The polling site for this
video was powered by Fasthosts. UK viewers can enter
their competition to win a tech bundle and dream PC
setup worth up to £5,000. 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 an obvious
thing 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 Wikidata, 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 good, that's a good start. Also, I removed all listings for
groups of people, because: yikes. Next, places. If you're doing
"what is the best thing", no country or river or building
is ever going to win, it'll get voted down by political rivalries
or people elsewhere who've never heard of it, so if the item was tagged
with a latitude and longitude, it also got thrown out. Also, anything tagged as
fictional got removed too: not works of art themselves, but characters and events
that aren't part of reality. 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 fifty different languages. I tried different thresholds for that, but fifty seemed to have
the right balance where almost everything that remained
would be recognisable to most people. And that brought it down to 8,850 things.
Which is a managable 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. 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 lighthearted web poll. Crimes against the person. A couple of disturbing things that were
just listed as "rituals". Anything to do with the Nazis.
Which it turns out is quite a lot. They kept showing up under
apparently-innocent categories? Like, eugenics was just
tagged as "social philosophy". Mein Kampf, 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". Hundreds of generic names of galaxies-- "Okay, you know what? I talked
about that for far too long. "Let's just say I removed the boring
ones, okay? There were 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 de fifa" 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: 7,188 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. My code broke immediately
because I'd forgotten to change one line before going live, I fixed it within a minute or so while
a hundred people rushed to tweet me about something 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. That means some items had more match-ups
than others, just through sheer luck. The outliers were "mold",
which was in 125 match-ups, and "canal", which was in 236. There was the expected
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've 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 any 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
anything other than your own faith. In hindsight, I should have
done something like consolidate all the entries for faiths 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, a group of English-speaking,
extremely-online nerds. However, that's also going to be a lot
of the people who watch this video, so, I think it's fair to say, as voted by you: here are
the top ten best things. At number 10, privacy. And ranked above privacy,
at number 9, pizza. Is pizza better or more important
than privacy? [indecisive noise] ...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 palates of five-year-olds, I think it's more that, while those
may not be everyone's favourite foods, there are very few people
who actively dislike them, so they'll win a lot of generic
match-ups just because of that. The next items up: knowledge,
creativity and logic. The foundations of human thought.
Given my audience, that makes a lot of sense. At number 5: 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 lovely. Then we get to three items that I
honestly wasn't expecting to be so high. At number 4: gravity. Sure, it's essential for
the entire universe to work, I just didn't expect it to beat
"hugs". And then, at number 3... ...the Earth's magnetic field. Like I said, extremely-online nerds. Because, again, yes,
essential for life to exist, but just to be clear, "air" and "fresh
water" only just made the top 25, and somehow the Earth's
magnetic field is at number 3. And it's at this point that I really
start to doubt my own methodology. Because at number two is electricity. I do realise that using an
electronic device to run this poll does give that a certain
advantage, but again, 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 and won
exactly the same number of match-ups, they landed in joint 36th place. Despite there being quite a few
things about sex in the list, none of them got near the top 50. "Okay, okay, I should have checked more
than the top 50 before recording this, "'cos 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 into
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. Actually, I do know what does, heterosexuality lost more
than 50% of its match-ups, 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 a 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 Fasthosts, a web hosting company with more
than twenty years' experience. Their dedicated servers can have up to
10Gbps connectivity and unlimited bandwidth, and their CloudNX platform lets you configure and
scale your hosting hardware in real time with no upfront costs. All of their servers and
engineers are based in the UK. And if you are too, then you can go the
link on screen or in the description to enter their competition to win
a tech bundle and dream PC setup worth up to £5,000. If you can answer the techie test
question they asked me to write. Which is: what's the HTTP
response code for 'OK'? Terms and conditions
are over on their site, the closing date is 31st
October 2020: good luck!
I wish he would release the full list.
Also orgasm at 69. Nice.
I did not expect the best thing, but I should have expected the best thing. Sleep, for those who don't have time to watch!
I was expecting the internet to win after seeing 10-2.
Pizza is better than air confirmed.
I don't think it's correct to just pick the one with the most head-to-head wins, but rather pick the one that wins head-to-head against all other things. This may seem like the same thing but not really. Gravity might lose to pizza 20% of the time while the earth's magnetic field may lose to pizza 15% of the time. But this doesn't mean that gravity would lose to the magnetic field.
The best thing is loss of consciousness... not too dissimilar from death... there is a lot of meaning behind that I think.
I love Tom Scott. Always interesting and to the point.
Skip to 10:05 if you want the list.
what about happiness? or "goodness" itself