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  • 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 runningand 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 reveallot 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 animalenormous 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 hadWikipedia 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 NazisWhich 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 "humanor "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 correctedbut 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 thingas decided by, if we're honest,

  • a group of English-speakingextremely-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 privacyat number 9, pizza.

  • Is pizza better or more important  than privacy? [indecisive noise]

  • ...but pizza is more likely to winmatch-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: knowledgecreativity 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 endearmentuniversal 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 thathonestly 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, yesessential 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, andswear 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!

The polling site for this  video was powered by Fasthosts.

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B1 中級

1,204,986 Votes Decided: What Is The Best Thing?

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2022 年 02 月 23 日
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