this include people who died from 9/11 related diseases? If so, that number is 0

It would be interesting to see the numerical results both ways to see the effects with and without 9-11 induced fatal diseases.

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