Survey Analysis

First thanks to everyone who took a few precious minutes from their day to answer our silly questions. The motivation for the survey is lost on me, but nevertheless it provided hours of entertainment. If I get more time, I will do more analysis, and add in more people to the survey. I hope to update this annually and especially if any of the questions become true during the next 20 years. I apologize if this post is not formatted correctly for your device.

At first I thought I would just post the survey online and solicit answers, then after a few cold calls to friends and family, I decided I really enjoyed talking to people. Which is totally weird for me. I would like to think I learned more about each person not by their answers, but how they answered.

My good friend JM posted the survey online, and I will report the differences of answers here as well.

I talked to more than 50 people, see the distribution of gender and age below. The median age was about 40, meaning half the people were less that 40, and the other half older.

Randomly I selected about half men and half women.

I talked to everyone from CEOs of billion $ companies, to those just entering high school, and a few that have retired.  My only demographics were age and gender, so no other correlations can be made. I looked at some correlations between answers and gender, but found nothing really interesting. I will keep looking. I hope to show how answers drift with each generation.

I did some analysis of what people answered the most or least like someone else. There were a total of 14 questions, and one pair of participants did match on all 14 questions! At the other end of the spectrum there was a pair of people that only had 3 questions in common. For large amounts of good beer I will tell you how many matches you had in common; and for even more beer I will tell you who you are least like. Here is a chart showing all the number of questions answered the same between all pairs of people. Most people matched 9 answers with someone else.

I will divulge my matches here.  Early on my closest match was my brother, we answered 11 questions the same. I thought this to be very odd, since we are about as different as two humans can be, or at least I thought. Then later on with 12 matches came TM.

Funniest answer:
Q. Will Google exist on the stock exchange?
A. Let me google that!

The scariest answer was when a doctor told me he/she did not think the life expectancy would be more than 80 in 20 years.

The last question I asked was what do you see as the most promising advancement for society in the next 20 years. The word cloud above represents the answers. I took the liberty of condensing answers where possible. By far the most common theme was healthcare, and alternative energy. The program I used to generate the word cloud obviously has some bugs, as alternative energy did not show up. Some interesting single answers were music, better race relations, anything Elon Musk does, something we don't know. There was a late answer for the eradication of lawyers, but I think alcohol and the number of lawyers present influenced the answer.


Here are the answers thus far. I have abbreviated the actual question here, but you get the idea. The question that had the most common answer was that there would be a women president in 20 years.
The question with the least common answer was will Social Security Exist.

Yes:31% No:69% Will unemployment be more than 15%?
Yes:29% No:71% Will more people die in terrorist attack than automobile accidents in a year.
Yes:54% No:46% Will SS still exist?
Yes:37% No:63% Will we find intelligent life on other worlds?
Yes:94% No:6% will there have been a women president?
Yes:58% No:42% Will GM exist on the stock exchange?
Yes:90% No:10% Will Google exist on the stock exchange?
Yes:54% No:46% Will a prestigious university have gone bankrupt ?
Yes:43% No:57% Will obesity be less prevalent in the us?
Yes:35% No:65% Will self driving cars be the norm?
Yes:84% No:16% Will the life expectancy be more than 80?
Yes:19% No:81% Will global warming have turned out to be a hoax?
Yes:35% No:65% Will there be a USPS?
Yes:19% No:81% Will people be happier?