WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 1 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:02.640 The polling site for this  video was powered by Fasthosts. 2 00:00:02.640 --> 00:00:04.240 UK viewers can enter  their competition to win 3 00:00:04.240 --> 00:00:07.360 a tech bundle and dream PC  setup worth up to £5,000. 4 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:09.040 There's a link in the description, 5 00:00:09.040 --> 00:00:10.960 and a question at the end of the video. 6 00:00:11.520 --> 00:00:14.160 This isn't the first time that  this question's been asked. 7 00:00:14.160 --> 00:00:16.000 Several web projects have  tried to answer it before, 8 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:17.840 some are still running,  and some are defunct. 9 00:00:17.840 --> 00:00:20.400 And the question itself has  been used as a punchline, 10 00:00:20.400 --> 00:00:23.680 asked by an inept, self-obsessed  radio DJ character. 11 00:00:23.680 --> 00:00:26.000 "What is... the best thing?" 12 00:00:26.960 --> 00:00:30.400 Of course there isn't a meaningful  answer to that question. Of course. 13 00:00:30.400 --> 00:00:32.560 But I think there are  some really interesting   14 00:00:32.560 --> 00:00:34.880 challenges in trying to  find an answer anyway, 15 00:00:34.880 --> 00:00:37.920 and the results can reveal a  lot more than you might think. 16 00:00:38.720 --> 00:00:40.880 The first problem is  trying to list everything. 17 00:00:40.880 --> 00:00:42.640 I know it's an obvious  thing to say, but: 18 00:00:42.640 --> 00:00:44.560 there are a lot of  things in the universe. 19 00:00:44.560 --> 00:00:46.960 So let's reduce the scope to   20 00:00:46.960 --> 00:00:50.080 "everything that most people  could form an opinion about". 21 00:00:50.640 --> 00:00:53.040 How do you get a list  of everything like that? 22 00:00:53.600 --> 00:00:56.160 Well, the starting point is Wikidata. 23 00:00:56.160 --> 00:00:59.680 Everything that has a Wikipedia  article also has an entry in Wikidata, 24 00:00:59.680 --> 00:01:01.680 but so does every category of things,   25 00:01:01.680 --> 00:01:03.600 every property that  something might have, 26 00:01:03.600 --> 00:01:06.960 and every link and connection  between all of those. 27 00:01:06.960 --> 00:01:09.440 And it's all designed to  be processed by computers. 28 00:01:09.440 --> 00:01:12.560 So I figured I'd start  by downloading it. 29 00:01:12.560 --> 00:01:14.520 More than a terabyte of data, 30 00:01:14.520 --> 00:01:17.600 more than 88 million things exhaustively described. 31 00:01:18.480 --> 00:01:21.200 And most of those things  are not interesting. 32 00:01:21.200 --> 00:01:24.080 More than that, they're going to  be a mystery to almost everyone. 33 00:01:24.080 --> 00:01:26.720 Every named location in the world no matter how obscure, 34 00:01:26.720 --> 00:01:30.800 every species and genus of animal,  enormous numbers of scholarly articles. 35 00:01:30.800 --> 00:01:35.360 If you show most of those to people  and ask them to form an opinion, 36 00:01:35.360 --> 00:01:37.760 the answer isn't just  going to be "I don't know": 37 00:01:37.760 --> 00:01:39.920 it'll be "I don't care". 38 00:01:39.920 --> 00:01:42.640 So I had to filter  those 88 million things. 39 00:01:42.640 --> 00:01:45.200 And the first steps were  actually kind of easy. 40 00:01:45.200 --> 00:01:47.440 First, I removed all  listings for people. 41 00:01:47.440 --> 00:01:51.280 We're ranking things, so someone  else can do "who is the best person". 42 00:01:51.280 --> 00:01:52.000 You're welcome to that. 43 00:01:52.000 --> 00:01:55.680 But I just removed any item that  was tagged with Q5, "human". 44 00:01:55.680 --> 00:01:57.520 And that's good, that's a good start. 45 00:01:57.520 --> 00:02:00.640 Also, I removed all listings for  groups of people, because: yikes. 46 00:02:01.200 --> 00:02:03.920 Next, places. If you're doing  "what is the best thing", 47 00:02:03.920 --> 00:02:06.080 no country or river or building is ever going to win, 48 00:02:06.080 --> 00:02:09.760 it'll get voted down by political rivalries or people elsewhere  who've never heard of it, 49 00:02:09.760 --> 00:02:12.320 so if the item was tagged  with a latitude and longitude, 50 00:02:12.960 --> 00:02:14.560 it also got thrown out. 51 00:02:14.560 --> 00:02:17.680 Also, anything tagged as  fictional got removed too: 52 00:02:17.680 --> 00:02:19.040 not works of art themselves,   53 00:02:19.040 --> 00:02:21.840 but characters and events  that aren't part of reality. 54 00:02:22.400 --> 00:02:25.440 That still left an  enormous number of items. 55 00:02:25.440 --> 00:02:28.640 But we're only looking for things  that most people will know about, 56 00:02:28.640 --> 00:02:30.480 and there's a really  good metric for that: 57 00:02:30.480 --> 00:02:35.920 I kept anything that had a Wikipedia article in at least fifty different languages. 58 00:02:35.920 --> 00:02:37.520 I tried different thresholds for that, 59 00:02:37.520 --> 00:02:40.320 but fifty seemed to have  the right balance where 60 00:02:40.320 --> 00:02:44.240 almost everything that remained  would be recognisable to most people. 61 00:02:44.800 --> 00:02:51.440 And that brought it down to 8,850 things. Which is a managable number. 62 00:02:52.400 --> 00:02:55.520 But there was no way to  automate the last part. 63 00:02:55.520 --> 00:03:00.320 I had to manually check through all  those thousands of things to find   64 00:03:00.320 --> 00:03:01.120 the bad ones. 65 00:03:01.760 --> 00:03:04.080 Not just things that most people  would vote against because they're   66 00:03:04.080 --> 00:03:05.280 unpleasant or harmful, 67 00:03:05.280 --> 00:03:09.760 but things that no-one should be asking  about in a lighthearted web poll. 68 00:03:09.760 --> 00:03:10.991 Crimes against the person. 69 00:03:10.991 --> 00:03:14.640 A couple of disturbing things that were  just listed as "rituals". 70 00:03:14.640 --> 00:03:17.920 Anything to do with the Nazis.  Which it turns out is quite a lot. 71 00:03:17.920 --> 00:03:21.680 They kept showing up under  apparently-innocent categories? 72 00:03:21.680 --> 00:03:25.520 Like, eugenics was just  tagged as "social philosophy". 73 00:03:25.520 --> 00:03:28.000 Mein Kampf, just listed  as "written work". 74 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:33.200 Unless you kept constantly vigilant  for them, they kept trying to sneak in. 75 00:03:34.160 --> 00:03:36.000 Then there were the dull  groups of things that could   76 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:38.160 be summed up in a single entry instead. 77 00:03:38.160 --> 00:03:42.000 Every time zone. Every language, every  country's flag and national anthem. 78 00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:44.720 Every individual book  of every religious text. 79 00:03:44.720 --> 00:03:50.000 A lot of mythological figures who weren't tagged as either "human" or "fictional". 80 00:03:50.640 --> 00:03:53.040 Hundreds of generic names of galaxies-- 81 00:03:53.040 --> 00:03:55.920 "Okay, you know what? I talked  about that for far too long. 82 00:03:55.920 --> 00:03:58.320 "Let's just say I removed the boring  ones, okay? There were a lot of them. 83 00:03:58.320 --> 00:03:59.520 "Let's skip forward." 84 00:03:59.520 --> 00:04:01.360 And then, there was the vandalism. 85 00:04:01.360 --> 00:04:04.640 All of which has since been corrected,  but in the snapshot I downloaded, 86 00:04:04.640 --> 00:04:10.000 someone had replaced the title of  "graphics" with "Pro player de fifa" 87 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:13.920 and the description of  "worm" with "dog go fishing". 88 00:04:13.920 --> 00:04:17.520 Also, "pipe organ" was described as  "wind instrument that causes cancer". 89 00:04:17.520 --> 00:04:21.600 So there's someone out there who  really, really doesn't like pipe organs. 90 00:04:22.320 --> 00:04:26.720 When all was done: 7,188 things. 91 00:04:26.720 --> 00:04:28.000 I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, 92 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:30.000 people would still find mistakes, and they did. 93 00:04:30.560 --> 00:04:34.880 But it was good enough. It was time  to ask the world which was best. 94 00:04:36.560 --> 00:04:39.120 One of the best approaches  for ranking items in a list 95 00:04:39.120 --> 00:04:40.880 is to show them to people two at a time, 96 00:04:40.880 --> 00:04:43.680 and then ask them to pick  the best of each random pair. 97 00:04:43.680 --> 00:04:46.000 The best ones will be  consistently voted for, 98 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:47.600 and the worst ones voted against. 99 00:04:47.600 --> 00:04:50.000 And as long as you have  enough votes in total, 100 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:52.320 you don't need to keep track  of all the different pairings: 101 00:04:52.320 --> 00:04:55.840 just the total number of wins  and losses for each item. 102 00:04:55.840 --> 00:04:57.440 Now, I've written code  to do that before, 103 00:04:57.440 --> 00:04:59.600 so I just reused it, put  a quick site together,   104 00:04:59.600 --> 00:05:00.960 and launched it out on Twitter. 105 00:05:01.920 --> 00:05:06.080 My code broke immediately  because I'd forgotten to change   106 00:05:06.080 --> 00:05:07.600 one line before going live, 107 00:05:07.600 --> 00:05:11.360 I fixed it within a minute or so while  a hundred people rushed to tweet me 108 00:05:11.360 --> 00:05:14.160 about something I obviously  already knew about. Anyway. So. 109 00:05:14.160 --> 00:05:18.880 Five hours and more than  1.2 million votes later, 110 00:05:18.880 --> 00:05:20.560 the order of items had settled down, 111 00:05:20.560 --> 00:05:24.480 and I closed the poll before anyone  wrote code to try and break it. 112 00:05:24.480 --> 00:05:27.680 Now, you'll remember that each  pairing was randomly chosen. 113 00:05:27.680 --> 00:05:31.840 That means some items had more match-ups  than others, just through sheer luck. 114 00:05:31.840 --> 00:05:35.200 The outliers were "mold", which was in 125 match-ups, 115 00:05:35.200 --> 00:05:37.520 and "canal", which was in 236. 116 00:05:37.520 --> 00:05:40.800 There was the expected  distribution between those. 117 00:05:40.800 --> 00:05:44.080 So, at this point, we  had ranked everything. 118 00:05:45.920 --> 00:05:47.840 I don't want to spend too much  time on the bottom of the list. 119 00:05:47.840 --> 00:05:51.120 It's a lot of nasty diseases  and unpleasant concepts. 120 00:05:51.120 --> 00:05:53.040 Also one of the Twilight movies. 121 00:05:53.040 --> 00:05:56.400 I will say that The Worst  Thing... is Lyme disease. 122 00:05:56.400 --> 00:05:57.502 I've no idea why. 123 00:05:57.502 --> 00:06:00.400 It did significantly worse than everything else, by a good margin. 124 00:06:00.400 --> 00:06:02.640 Maybe, statistically, out  of the thousands of items, 125 00:06:02.640 --> 00:06:04.640 one had to get a lot  of unlucky matchups? 126 00:06:04.640 --> 00:06:09.040 But, honestly, it is a really  long way below any other item. 127 00:06:09.040 --> 00:06:10.720 "Coronavirus", also fairly low. 128 00:06:10.720 --> 00:06:13.920 And anything religious did  quite poorly, which makes sense: 129 00:06:13.920 --> 00:06:15.520 if you're not religious  you're rarely going to   130 00:06:15.520 --> 00:06:18.240 vote for anything to do with faith, and if you are religious   131 00:06:18.240 --> 00:06:22.000 you're hardly ever going to vote  anything other than your own faith. 132 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:24.320 In hindsight, I should have  done something like consolidate 133 00:06:24.320 --> 00:06:28.240 all the entries for faiths into  one just called "religion". 134 00:06:28.240 --> 00:06:31.360 Which I'm sure wouldn't have  caused me any problems at all. 135 00:06:31.360 --> 00:06:33.840 Anyway. The best things. 136 00:06:33.840 --> 00:06:34.720 First, let's be clear:   137 00:06:34.720 --> 00:06:37.520 these are the results as voted by  the people who follow me on Twitter. 138 00:06:37.520 --> 00:06:41.520 This is about "the best thing"  as decided by, if we're honest, 139 00:06:41.520 --> 00:06:45.440 a group of English-speaking,  extremely-online nerds. 140 00:06:45.440 --> 00:06:47.920 However, that's also going to be a lot  of the people who watch this video, 141 00:06:47.920 --> 00:06:49.520 so, I think it's fair to say,   142 00:06:49.520 --> 00:06:53.440 as voted by you: here are  the top ten best things. 143 00:06:53.440 --> 00:06:55.280 At number 10, privacy. 144 00:06:55.280 --> 00:06:58.560 And ranked above privacy,  at number 9, pizza. 145 00:06:58.560 --> 00:07:02.800 Is pizza better or more important  than privacy? [indecisive noise] 146 00:07:02.800 --> 00:07:06.400 ...but pizza is more likely to win a  match-up, and that's what counts here! 147 00:07:06.400 --> 00:07:09.520 By the way, the next highest  food was ice cream, at number 43, 148 00:07:09.520 --> 00:07:13.120 and while that could imply that my audience have the palates of five-year-olds, 149 00:07:13.120 --> 00:07:16.640 I think it's more that, while those  may not be everyone's favourite foods, 150 00:07:16.640 --> 00:07:19.840 there are very few people  who actively dislike them, 151 00:07:19.840 --> 00:07:22.960 so they'll win a lot of generic  match-ups just because of that. 152 00:07:22.960 --> 00:07:26.160 The next items up: knowledge,  creativity and logic. 153 00:07:26.160 --> 00:07:30.800 The foundations of human thought. Given my audience, that makes a lot of sense. 154 00:07:30.800 --> 00:07:32.800 At number 5: hugs. 155 00:07:32.800 --> 00:07:35.360 Which Wikidata clinically describes as   156 00:07:35.360 --> 00:07:38.800 "a form of endearment,  universal in human communities". 157 00:07:39.440 --> 00:07:41.440 Granted, it's 2020 as  this video goes out, 158 00:07:41.440 --> 00:07:43.760 so they're less universal than  they perhaps should be right now, 159 00:07:43.760 --> 00:07:45.280 but that's still lovely. 160 00:07:45.840 --> 00:07:50.000 Then we get to three items that I  honestly wasn't expecting to be so high. 161 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:52.000 At number 4: gravity. 162 00:07:52.960 --> 00:07:55.200 Sure, it's essential for  the entire universe to work, 163 00:07:55.200 --> 00:07:58.400 I just didn't expect it to beat  "hugs". And then, at number 3... 164 00:07:59.040 --> 00:08:00.560 ...the Earth's magnetic field. 165 00:08:02.400 --> 00:08:04.400 Like I said, extremely-online nerds. 166 00:08:04.400 --> 00:08:06.560 Because, again, yes,  essential for life to exist, 167 00:08:06.560 --> 00:08:11.280 but just to be clear, "air" and "fresh  water" only just made the top 25, 168 00:08:11.280 --> 00:08:14.080 and somehow the Earth's  magnetic field is at number 3. 169 00:08:14.080 --> 00:08:17.360 And it's at this point that I really  start to doubt my own methodology. 170 00:08:17.360 --> 00:08:19.200 Because at number two is electricity. 171 00:08:19.760 --> 00:08:23.280 I do realise that using an  electronic device to run this poll 172 00:08:23.280 --> 00:08:26.720 does give that a certain  advantage, but again, 173 00:08:26.720 --> 00:08:28.240 should that really be higher than air? 174 00:08:29.520 --> 00:08:31.040 Before we get to the best thing, though, 175 00:08:31.040 --> 00:08:35.120 here are some other interesting  results in specific categories: 176 00:08:35.120 --> 00:08:37.360 the best part of the body is the brain. 177 00:08:37.360 --> 00:08:41.120 "Space" and "time" both fought and won  exactly the same number of match-ups, 178 00:08:41.120 --> 00:08:43.920 they landed in joint 36th place. 179 00:08:43.920 --> 00:08:47.040 Despite there being quite a few  things about sex in the list, 180 00:08:47.040 --> 00:08:49.200 none of them got near the top 50. 181 00:08:49.200 --> 00:08:52.640 "Okay, okay, I should have checked more  than the top 50 before recording this, 182 00:08:52.640 --> 00:08:56.480 "'cos it turns out that the  highest-rated sex thing is 'orgasm', 183 00:08:56.480 --> 00:09:00.000 "and it got to number 69, and I  swear I'm not making that up." 184 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:04.960 The best creatures are bees, then  emperor penguins, then hedgehogs. 185 00:09:04.960 --> 00:09:08.720 The best colours are black, then  blue, and the worst is brown. 186 00:09:08.720 --> 00:09:12.000 Love doesn't even make it into  the top 100, it's down at 137, 187 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:14.320 next to Vitamin C and cryptography, 188 00:09:14.320 --> 00:09:17.680 and if that doesn't prove my audience  isn't representative of the wider world, 189 00:09:17.680 --> 00:09:19.040 I don't know what does. 190 00:09:19.040 --> 00:09:20.800 Actually, I do know what does,   191 00:09:20.800 --> 00:09:24.080 heterosexuality lost more  than 50% of its match-ups, 192 00:09:24.080 --> 00:09:27.920 while bisexuality was ranked  only one item below doctors. 193 00:09:27.920 --> 00:09:31.600 Yes, it is ridiculous to try  and rank everything like this. 194 00:09:31.600 --> 00:09:34.960 But the results do reveal things  about this group of people, 195 00:09:34.960 --> 00:09:37.280 about the folks who tend  to watch videos like this. 196 00:09:37.280 --> 00:09:40.880 And perhaps the most revealing  thing is what placed first. 197 00:09:40.880 --> 00:09:43.920 It doesn't just tell you about the  needs and desires of this audience, 198 00:09:43.920 --> 00:09:46.560 it's also something about  the times we're living in. 199 00:09:46.560 --> 00:09:49.280 If we weren't in what seems  to be such a rough year, 200 00:09:49.280 --> 00:09:52.960 if I were giving this talk to a live  audience, like I originally planned to, 201 00:09:52.960 --> 00:09:55.200 instead of a standing in  front of a green screen and 202 00:09:55.200 --> 00:09:57.520 talking to a camera in a tiny apartment, 203 00:09:57.520 --> 00:10:00.400 well, then, in that case maybe the  results would have been different. 204 00:10:00.960 --> 00:10:05.520 But the best thing, according  to this audience in mid-2020: 205 00:10:05.520 --> 00:10:06.240 the best thing is... 206 00:10:07.600 --> 00:10:08.100 sleep. 207 00:10:08.640 --> 00:10:10.080 Have a good night, folks. 208 00:10:10.080 --> 00:10:12.480 I ran the polling site for  this video on Fasthosts, 209 00:10:12.480 --> 00:10:15.520 a web hosting company with more  than twenty years' experience. 210 00:10:15.520 --> 00:10:19.520 Their dedicated servers can have up to 10Gbps connectivity and unlimited bandwidth, 211 00:10:19.520 --> 00:10:20.960 and their CloudNX platform   212 00:10:20.960 --> 00:10:23.280 lets you configure and  scale your hosting hardware 213 00:10:23.280 --> 00:10:25.760 in real time with no upfront costs. 214 00:10:25.760 --> 00:10:28.000 All of their servers and  engineers are based in the UK. 215 00:10:28.000 --> 00:10:32.160 And if you are too, then you can go the  link on screen or in the description 216 00:10:32.160 --> 00:10:35.760 to enter their competition to win  a tech bundle and dream PC setup   217 00:10:35.760 --> 00:10:37.360 worth up to £5,000. 218 00:10:38.800 --> 00:10:41.200 If you can answer the techie test  question they asked me to write. 219 00:10:41.200 --> 00:10:44.720 Which is: what's the HTTP  response code for 'OK'? 220 00:10:45.280 --> 00:10:46.880 Terms and conditions  are over on their site, 221 00:10:46.880 --> 00:10:59.840 the closing date is 31st  October 2020: good luck!