What is the friendship paradox? In a  Purdue University video , Prof Feld said he was “surprised” to find “that it’s always true in social networks that friends in general have more friends on average than people do”.  If that sounds a bit like a head-scratcher, well, it is (hence the “paradox” part).  “People assume that if there’s a pair of friends, one must have more friends and the other must have [fewer] friends, so you would expect that half the people would have fewer friends than their friends,” he continued.  But instead, he said, some people have loads of friends, and naturally, those people are likelier to be friends with lots of people who have fewer friends than them.  And the other people who have fewer friends are less likely to be our mates. In other words, it’s not so much that most people hover around an average amount of friends, with some having slightly more than others.…