“Percent of the World” Paradox

Thursday, January 8, 2026

The “percent of the world” paradox is the counterintuitive fact that, due to the large world population (over 8 billion), even a seemingly small percentage of the world, such as 2%, 1%, or even 0.1%, is still a lot of people! As of January 8, 2026, at 05:00 UTC, there are 8,164,320,521 people on Earth. With that large population, one percent of the population is still a lot of people; that’s 81,643,205 people!

Counterintuitive facts

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Here are some amazing, counterintuitive consequences and examples of this paradox.

Even if only 1% of people in the world know a certain concept in math, that means there are over 81 million people who know it. When I was in high school, I learned the challenges of being far ahead of my peers and even my teachers when it came to math. Most people don’t know what a “pseudoprime” is, but I knew it and mastered the concept when I was only 14. The number 4,681 is a strong pseudoprime to base 2. It’s not prime, as 4,681 = 31 × 151, and yet, it “behaves” like a prime in the sense that it passes the Miller-Rabin primality test in base 2. Whenever I expressed my frustration that others didn’t know as much about math as I did, teachers had to explain to me not to “assume” that people know what I know. A teacher could even say something like, “No, you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that.” Well, now, I have a valid, stat-backed defense that, since there are 8 billion people in the world, the statements, “Most people don’t know what a Mersenne prime is” and “There are plenty of people who do know what a Mersenne prime is” do not contradict each other, as they can both be simultaneously true.
And even if only 0.1% of people in the world know a certain OBSCURE concept in math, that still translates to over 8,100,000 who DO know it.
You can theoretically have 810 million haters and still be 90% loved. It is very hard to estimate how many haters or fans a celebrity has. In 2021, I saw a YouTube video ranking the most hated celebrities in the world. However, like most other videos and online documents on this topic, they made the mistake of ranking “hated-ness” on the NUMBER of haters rather than the PERCENTAGE. For example, by their definition, “15,000 fans, 2,000 haters” is more hated than “3 fans, 15 haters” because 2,000 is much greater than 15, but it should be the other way around, as the former has a fan-to-hater ratio of 88:12, while the latter has a fan-to-hater ratio of 1:5 or 17:83. Based on their definition, Justin Bieber ranked #5, behind only several others like Chris Brown and Kanye West. Since Justin is my favorite celebrity, seeing this made me very sad. About whoever created this video, don’t ask me how that person came up with the figures presented in the video, as I have no idea. But what I do know is that, according to that video, Justin Bieber has 260 million haters. Well, you know what? Even if that is the case, one can have 260 million or even 360 million haters and still be 97% loved if the rest of the world loves the person, assuming everyone either loves or hates the person; on a 10-point scale, everyone feels 0/10 or 10/10 about the person, and 1/10 through 9/10 are never used.
Even if 99.9% of people are not Pokémon fans, there are still 8 million Pokémon fans.
Even if 99.99% of people deny a scientifically valid truth (vaccines, climate change, gravity, etc.), there can still be 810,000 people who know better. While 810,000 seems very small in comparison to 8.1 billion, you shouldn’t overlook a set of 810,000 people. That’s more than the number of people in Boston (675,000). In a mainline Pokémon game, if a Pokémon, Level 1, in the “Fast” leveling group (such as Clefairy or Jigglypuff) were to gain one experience point for each person who knows the truth (that so many people are stubbornly and erroneously denying), that Pokémon would be Level 100 with 10,000 experience points to spare. How many experience points to reach Level 100? For Pokémon in the “Fast” leveling group, it’s 800,000.