i'm a huge nerd and pretty much write and make videos about things that i find interesting i'm
curious about the world and feel like sometimes i'm interested in some ridiculous topics
with that being said i was extremely surprised how many of you enjoyed my last video about why
the danny gonzales tiktok song didn't go viral aside from analyzing human behavior and the psyche
i like trying to figure out why things did or didn't happen so i'm extremely grateful
that so many of you are inquisitive as well with this video i don't mean to milk the danny gonzales
tick tock song topic but this is something that was on my mind throughout watching his video while
watching danny's video i just kept thinking there are so many things wrong with this experiment
i debated on discussing it in my last video but i figured that'd make it way too long i love that
danny goes out of his comfort zone and tries new things i think that's one of the reasons why he's
one of the best youtubers on the platform right now it's easy to see that danny has a curious
mind and it's great to see him experiment so i'm hoping that if danny sees this it will help him
improve his method for the next experiment but more importantly i hope it helps all of you think
a little bit more critically about how we conduct experiments to get a little closer to the truth
scientific literacy is extremely important in this day and age we're constantly flooded
with clickbait headlines that say things like new studies shows breathing air cures cancer
or how drinking a gallon of mayonnaise can extend your life by three and a half years
yes i know those examples were exaggerated but you know what i mean in a world where people are
fighting to get our clicks rather than deliver us the truth i feel it's important that we understand
what a good experiment looks like each day we put our trust in politicians doctors and
others who tell us about studies too often we succumb to confirmation bias while neglecting
all of the flaws in the study that we're being informed about up until this year i didn't know
how to independently think about different studies and the information i was receiving so i made it
a personal goal to better understand how studies are done and what separates good science from bad
science i'm also extremely fascinated how people can fall for conspiracy theories so i was able to
scratch all of these itches of curiosity with some great books some of the books that really helped
me better understand the scientific method and good versus bad studies are the skeptic's guide to
the universe science fictions and calling bs while i personally find this topic extremely interesting
i know learning about scientific studies and research can be pretty boring for some so this
is why i love nerding out by taking pop culture topics like the danny gonzales tick tock song to
help people better understand these sometimes boring topics so in this video we're going to
pretend that danny hired us to help him make a viral tick-tock song hopefully by the end danny
and the rest of us can improve our experimenting process first we're going to take a look at some
of the research questions we'd want to answer as danny when trying to make a tick tock song
go viral and then we'll form our hypothesis after that it's time to scrutinize our hypothesis and
variables to try and make sure we're not missing anything with our process finally we'll put it all
together to see what a proper experiment would look like as well as some limitations we may
face while running it but before we get started if you're new to the rewired soul make sure you
subscribe and ring that notification bell here we use critical thinking and practice skepticism
to better understand the world and improve our overall well-being and if you're interested in any
of the books that i mentioned the affiliate links are always listed down in the description below
every experiment should have a goal and most experiments start with a question
sometimes our questions are too broad or too vague so it's important to sit down and really see what
we want to accomplish with this experiment we want to help danny make his tik tok song go viral
but what kind of research will we be doing the two primary types of studies are quantitative
and qualitative qualitative studies are often used in psychology but they're much harder to properly
analyze because some of the data is based on subjective experience with quantitative research
we're looking at numbers since we're trying to make a tik tok song go viral we're going to
have clear metrics we can look at but there may be some additional subjective factors so it'll
be both qualitative and quantitative next we need to narrow this down a bit what are we going to do
what do we think might work well let's say after consulting with danny we think that there's a
formula for viral tiktok songs so the more precise question we want to ask for our research is can a
formula make a tiktok song go viral now it's time to form a hypothesis and set up some variables
our hypothesis is what we want to test what we're changing and what we think is going to happen
first we need to make sure we have an independent and dependent variable
the independent variable is what we're going to change or control and the dependent variable is
what we're hoping to have an effect on so in this situation the independent variable
is the formula we're going to come up with for danny's tik tok song and the dependent variable
is the amount of times people use the song in tik toks when we put it all together our
hypothesis is that you can use a specific formula to make a tiktoksong go viral next
it's time to get serious and really figure out how we're going to run this experiment
i'm currently taking a course on effective research methods and something the instructor
said was extremely important she said a proper experiment is trying to find the truth but if
you're just trying to confirm your hypothesis you have an agenda when we hear about research
we often don't want to do the extra work and get the details about who ran the study and
why we often forget that even scientists have biases and agendas and unsurprisingly they can
also be motivated by money decades ago a group of scientists from harvard came out saying that
fats were the primary danger and not sugar years later it was discovered that the researchers were
actually paid by the sugar industry to do this research disgraced dr andrew wakefield
the man who started the anti-vaxx movement was being paid by the lawyers of parents to prove
the mmr vaccine caused autism since then his research has been retracted but as we all know
the damage has been done although we're not making major decisions about health like the
above examples in this hypothetical situation danny hired us to help with some research
and since we're ethical scientists we're going to do some good work that's why we're going to
scrutinize our hypothesis and variables before we get started first and foremost we need to
ask a very important question does the problem underlying our research really matter to society
at large well it's easy to say no helping danny go viral on tiktok doesn't matter we need to think
about the bigger picture if we can prove that a formula can make something go viral on tiktok
this is huge for people who are passionate about creating and want to be an influencer
even more importantly think about the implications this could have for charity organizations and
raising awareness about important global issues if we were to help the aspca go viral on tiktok
think about all the animals that we could help or what if the national alliance on mental illness
wanted to raise mental health awareness we could help them out significantly with this formula
next we need to ask ourselves if we'll be able to locate evidence for our research something
that separates real science from pseudoscience is that the real science is falsifiable in this
case if our hypothesis is that a formula can make danny's tiktok song give 50 000 uses we'll have
data to know if we failed or succeeded if this was a pseudo-scientific study we wouldn't be able to
falsify it because we say something like the lack of views actually shows that it was a success it's
a heads i win tails you lose scenario but we're awesome researchers so we don't play like that now
we need to take a look at the extraneous variables and i think this is where danny could have really
improved his experiment an extraneous variable is something that could affect the results of the
experiment that we may not be expecting in this case the biggest extraneous variable we might face
is that people recognize danny with 1.5 million followers on tiktok and over 4 million on youtube
if people find out it's danny it's an issue why due to its popularity if the song
does go viral we won't know if it was because of our formula or because of the fact that popularity
can beget popularity like i said i think this was the biggest one that danny didn't think about but
if you can think of any other extraneous variables do me a favor and leave a comment down below
with a proper experiment like this we're starting from scratch so in this fictional world where
danny hired us to help him we're going to pretend he never independently ran his experiment on his
own but at the brainstorming table denny brings us some ideas he had for running this experiment
and they sound pretty good some of danny's ideas include find a common style of beat that works
for viral tik tok songs gather a bunch of viral tik tok songs and create a word cloud
create a new account with a fake name to promote the song then create consistent content with the
song and use some current tik tok trends to try and gain some traction these are all great ideas
and we're going to run with them but danny has one last idea he's going to record the song and
the videos while wearing a minimal disguise well this is why danny pays us the big bucks
because we immediately bring up the extraneous variables danny has a unique voice and short of
a special effects team it may not be too hard for people to figure out its danny so what's a better
way to run this experiment first we're going to hire an actor to be the song's artist ned flames
aka fox season in order to limit other factors we need to find someone with a similar build to
danny we'll want to hire an actor with a slim build about six feet tall and has magnificent
hair it's important that we find someone similar looking to danny because let's say you cast me and
the song flopped is it because the formula was bad or because i'm overweight or if we hired a woman
we'd have to take those factors into consideration as well but we'll circle back to this topic during
the replication process next we need to find someone with a similar quality of rapping as danny
maybe the actor we hire can flow and if that's the case that's awesome if not we need to find someone
else as we all know danny can rap so we can't just hire someone like your dad to record the track
even if danny writes the lyrics we need someone he can coach to have a similar style and quality
and now that we have everything that we need we can run the experiment and check the results
well the experiment is over and since danny hired the best team in the business
we not only hit our goal but we passed it within just a couple weeks over 75 000 people use this
track and it's the latest banger on tik tok then we reveal to the world that this was an experiment
and we get danny gonzalez a million more followers on tiktok and on youtube because we did such an
epic job the end right well not exactly now is the most important part of the study remember
we wanted to run this research for the greater good we want to help hopeful influencers go viral
and we also want to help organizations that are doing good for the world so before we publish our
findings we're going to want to do two important things one try to replicate our findings and two
try to disprove our findings but first let's start with trying to disprove our findings we need to
step into the role of a competing researcher or investigative journalist and do everything we can
to debunk our findings then and only then can a researcher have any faith in their results
in the scientific realm this is where peer reviews come in when a group of scientists publishes their
findings more people from the scientific community get involved while running our research we may
have been too narrow-minded and not thought of other factors that may have contributed to
our findings or we may have succumbed to our own biases without even realizing it but in my opinion
before publishing findings you'll gain a lot more credibility by publishing all the things you did
to try and disprove your research rather than confirm it this not only makes the work easier
during the peer review process but it also shows that you're trying to have scientific integrity
lastly it's time to replicate the study so let's say since danny is such a nice guy he never made
us sign an nda and he wants us to go around helping other influencers with our findings
we give them our formula and see if they can replicate our success not only that but we run
our experiment multiple times as well to see if we can replicate it one of the crucial aspects
of analyzing results is having a proper sample size if we only tested it once and it worked
we wouldn't know if we just got lucky maybe the tiktok algorithm just happened to help us
more than it normally would or maybe a big influencer just happened to use our song
by running the research multiple times we could see how legitimate our research actually was
once replicated we'd want to try a bunch of other different variables we want to change different
pieces of the formula and i think a great place to start is with the actor we should try to replicate
it with actors of various heights weights nationalities clothing styles and more then
we should also record tracks with a female rapper and hire actresses to see if gender played a role
interestingly enough there are companies that actually do this for any of you who watch the
social dilemma on netflix you know there's a lot of work that goes into the data that's collected
and hopefully now that you've got a better understanding of the process you can also
better understand how algorithms are used to grab your attention for various agendas but my hope is
that you take this knowledge and use it to satisfy your own curiosity and run some proper experiments
to help you in other areas of your life all right everybody thank you once again for nerding out
with me i think this is really important right like even though it's like fun it's fun to look
at like you know the danny gonzales tiktok viral song experiment like i like i use this kind of
stuff at my job like i i have a a very like cool position where i get to run different experiments
and try different things to help our company to help our clients when i look at data and
stuff like that and i want to make sure that i'm looking at the data correctly and here's the thing
here's the thing this is something that i just started educating myself about like thoroughly
like this year right and i'm learning so so so much something that i didn't really dive into
in this is biases right like i think one of the most important things and i talk about it all the
time when i talk about critical thinking and all of that is like we need to educate ourselves about
all the different biases we have all the different biases because if not we can just go down the
wrong pathway like you remember in dumb and dumber right when they go on the wrong road
for like hours or whatever and that's when they end up getting a little moped anyways you know
what i'm talking about and that's why we need to be mindful of our own biases because our biases
can make us feel like we're on the right path and we're just totally screwing everything up
but again more importantly we're constantly fed different studies and research and everything like
that and educating ourselves about how proper research is done we can go a step further and
be like is this really a credible study what does the scientific community actually say so
like i said um i've listed those books down below the skeptic's guide to the universe
calling bs and science fictions those are all great if you're interested in this topic and
how research is properly done the difference between pseudoscience and regular science
uh and all that stuff so check out the description down below all right but anyways that's all i got
for this video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you
subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge huge thank you to everybody who supports the
channel over on patreon or getting the books that i've written over at the rewiredsoul.com
or using my affiliate links to uh get the books that i recommend that all helps all right
you're all awesome thanks again for watching i'll see you next time