YATW Blog 2#: Why I'm Wrong

Hello, me again, Quinn Grzywinski back for my English assignment YATW, a project which we get three blog posts out of a subject of importance to us and make a difference! It’s been, you know, quite awhile since my first blog on overpopulation, which by the you can find here if you’re not caught up to speed on what I’ve been researching and studying. So, this time around, I wanted to launch my own original research on overpopulation, not just leech information off of sources in order to make my own summary on the subject. What I wanted to learn about for this blog post was how much a problem people in my school and community actually considered overpopulation to be; I was under the notion that people in general didn't considered it seriously enough. It was pretty much the reason I chose this as my YATW project, so I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of awareness people seemed to show. But I’m getting ahead of myself aren't I? Yes I think I am; let me provide some background information on what I did for this post.

So my first step to conducting my own original research was to decide what type of research I wanted to explore. I settled on the survey option, and got to work making the questions, that asked directly how much of a problem people thought overpopulation was, and what they thought was the actual population of the world was, which country they thought had the highest population is the world and various other questions. My “hypothesis” as it were, was that people would be not aware on knowledge of overpopulation and its effects on the world, but as you can see below on my survey's results, that just simply wasn't the case.

What you see above you is graph of the results of people answers to the question “Do you know what the current population of the world is?”. Now my theory that the answers would revolve around 6,900,000,000, but as you can see, a vast majority actually got the correct answer of 7,215,000,000,000. This kinds of shakes up my opinion that this subject wasn’t very well known as a potential world-defining event in our future, seeing that nearly everybody got the correct answers for my questions. For example, one of the questions of the survey was which country had the biggest population in the world, and for the 26 or 27 people who took the survey, 23 of them guessed the correct answer of China, a country which holds about 1,390,000,000 people. Same with the other questions really, majority ruled correctly, and I find that I’m really bad at making hypotheses.

So, you might ask, what does this mean for my research and what overpopulation means for the world. Well, at first, I thought that was that. People are in fact aware that overpopulation exists and is a threat, but after I stepped back, I started to second guess this. Well yes, people have proven that they know what overpopulation is and what the number of people on earth are. Look at chart below for a moment.

This was one of my questions on the survey asking people how much they considered overpopulation a threat, scoring it 1 through 5 on the panic-o-meter. See how most people scored it about a 3. Yes there are a couple 4’s and 5’s, at least for than 1’s and 2’s, but this kind of puts into doubt how dangerous people think overpopulation is. This kind of makes me want to to redo my survey a little, putting in questions that would address the severity of overpopulation, rather than questions just asking for a number or two. Do the people that took the quiz know that we humans are estimated to run out of oil in about 40 years? Do they know that the population nearly doubled during the 20th century? So yes, I may have some regrets, but I’m actually kind of grateful for the shattering of this one-sided window I've been looking, and the awareness of global warming could be something I integrate into blog 3#.

Before I go though, I like to address possibly my biggest point I brought up in my first blog. Remember the big ominous number of 10,000,000,000 people in my first blog, which I fixated quite a bit on? Well I’d like to rectify my comments in blog 1# a little, since I've found out a bit more. I kind of decreed that once the species reached 10,000,000,000 we would all need to become vegetarians or we’d all die due to food shortage, and I said that this event would happen in 3100. In actuality, it could happen well before then, around 2070 to 2080, according to this big ominous clock, so yeah, looking forward to then.

I wouldn't call the survey a success, but I gathered some cool data, and also learned how to properly format my survey’s in the future. But since I don’t want to leave everybody reading terrified for the next couple decades, I think I’m going to refocus in blog 3# on how to actual stop overpopulation in its tracks and work out a solution. And hopefully, it might even end up tying into my Agent Of Change proposal in the end.

Thanks for reading and see you in Blog 3#!