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there's a link in the description and a
question at the end of the video
this isn't the first time that this
question's been asked several web
projects have tried to answer it before
some are still running and some are
defunct
and the question itself has been used as
a punchline asked by an
inept self-obsessed radio dj character
what is
the best thing of course there isn't a
meaningful answer to that question of
course but
i think there are some really
interesting challenges in trying to find
an answer anyway
and the results can reveal a lot more
than you might think
the first problem is trying to list
everything i know it's obvious to say
but
there are a lot of things in the
universe so let's reduce the scope to
everything that most people could form
an opinion about
how do you get a list of everything like
that well the starting point is
wikidata everything that has a wikipedia
article also has an entry in wiki data
but so does every category of things
every property that something might have
and every link and connection between
all of those
and it's all designed to be processed by
computers so i figured i'd start
by downloading it more than a terabyte
of data more than 88 million
things exhaustively described and most
of those things
are not interesting more than that
they're going to be a mystery to almost
everyone every named location in the
world no matter how obscure every
species and genus of animal
enormous numbers of scholarly articles
if you show
most of those to people and ask them to
form an opinion the answer isn't just
going to be
i don't know it'll be i don't care so i
had to filter those
88 million things and the first steps
were actually
kind of easy first i removed all
listings for people we're ranking things
so someone else can do who is the best
person you're welcome to that but
i just removed any item that was tagged
with q5 human
and that's uh that's good that's a good
start also i removed all listings for
groups of people because
yikes uh next places if you're doing
what is the best thing
no country or river or building is ever
gonna win it will get voted down by
political rivalries or people elsewhere
who've never heard of it so if the item
was tagged with the latitude and
longitude
it also got thrown out uh also anything
tagged as fictional
got removed too not works of art
themselves but characters and events
that aren't part of reality
uh that still left an enormous number of
items but we're only looking for things
that most people will know about and
there's a really good metric for that
i kept anything that had a wikipedia
article in at least
50 different languages i try different
thresholds for that but
50 seem to have the right balance where
almost everything that remained
would be recognizable to most people and
that brought it down
to 8850
things which is a manageable number
but there was no way to automate the
last part
i had to manually check through all
those thousands of things to find
the bad ones and that's not just things
that most people would vote against
because they're
unpleasant or harmful but things that no
one should be asking about in a
light-hearted web poll
crimes against the person a couple of
disturbing things that were just listed
as
rituals uh anything to do with the nazis
which it turns out is is quite a lot
they kept
showing up under apparently innocent
categories
like eugenics was just tagged as social
philosophy
mind camp just listed as written work
unless
you kept constantly vigilant for them
they kept
trying to sneak in then there were the
dull groups of things that could be
summed up in a single entry instead
every time zone every language every
country's flag and national anthem
every individual book of every religious
text a lot of mythological figures who
weren't tagged as either human
or fictional uh hundreds of generic
names of galaxies
okay you know what i talked about that
for far too long uh let's just say i
remove the boring ones okay there are a
lot of them let's skip
forward and then there was the vandalism
all of which has since been corrected
but
in the snapshot i downloaded someone had
replaced the title of
graphics with pro player defeatful
and the description of worm with dog go
fishing also
pipe organ was described as wind
instrument that causes cancer so there's
someone out there who
really really doesn't like pipe organs
when all was done seven thousand one
hundred and eighty eight
things i knew it wasn't going to be
perfect people would still find mistakes
and they did
but it was good enough it was time to
ask the world
which was best one of the best
approaches for ranking items in a list
is to show them to people two at a time
and then ask them to pick the best of
each random pair the best ones will be
consistently voted for
and the worst ones voted against and as
long as you have enough votes in total
you don't need to keep track of all the
different pairings just the total number
of wins and losses
for each item now i've written code to
do that before so i just reused it put a
quick site together and launched it out
on twitter
ah my code broke immediately because i
had forgotten to change
one line before going live i fixed it
within a minute or so while
100 people rushed to tweet me about
something that i obviously already knew
about anyway
so five hours and more than 1.2
million votes later the order of items
had settled down and i closed the poll
before anyone wrote code
to try and break it now you'll remember
that each pairing was randomly chosen
uh that means that some items had more
match-ups than others just
through sheer luck the outliers were
mold which was in 125 matchups and
canal which was in 236 that was the
expected
uh distribution between those so at this
point
we had ranked everything
i don't want to spend too much time on
the bottom of the list it's a lot of
nasty diseases and unpleasant concepts
also one of the twilight movies i will
say that the
worst thing is lyme disease i have no
idea why it did significantly worse than
everything else by a good margin
maybe statistically out of the thousands
of items one had to get
a lot of unlucky matchups but honestly
it is a really
long way below every other item
coronavirus also fairly low
and anything religious did quite poorly
which makes sense if you're
not religious you're rarely going to
vote for anything to do with faith and
if you are religious
you're hardly ever going to vote for
anything other than your own faith
in hindsight i should have done
something like consolidate all the
entries for faith-based stuff into one
just called
religion which i'm sure wouldn't have
caused me any problems at all
anyway the best things first let's be
clear these are the results as voted by
the people who follow me on twitter this
is about the best thing as decided by
if we're honest uh a group of
english-speaking
extremely online nerds uh however that's
also gonna be a lot of people who watch
this video so i think it's fair to say
as voted by you here are the top 10
best things at number 10 privacy and
ranked above privacy at number 9
pizza is pizza better or more important
than privacy
but pizza is more likely to win a match
up and that's what counts here
by the way the next highest food was ice
cream at number 43 and while that could
imply that my audience have the palettes
of
five-year-olds i think it's more that
while those may not be
everyone's favorite foods there are very
few people who actively dislike them
so they'll win a lot of generic
match-ups just because of that uh the
next item's up
uh knowledge creativity and logic the
foundations of human thought
given my audience that makes a lot of
sense uh number five
hugs which wikidata clinically describes
as
a form of endearment universal in human
communities
granted it's 2020 as this video goes out
so they're less universal than they
perhaps should be right now but that's
still kind of lovely then we get to
three items that
i honestly wasn't expecting to be so
high uh number four
gravity uh sure it is essential for the
entire universe to work i just didn't
expect you to beat hugs
and then at number three the earth's
magnetic field
like i said extremely online nerds
because again yes essential for life to
exist but
uh just be clear air and fresh water
only just made the top 25 and somehow
the earth's magnetic field is at number
three
and it's at this point that i really
start to doubt my own methodology
because at number two is
electricity uh i do realize that using
an
electronic device to run this pole does
give that a certain
advantage but again should should that
really be higher than
air before we get to the best thing
though
here are some other interesting results
in specific
categories the best part of the body is
the brain space
and time both fought in won exactly the
same number of matchups uh they landed
in joint
36th place uh despite there being quite
a few things about sex and the list
none of them got near the top 50. okay
okay i should have checked more than the
top 50 before recording this because
it turns out that the highest rated sex
thing is orgasm and it got to number 69
and i swear i'm not making that up
the best creatures are bees then emperor
penguins
then hedgehogs the best colours are
black then blue
and the worst is brown love doesn't even
make it to the top 100 it's down at 137
next to vitamin c and cryptography and
if that doesn't prove my audience isn't
representative of the wider world
i don't know what does uh actually i do
know what does uh
heterosexuality lost more than 50 of its
matchups while bisexuality was ranked
only one item
below doctors yes it is ridiculous
to try and rank everything like this but
the results do reveal things about
this group of people about the folks who
tend to watch videos like this and
perhaps the most revealing thing
is what placed first it doesn't just
tell you about the needs and desires of
this audience it's
also something about the times we're
living in if we weren't in what seems to
be
such a rough year if i were giving this
talk to a live audience like i
originally planned to instead of
standing in front of a green screen and
talking to a camera in a tiny apartment
well then in that case maybe the results
would have been different
but the best thing according to this
audience
in mid-2020 the best thing is
sleep have a good night folks i ran the
polling site for this video on fast
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good luck
you