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

The survey site for this video was developed by Fasthosts. UK viewers can enter the competition to win a tech bundle and the PC build of their dreams worth up to £5,000. There is a link in the description and a question at the end of the video. This is not the first time this question has been asked. Several web projects have tried to answer this question before, some are still running and some no longer exist. And the question itself has been used as a punchline, asked by an inept, self-obsessed radio DJ character. "What's the

best

thing

?" Of course, there is no 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 think. The first problem is trying to list every

thing

. I know it's obvious to say, but: there are many things in the universe. So let's narrow the scope to "everything that most people can form an opinion about." How do you get a list of all 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 thing, every property something can have, and every link and connection between them all.

And everything is designed to be processed by computers. So I thought 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 will be a mystery to almost everyone. Every named place in the world, no matter how obscure, every species and genus of animal, an enormous amount of academic articles. If you show most of them to people and ask them to form an opinion, the answer won't just be "I don't know": it will be "I don't care." So I had to filter out those 88 million things.

And the first steps were quite easy. First, I deleted all the people tokens. We are ranking things so someone else can decide "who is the

best

person." You are welcome. But I simply removed any items tagged with Q5, "human". And that's good, it's a good start. Also, I deleted all the people group listings because: wow! Next, places. If you are doing "

what

is best", no country, river or building will ever win, be rejected by political rivalries or people from other places who have never heard of it, so if the item was labeled with latitude and longitude, was also discarded.

Additionally, everything labeled as fictional was also removed: not works of art themselves, but characters and events that are not part of reality. That still left a huge amount of items. But we only look for things that most people know, and there's a really good metric for that: I saved everything 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 left would be recognizable to most people. And that brought it down to 8,850 things. Which is a manageable number. But there was no way to automate the last part.

I had to manually go through all those thousands of things to find the bad ones. Not just things that most people would vote against because they are unpleasant or harmful, but things that no one should ask about in a happy web survey. Crimes against the person. A couple of disturbing things that were simply listed as "rituals." Everything that has to do with the Nazis. Which turns out to be quite a bit. Were they still showing up in seemingly innocent categories? For example, eugenics was labeled simply as "social philosophy." Mein Kampf, newly classified as a "written work." Unless you were constantly on the lookout for them, they kept trying to sneak in.

Then there were the boring groups of things that could be summed up in a single entry. Each time zone. Each language, the flag of each country and its national anthem. Each individual book of each religious text. Many mythological figures that were labeled neither "human" nor "fictional." Hundreds of generic galaxy names... "Okay, you know

what

? I talked about that for too long. "Let's just say I eliminated the boring ones, okay? There were many of them. "We leap forward." And then, there was the vandalism. This has all since been corrected, but in the snapshot I downloaded, someone replaced the "graphics" title with "fifa pro player" and the "worm" description with "dog goes fishing." Furthermore, the "tubular organ" was described as a "cancer-causing wind instrument." So there's someone out there who really doesn't like pipe organs.

When everything was done: 7,188 things. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, that people would still find mistakes, and they did. But it was good enough. It was time to ask the world which was better. One of the best approaches to sorting items on a list is to show them to people in pairs and then ask them to choose the best of each pair at random. The best will be consistently voted in favor and the worst against. And as long as you have enough total

votes

, you don't need to keep track of all the different matchups: just the total number of wins and losses for each element.

I've written code to do that before, so I repurposed it, put together a quick site, and launched it on Twitter. My code immediately broke because I forgot to change a line before posting, I fixed it in about a minute while a hundred people were rushing to tweet me about something I obviously already knew. Anyway. So. Five hours and over 1.2 million

votes

later, the order of the items had stabilized, and I closed the poll before anyone typed in code to try to crack it. Now you will remember that each pair was chosen at random. That means some items had more matches than others, simply by pure luck.

The outliers were "mold," which was in 125 matchups, and "channel," which was in 236. There was the expected distribution among them. So at this point, we had sorted everything out. I don't want to spend too much time at the bottom of the list. There are a lot of unpleasant diseases and unpleasant concepts. Also one of the Twilight movies. I will say the worst... is Lyme disease. I have no idea why. It fared significantly worse than everything else, by a good margin. Maybe, statistically, out of the thousands of items, one had to have a lot of unfortunate matchups? But honestly, it is far below any other element. "Coronavirus", also quite low.

And everything religious did pretty poorly, which makes sense: if you're not religious, you'll rarely vote for anything that has to do with faith, and if you're religious, you'll almost never vote for anything other than your own faith. . In retrospect, I should have done something like consolidate all religion entries into one so-called "religion". Which I'm sure wouldn't have caused me any problems. Anyway. The best things. First, let's be clear: These are the results voted for by people who follow me on Twitter. It's about "the best," as

decided

, if we're honest, by a group of extremely connected, English-speaking nerds.

However, there will also be a lot of people who will see this video, so I think it's fair to say, as voted by you: here are the ten best things. At number 10, privacy. And above privacy, at number 9, is pizza. Is pizza better or more important than privacy? ...but pizza is more likely to win a showdown, and that's what counts here! By the way, the next highest food was ice cream, at number 43, and while that might imply that my audience has the palates of five-year-olds, I think it's more that, while those may not be the foods Everyone's favorites, there are very few people who actively dislike them, so they will win a lot of generic matchups just because of that.

The following elements: knowledge, creativity and logic. The foundations of human thought. Given my audience, that makes a lot of sense. At number 5: hugs. What Wikidata describes clinically as "a form of affection, universal in human communities." Of course, it's 2020 when this video is posted, so they're less universal than perhaps they should be at this point, but it's still lovely. Then we got to three items that I honestly didn't expect to be so high. At number 4: gravity. Sure, it's essential for the entire universe to function, but I didn't expect it to surpass "hugs." And then, at number 3... ...the Earth's magnetic field.

Like I said, extremely online nerds. Because, again, yes, it's essential for life to exist, but to be clear, "air" and "fresh water" barely made the top 25, and somehow the Earth's magnetic field is at number 3. And It is at this point that I really start to doubt my own methodology. Because number two is electricity. I realize that using an electronic device to conduct this survey gives you some advantage, but again, should it really be larger than air? Before we get to the best, though, here are some other interesting results in specific categories: The best part of the body is the brain.

Both "Space" and "Time" fought and won exactly the same number of matches and finished together at number 36. Even though there were quite a few things about sex on the list, none of them came close to the top 50. "Okay , okay, I should have checked more than the top 50 before recording this," because it turns out that the highest... What's classified as sex is 'orgasm,' "and it made it to number 69, and I swear I'm not inventing". The best creatures are bees, then emperor penguins, then hedgehogs. The best colors are black, then blue and the worst is brown. Love doesn't even make the top 100, it's at number 137, right next to vitamin C and crypto, and if that doesn't prove that my audience isn't representative of the world at large, I don't know what does.

In reality, what I do know is that heterosexuality lost more than 50% of its matches, while bisexuality was ranked just one element below doctors. Yes, it's ridiculous to try to classify everything this way. But the results do reveal things about this group of people, about the people who tend to watch videos like this. And perhaps most telling is what came first. It not only speaks to the needs and desires of this audience, but also to the times in which we live. If we weren't in what appears to be such a difficult year, if I were giving this talk to a live audience, as I had originally planned, instead of standing in front of a green screen and talking to a camera in a small apartment, well , then, in that case perhaps 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, friends. I ran the survey site for this video at Fasthosts, a web hosting company with over twenty years of experience. Their dedicated servers can have up to 10Gbps connectivity and unlimited bandwidth, and their CloudNX platform allows you to 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, you can hit the link on the screen or in the description to enter the competition to win a tech pack and your dream PC setup worth up to £5000.

If you can answer the technical exam question they asked me to write. Which is: what is the HTTP response code for "Accept"? Terms and conditions finalized on their site, deadline is October 31, 2020 – good luck!