A fun experiment. I didn't try, because you took the time to respond to an email i sent you a year ago and answer questions on a stupid video I had. That was way cooler to me than a postcard.
350 Emails. Not bad at all. Now the only question is: How many actually attempted to send you mail? Probably not something anybody could really figure out.
+Kram1032 Hello. This is genuine, hand made, gluten and GMO free self advertisement. Please visit my channel and sub if you like what you see. Thank you.
A friend of mine did postgrad physics at the same university as Derek, so I figured I could probably get something to him through that route. Probably would have been no more than 4 degrees, but I completely forgot to actually send the email. Sorry Derek!
Did you receive any duplicate emails from the same person that went through different chains of people? I would find that very interesting to see how different the paths were.
Yeah exactly, that's why his average number of connections was so low, because mostly people who knew that they knew someone who knew Veritasium attempted it.
I got so close. I got it as far as an alumni from Queens University Kingston but they said that they didn't keep in touch with anyone. I was so disappointed that it didn't through. :( Ah, well, I tried.
Suggested improvements on this experiment... 5yrs later. 1. Have an additional email address so that they can send an email directly. You will be able to see how many people attempted to send you an email Vs how many actually came through. 2. In that direct email, they will mention where they're mailing from, that way you can tell which countries are more connected 3. In that direct email ask them their age, so you can tell how much different generations are connected 4. You can optionally ask occupations, education etc to see if these affect connectedness too
+Veritasium Targeted approach can be a lot shorter, if you some stuff already about that person. For example, you attended Login 2014 conference in Vilnius? I was where too. And i know a friend who's involved in organizing it. So my best bet would have been though him.
That's funny. I didn't participate because I felt it was way too unlikely to reach him in the end. I thought he would get very few e-mails but man I was wrong... But if I tried (from Germany), I would have written an e-mail to a good friend of my dad who I've met a couple of times. He's from Canada and maybe that way I would have gotten closer to Derek (at least geographically).
@@MaidaA22589 the whole idea of the experiment is that you are always within 6 degrees of separation from anyone else in the world so you could have asked anyone, the whole best guess thing is just to increase your chances, not your odds, there's a difference
As a 15 year old Arab with friends dying of sheer disintrest in life and just want to grow up to be the new Ronaldo or something. I just knew my chances where not too good... now just imagine me writing it to my Arab friends in Arabic. that would bee about 40000 degrees of separation.... but the thing is that I think that the degrees of separation are much less than you think. because maybe someone sends the email a way that takes 10, when the other way would have been 2...
I totally understand u.. I live in iraq and its really hard to find tht line tht will connect me to derek (UNLESS EVERYONE sends my email to EVERYONE they knew so ill have expenentially more paths) but we knw thts not the case and MOST ppl will not forward my email simply bcoz they dont care
What you did with the girl from west Vancouver is a very common conversation starter with people you get to know in Austria and since it is a small county, very often you find that commonly known person very fast.
i'm curious as to more details, but not sure how you could relate them without violating people's privacy (ie: naming names). For instance, where there any really unexpected paths that were followed? Who had the most emails funnelled through them? Or was is pretty evenly distributed? Stuff like that. Still, it was a fun experiment to participate in, thanks, Derek!
I didn't send out an email because I knew I could reach you with 2 degrees of separation, and I didn't want to bother the guy we share contact with. So, I'm sorry. Maybe I could have tried to find a different way to connect to you, but that kinda defeats the purpose, right? I already know that I know someone you know. So, shrug.
+Melthornal i dont think it was a good time for me to plan to get there, all mutual contacts and everything wouldve taken time 2 i wouldve taken 100 degrres
+Melthornal yeah, i also did not sent out email because i know it would end up badly. if we all sent out email it will ends up in thousand if not tens of thousand
+Melthornal Actually, maybe to make the experiment a little more varied we should have sent an e-mail to some who definitely does not know him, to see if he could find a connection (not through you, at least directly)
I am from a rather small region in Germany called Saarland. It has about 1 Million inhabitants. But, wherever in the world you randomly meet somebody else from that area, we love the game to find aquaintances, we have in common. Mostly we succeed within 10 minutes.
could pls tell me who in luxembourg reached to you? because i'm from luxembourg too, and I just couldn't think of anyone who might know you; (and since luxembourg is a small country, most of its population is seperated by 2 degrees lol) just the name is enough, luxembourg doesn't have a lot of people who promote science lol....
Derek - I think some interesting stats to share would be 1. How many of your immediate friends/family/etc did you receive an email through. i.e. was there 2-3 friends who by being a teacher or a doctor, had 90% of the emails come through them. 2. How many emails have you got a month later? (was there merely a delay for some of the more obscure ones?) 3. Perhaps share the geographic path of some of the longer ones just for interest sake. i actually believed I had a really good shot at this being an Aussie, and I emailed a school mate who I don't share many mutual friends with and who lives across state and who has contacts from his many hobbies all over the country and the USA. But mine didn't get through, I think probably due to laziness on one leg of the journey :)
I have a friend named Jerome that is known all over the country. He's not famous just a really nice guy that travels a lot for work. I run into people from California to Boston that know Jerome. Sometimes it's 2 Degrees of Separation sometimes as much as 8 but no matter where I go people seem to know this guy.
I kind of interested doing a similar experiment. I found a SD card on the ground in Cologne, Germany and I haven't found any information within the files on the card to get in contact with the person who lost it, but there are pictures taken of the owner. I would like to identify the owner and this could be a way that works.
The interesting thing is that the final links are the same, that is, what really happens is your onnly 3-4 degrees separated from really well connected people with many many contacts.
This sorta reminds me of this game that you play on wikipedia where you choose a topic of choice (even better if it's specific) and click the link on the left that says random article. From there, you would have to try to get to the page you chose beforehand.
Never got around to sending an email. I think i could have gotten it there had I remembered to send the email. Here was my plan. My goal would have been to get a message to Destin. I know he went to the University of Alabama. I have an engineering degree from Auburn University. My plan was to use my contacts from Auburn who would hopefully know someone who is either an Alumni or works for the University of Alabama who could then forward the message to the Alabama engineering faculty. From there I am sure some of the professors there still know Destin well enough to email him. From the last link in the chain is from Destin to you. Probably 3 or 4 links in the chain. The interesting thing about this experiment especially when you get past 2 degrees of separation is it takes a lot of help from total strangers to get your message through. Awesome that you got as many as you did.
About 2 years ago i talked for the first time to my now best friends on skype. As for the time they were connected to me by one person. But as time went on and we all got to know alot about each other, we found out that i had two more persons who would'v connected me with them. We do live in the same country(Estonia), but it's still mind blowing. We live in a frog pool.
Vancouver is a beautiful city, great views from Kitsilano Beach! I think many of us were lazy or did not want to cause spam, and so didn't send an email.
sounds like a cup half empty half full situation. i would say both in her and be one with her. give a whole new meaning to the missionary position. lulz.
This is a similar thing with genealogy. If you upload a tree on FamilySearch, you can download the app. The app has a feature where, if you are within 20 feet of anyone else with the app, it tells you how you are related. It only goes back 12 generations. But I have only met ONE person (a stranger from China who was visiting California at the same time I was) to whom I was not related. You only have to share one ancestor. And Americans marry, on average, their 6th-8th cousins. Because we're all related.
Well I missed the deadline to email you and find out how many degrees of separation between us. But just thought of giving it a shot for the sake of Curiosity. Can you comment on what's the number of degrees of separation between us? It is a nice thing to know. Keep making these cool videos. Thanks!
Would love to see the degrees of separation in Iceland. You can talk about almost anybody in this country and in a group of 10 there is sure to be one that either knows them directly or knows someone that knows them.
Is that Stanely Park your at? I noticed that first dude you talked to was wearing a Seahawks hat. That's a nice area whenever I can make the road trip up there.
I actually know of a way I could have gotten an email to you with only 2 degrees of separation. However, I did not part take, because I watched your video on Sept 1st, and knew I would not have made it through the chain in time.
I was tempted to try sending any email out to my relatives in Australia, what held me back was the fact that I would have had to explain what were I doing, who are you etc, and than if they did oblige to forward the mail they would have had to repeat my explanation to the next person and so on, relying on a chain of people without being able to contact them yourself is very very difficult.
I didn't sent an email becouse I didn't know who could have a better shot trying to reach you :( I'm surprised (and a little jealous) somebody in Spain contacted you :)
you are also at the mercy of who you send it to...whether they continue the chain or not or if they just find out about it through your email and want to do it themselves.
What would be interesting to see, is how many people attempted to send emails. You could set up a specific "throw away" email and provide it in a future video, and ask for those who tried to contact you for the experiment to send an email to that throw-away email. You wouldn't have to read through them. Just by glancing at the inbox, one could get a fairly decent idea of what percent 350 received emails is to the actual number of attempts.
The distribution of the degrees of separation looks more like a *gamma* distribution or another heavy-tailed distribution, much like we would expect the first five degrees to be much more probable than the next 5. There's no intuitive reason why it should be normally distributed.
This is awesome! This thought makes me happy to think about. ;) How close we really are as humans. All of us.. I would have tried sending that email if i would have seen the original video of this. I bet it would have worked. For sure. This is awesome.
I wasn't going to participate at all because I didn't want to help you alienate your friends/acquaintances and I didn't want to alienate my friends/acquaintances. Then I got a few emails from people asking me to forward them on and I thought long and hard about how I could send it. I came up empty because your rule required an "IN PERSON" meeting. I know couple people over the internet (that also know me) that might have been able to get me a separation of 3 or 4, but I've never met them in person. The only in-person person that could have worked, I haven't talked to them in 11 years. They probably don't even remember me. In fact, that person didn't even occur to me until after the deadline had passed.
I wish I had access to the net at the time of the experiment! But I'm only catching up with videos now so I couldn't get a postcard nor represent Chile in your experiment! 😢
That histogram seems to show something different. It seems to me that what it shows is that people who actually have a closer link (fewer degrees of separation) have a higher chance of propagating information through that link to their target. I.e. someone who has a link of 6 dos to the queen of England has a much lower chance of their message getting to the queen than someone with 4 dos link. Now also as was said in the video and the comments, people don't know about these links (probably can't follow it reliably without testing for more than 3 dos)
Your 350 emails remind me of something that happened almost 3 years ago... I needed an official translation but I didn't know anyone related to that area, so I wrote a generic message and sent it to the more than 300 email addresses I found for official translators in the chancellery website. From these, I got around 100 responses but my mistake was not taking care of my email signature where I had my phone number so additionally I got more than 20 calls and I was just glad it wasn't more people calling me...
A more effective way to get much more information out of the experiment might have been to keep a track of all the people who did sent out an email. A way to do that would be to create a spreadsheet online, where anyone sending out the email would list down their basic information. Just a thought.
I wonder how many people sent emails to you directly, I.e. how many people represent the last degree of separation between you and the viewers - and who sent the most of emails?
+Samantha Plater None of my friends forwarded more than ten emails... Except Destin. And I suspect that is because of the comment, video, site, and auto-forwarding email he set up.
I did try to contact you, I sent an email out to about 8 people, one of those people put it on their facebook (I don't think that option was excluded)and one of their facebook friends sent it to a contact, and THAT contact knew you. So I was able to make the connection in just 4 degrees of separation! BUT unfortunately the friend of a friend of a friend that knew you said that the two of you had some sort of a falling out and wasn't comfortable sending you an email. I was sad, but it's all right. At least I know that it is possible, even if it wasn't accomplished on my behalf :)
I didn't know where to start. I thought about trying my science teacher, but my school is so small I knew that it would take at least 3 steps to leave the state.... :( Maybe I'll try to send you one once I get to University... :D
i messaged my australian friend on facebook explaining it before i emailed him, and he thought it was kinda weird but went along with it. he even went through mutual friends list and found a path that might work. the guy he contacted ended up putting together a hilarious pdf that included my original email since most of the communications happened via facebook instead. he made a spot for the 4th person who should have been the last step but idk if she ever sent it on. i'm guessing we would know by now if our message made it though. oh well. that's what i get for going the Australian grad student/academic route- she was probably busy
Funny you mention this, Filip And Dredrik, 2 famous TV_show hosts are doing a show about exactly this topic. They will travel the world and try to prove it is true. Unfortunatley for the english speakers i think it will be in Swedish only, anyways, first of 6, 2 hour long episodes starts tommorrow +8h GMT
No idea how far mine got. I tried targeting towards Destin, since I know someone whose uncle and aunt work in the Alabama university system. I sent her an email, and she said she'd send the email to her aunt or uncle, but beyond that, I never knew how far it got.
I think a very big part of this is peoples' unwillingness to be seen as taking part in a chain letter. With the physical package, people might send it on out of respect for the initial sender's commitment. But I don't believe any of my opening emails were forwarded even once, simply because people worry the recipient might find it annoying. This could easily explain part of the shortness of your connection chains: you expect an exponential drop-off in number of messages that have been passed on. It's actually worse than exponential: the further it gets from the sender, the less likely a person is to care enough to forward it.
Definitely. I personally didn't participate because I didn't want to bother my friends or put them in a situation where they have to bother someone for the sake of doing me a favor.
+2veritasium You ask why you didn't receive more emails I think there is another reason you didn't mention in the video: It has to do with risk aversion and the value we place on the relationships that act as the intermediaries. So to use me as an example: I'm confident that I could reach you with only two intermediaries... Me > A Museum Director I know professionally > A CZcamsr you've been in a video with > You I'm very confident that this would have been a successful path to you. But to ask that first intermediary to take part in this experiment would have been outside the bounds of our (professional) relationship. I made a judgement call that the potential reward didn't justify the potential risk to that relationship and ultimately did not participate in the experiment at all. Just something to think about. And on a side note: I'm happy you got so many emails but I'm also surprised. My guess was that you'd get less than 30.
I didn't try to send one because I don't really have any contacts on my email. It's mostly for newsletter or registration purposes. I would have loved to try, seeing as there were emails from the Philippines that have reached you. I could have tried Facebook. But things like these are usually just seen as spam specially after you sent out the email and you can't reason with your sendee, saying that what you sent wasn't spam.
"Let's get even closer" Veritassium 2015. one question though, what would happen if we tried this experiment, in let's say 20 years, this channel grows alot, we get to futhur regions of space, and we can inhabit more harsh enviorments, I mean assuming we survive.
I sent a request but the person I sent it to said that he found this annoying. Kind of like a chain email. I actually liked the experiment. I checked on linkedin and I am 3rd degree connected to Derek. I have over 1,000 connections on linkedin and 633K 2nd degree connections so it was likely that one of 2nd degree connections was connected to Derek. If Derek was a second degree connection, I would know which one to send the email. We want to be connected to those we care about and do not want to be bothered by those we do not. Personally, I think a lot of people have an interesting story to tell if we just know how to connect to them. Unfortunately, there are also a few scammers out there that you have to be careful about.
What would really interest me is: How many sources did the mails come from in the last step (of course like "A:35, B:15 etc, not as real names ;)). This would show if there is a small or broad overlap of people who knew you and also were connected to "us", or if it was always the same 10 people who did the last forwarding step
I was going to send an email but I completely forgot about it haha I'm a physics student and one of my professors, who's kind of close to me, is doing a postdoc at Standford, so I thought I could reach you through him. Too bad I didn't try
Ecuador, I live here and if I had sent the email to a friend of mine in Australia who is into science, I guess I would have reached his email in less than 6 steps
Im interested what kind of person was the last step in the seperation degrees. How well does that person know you? Is it a close friend or a family member or is it one of those strange acquaintances that widens your social influence?
You didn't get my email because my contacts didn't take me seriously.
***** Yes, but I don't think they looked at it. Perhaps because I send them videos and articles all the time.
+George Meyers I FEEL YOUR PAIN MAN!!! ME TOO!!! xD
I think my friend did forward my mail though. But not the person whom she sent to. :(
+George Meyers there is your problem, son. Don't be a spammer. Everybody hates a spammer.
+George Meyers mine too =)
+George Meyers thank you for trying anyway!
Since the Coronavirus outbreak and the efforts to contain it, I've been thinking about this video...
In another life, I could have called you friend.
A fun experiment. I didn't try, because you took the time to respond to an email i sent you a year ago and answer questions on a stupid video I had. That was way cooler to me than a postcard.
350 Emails. Not bad at all. Now the only question is: How many actually attempted to send you mail? Probably not something anybody could really figure out.
+Kram1032 Unless every one post something like "Y U NO REPLY" here.. Then we can start counting the comments xD
+Kram1032 Hello. This is genuine, hand made, gluten and GMO free self advertisement. Please visit my channel and sub if you like what you see.
Thank you.
+Clear Instructions Is it vegan?
Y U NO REPLY
+Clear Instructions I love gluten and GMO's.
A friend of mine did postgrad physics at the same university as Derek, so I figured I could probably get something to him through that route. Probably would have been no more than 4 degrees, but I completely forgot to actually send the email. Sorry Derek!
+Ben Rowe it's all good - lucky for me that we can exchange a YT comment rather than a costly postcard ;)
Did you receive any duplicate emails from the same person that went through different chains of people? I would find that very interesting to see how different the paths were.
Derek is a MASTER marketer! Using a lesson about Degrees of Separation to pimp his mailing list! Kudos! i'll sign up!
I didn't send any emails because I had no clue who to send it to or what to actually write in it.
Yeah exactly, that's why his average number of connections was so low, because mostly people who knew that they knew someone who knew Veritasium attempted it.
Most of the people that sent the emails probably knew they would win because they knew they knew someone who knew you
I got so close. I got it as far as an alumni from Queens University Kingston but they said that they didn't keep in touch with anyone. I was so disappointed that it didn't through. :( Ah, well, I tried.
+Catherine Rafferty Well, at least you can sub me now:D
+Catherine Rafferty good try!
Veritasium Thanks!
Suggested improvements on this experiment... 5yrs later.
1. Have an additional email address so that they can send an email directly. You will be able to see how many people attempted to send you an email Vs how many actually came through.
2. In that direct email, they will mention where they're mailing from, that way you can tell which countries are more connected
3. In that direct email ask them their age, so you can tell how much different generations are connected
4. You can optionally ask occupations, education etc to see if these affect connectedness too
feel like asking so many questions will be a bit of a privacy breach ngl
So how many of those links came through Destin, Bradey, Henery or Grey?
+Brandon Francey lots came through Destin
Bradey? Henery? :|
+Xyla Ardhia Fiorina I think he is talking about Brady Haran, the creator of many scientific channels. Don't know Henery or Grey.
+Jmmanuel Kondo Henry from minute physic and CGP Grey I guess.
+Veritasium Targeted approach can be a lot shorter, if you some stuff already about that person. For example, you attended Login 2014 conference in Vilnius? I was where too. And i know a friend who's involved in organizing it. So my best bet would have been though him.
I'm from Germany and have been to this beach just recently. Cool to see this place again in your vid.
That's funny. I didn't participate because I felt it was way too unlikely to reach him in the end. I thought he would get very few e-mails but man I was wrong...
But if I tried (from Germany), I would have written an e-mail to a good friend of my dad who I've met a couple of times. He's from Canada and maybe that way I would have gotten closer to Derek (at least geographically).
Same! I KNOW I'm way too unconnected to him to even try :(
Ich hab's gar nichts erst probiert. Wenn ich so darüber nachdenke, hätte es vielleicht über ein paar Professoren geklappt...
@@MaidaA22589 the whole idea of the experiment is that you are always within 6 degrees of separation from anyone else in the world so you could have asked anyone, the whole best guess thing is just to increase your chances, not your odds, there's a difference
As a 15 year old Arab with friends dying of sheer disintrest in life and just want to grow up to be the new Ronaldo or something. I just knew my chances where not too good... now just imagine me writing it to my Arab friends in Arabic. that would bee about 40000 degrees of separation....
but the thing is that I think that the degrees of separation are much less than you think. because maybe someone sends the email a way that takes 10, when the other way would have been 2...
Where are you from exactly (I might be in the same country as you XD )
radiel N I am a Jordanian living in uae
you have a great point.
valid content of monolinguism
vs polyglotism. on degree of language only separated you by one point.
I totally understand u.. I live in iraq and its really hard to find tht line tht will connect me to derek (UNLESS EVERYONE sends my email to EVERYONE they knew so ill have expenentially more paths) but we knw thts not the case and MOST ppl will not forward my email simply bcoz they dont care
That ending was so cute ^^
What you did with the girl from west Vancouver is a very common conversation starter with people you get to know in Austria and since it is a small county, very often you find that commonly known person very fast.
i'm curious as to more details, but not sure how you could relate them without violating people's privacy (ie: naming names). For instance, where there any really unexpected paths that were followed? Who had the most emails funnelled through them? Or was is pretty evenly distributed? Stuff like that. Still, it was a fun experiment to participate in, thanks, Derek!
I didn't send out an email because I knew I could reach you with 2 degrees of separation, and I didn't want to bother the guy we share contact with. So, I'm sorry. Maybe I could have tried to find a different way to connect to you, but that kinda defeats the purpose, right? I already know that I know someone you know. So, shrug.
+Melthornal The same goes exactly for me.
+Melthornal i dont think it was a good time for me to plan to get there,
all mutual contacts and everything wouldve taken time 2 i wouldve taken 100 degrres
+Melthornal yeah, i also did not sent out email because i know it would end up badly. if we all sent out email it will ends up in thousand if not tens of thousand
+Melthornal Actually, maybe to make the experiment a little more varied we should have sent an e-mail to some who definitely does not know him, to see if he could find a connection (not through you, at least directly)
the chances of finding a direct connection is really low so its better to take longer connections
Love your channel. Very good stuff.
BRILLIANT!!!
we must see this type of interaction. with a much closer look.
I am from a rather small region in Germany called Saarland. It has about 1 Million inhabitants. But, wherever in the world you randomly meet somebody else from that area, we love the game to find aquaintances, we have in common. Mostly we succeed within 10 minutes.
wow... such value he proposes to make people subscribe to his mailing list.
I'm not even mad or being sarcastic, that's amazing.
That's awesome ,Dirk! Finally another video on 2Veristablium woohoo!
could pls tell me who in luxembourg reached to you? because i'm from luxembourg too, and I just couldn't think of anyone who might know you; (and since luxembourg is a small country, most of its population is seperated by 2 degrees lol) just the name is enough, luxembourg doesn't have a lot of people who promote science lol....
Derek - I think some interesting stats to share would be
1. How many of your immediate friends/family/etc did you receive an email through. i.e. was there 2-3 friends who by being a teacher or a doctor, had 90% of the emails come through them.
2. How many emails have you got a month later? (was there merely a delay for some of the more obscure ones?)
3. Perhaps share the geographic path of some of the longer ones just for interest sake.
i actually believed I had a really good shot at this being an Aussie, and I emailed a school mate who I don't share many mutual friends with and who lives across state and who has contacts from his many hobbies all over the country and the USA. But mine didn't get through, I think probably due to laziness on one leg of the journey :)
Awesome videos, very interesting!
Nice Dogue de Bordeaux. I have one. She's 7 months old and weighs 78 lbs! Awesome dogs!
I have a friend named Jerome that is known all over the country. He's not famous just a really nice guy that travels a lot for work. I run into people from California to Boston that know Jerome. Sometimes it's 2 Degrees of Separation sometimes as much as 8 but no matter where I go people seem to know this guy.
I kind of interested doing a similar experiment. I found a SD card on the ground in Cologne, Germany and I haven't found any information within the files on the card to get in contact with the person who lost it, but there are pictures taken of the owner. I would like to identify the owner and this could be a way that works.
it's cool to see you're in vancouver! ^.^ Wish I could've come down just to say hi
That's deep! We subscribed to the newsletter :D Cheers, G
The interesting thing is that the final links are the same, that is, what really happens is your onnly 3-4 degrees separated from really well connected people with many many contacts.
This sorta reminds me of this game that you play on wikipedia where you choose a topic of choice (even better if it's specific) and click the link on the left that says random article. From there, you would have to try to get to the page you chose beforehand.
No emails from Singapore. I wanted to join the experiment at first but I really couldn't think of people that may know you so my email stopped at me
Never got around to sending an email. I think i could have gotten it there had I remembered to send the email.
Here was my plan. My goal would have been to get a message to Destin. I know he went to the University of Alabama. I have an engineering degree from Auburn University. My plan was to use my contacts from Auburn who would hopefully know someone who is either an Alumni or works for the University of Alabama who could then forward the message to the Alabama engineering faculty. From there I am sure some of the professors there still know Destin well enough to email him. From the last link in the chain is from Destin to you. Probably 3 or 4 links in the chain.
The interesting thing about this experiment especially when you get past 2 degrees of separation is it takes a lot of help from total strangers to get your message through. Awesome that you got as many as you did.
Hey. Saw you on Google Science Fair Awards Celebration. Nice touch on Coriolis Effect!!
nice to see you visited Vancouver, BC; what'd you think?
This is sooo cool!!
About 2 years ago i talked for the first time to my now best friends on skype. As for the time they were connected to me by one person. But as time went on and we all got to know alot about each other, we found out that i had two more persons who would'v connected me with them. We do live in the same country(Estonia), but it's still mind blowing. We live in a frog pool.
Vancouver is a beautiful city, great views from Kitsilano Beach!
I think many of us were lazy or did not want to cause spam, and so didn't send an email.
You should have tried to connect with that chick with 0 degrees of separation.
lmao
As in be her? Does that mean like understand her on a spiritual level so much that you become one?
/s
sounds like a cup half empty half full situation. i would say both in her and be one with her. give a whole new meaning to the missionary position. lulz.
Amazing.
A mailing list!? About time!
+Grant Riordon finally listening to Grey's advice.
This is a similar thing with genealogy. If you upload a tree on FamilySearch, you can download the app. The app has a feature where, if you are within 20 feet of anyone else with the app, it tells you how you are related. It only goes back 12 generations. But I have only met ONE person (a stranger from China who was visiting California at the same time I was) to whom I was not related. You only have to share one ancestor. And Americans marry, on average, their 6th-8th cousins. Because we're all related.
Well I missed the deadline to email you and find out how many degrees of separation between us. But just thought of giving it a shot for the sake of Curiosity. Can you comment on what's the number of degrees of separation between us? It is a nice thing to know. Keep making these cool videos. Thanks!
it is interesting. it just shows me how huge science is!!!
Would love to see the degrees of separation in Iceland. You can talk about almost anybody in this country and in a group of 10 there is sure to be one that either knows them directly or knows someone that knows them.
Is that Stanely Park your at? I noticed that first dude you talked to was wearing a Seahawks hat. That's a nice area whenever I can make the road trip up there.
+weedandwine kitsilano beach in west vancouver
Where did you film this video? It looks beautiful!
Instruction Clear Enough. My neighbor is Mr. Obama. Thank you.
I actually know of a way I could have gotten an email to you with only 2 degrees of separation. However, I did not part take, because I watched your video on Sept 1st, and knew I would not have made it through the chain in time.
I was tempted to try sending any email out to my relatives in Australia, what held me back was the fact that I would have had to explain what were I doing, who are you etc, and than if they did oblige to forward the mail they would have had to repeat my explanation to the next person and so on, relying on a chain of people without being able to contact them yourself is very very difficult.
I didn't sent an email becouse I didn't know who could have a better shot trying to reach you :( I'm surprised (and a little jealous) somebody in Spain contacted you :)
did you just say, this is Veritas I'm, we're getting closer every day.
You seem like you're often in Vancouver. I'm in New westminster and I go to downtown Vancouver frequently, I'd love to meet you there one day!
you are also at the mercy of who you send it to...whether they continue the chain or not or if they just find out about it through your email and want to do it themselves.
What would be interesting to see, is how many people attempted to send emails. You could set up a specific "throw away" email and provide it in a future video, and ask for those who tried to contact you for the experiment to send an email to that throw-away email. You wouldn't have to read through them. Just by glancing at the inbox, one could get a fairly decent idea of what percent 350 received emails is to the actual number of attempts.
The distribution of the degrees of separation looks more like a *gamma* distribution or another heavy-tailed distribution, much like we would expect the first five degrees to be much more probable than the next 5. There's no intuitive reason why it should be normally distributed.
This is awesome! This thought makes me happy to think about. ;) How close we really are as humans. All of us.. I would have tried sending that email if i would have seen the original video of this. I bet it would have worked. For sure. This is awesome.
I wasn't going to participate at all because I didn't want to help you alienate your friends/acquaintances and I didn't want to alienate my friends/acquaintances. Then I got a few emails from people asking me to forward them on and I thought long and hard about how I could send it. I came up empty because your rule required an "IN PERSON" meeting. I know couple people over the internet (that also know me) that might have been able to get me a separation of 3 or 4, but I've never met them in person. The only in-person person that could have worked, I haven't talked to them in 11 years. They probably don't even remember me. In fact, that person didn't even occur to me until after the deadline had passed.
THE SCIENCE ASYLUM
I wish I had access to the net at the time of the experiment! But I'm only catching up with videos now so I couldn't get a postcard nor represent Chile in your experiment! 😢
Woo! My email got to him! I had a friend in Australia, turns out he had a friend that graduated high school with Veritasium!
That histogram seems to show something different. It seems to me that what it shows is that people who actually have a closer link (fewer degrees of separation) have a higher chance of propagating information through that link to their target. I.e. someone who has a link of 6 dos to the queen of England has a much lower chance of their message getting to the queen than someone with 4 dos link. Now also as was said in the video and the comments, people don't know about these links (probably can't follow it reliably without testing for more than 3 dos)
Your 350 emails remind me of something that happened almost 3 years ago... I needed an official translation but I didn't know anyone related to that area, so I wrote a generic message and sent it to the more than 300 email addresses I found for official translators in the chancellery website. From these, I got around 100 responses but my mistake was not taking care of my email signature where I had my phone number so additionally I got more than 20 calls and I was just glad it wasn't more people calling me...
A more effective way to get much more information out of the experiment might have been to keep a track of all the people who did sent out an email. A way to do that would be to create a spreadsheet online, where anyone sending out the email would list down their basic information. Just a thought.
It's interesting that, despite never having been to Vancouver, I was able to recognize Kits Beach right off. It's becoming an icon!
+radagastwiz where do you know it from?
+Slayer5551 Just various uses in Canadian media (I'm from Ontario).
+radagastwiz ah, cool. I live in the Lower Mainland and didn't know it was a ubiquitous image.
I wonder how many people sent emails to you directly, I.e. how many people represent the last degree of separation between you and the viewers - and who sent the most of emails?
I'm guessing it's Deston at smarter everyday who is plotting revenge.....Silly Derek not warning his friends and family!!
+Samantha Plater None of my friends forwarded more than ten emails... Except Destin. And I suspect that is because of the comment, video, site, and auto-forwarding email he set up.
Veritasium How many is he reasonable for in the end?
+Veritasium 8kk 8 pool so aaa..a.a
I did try to contact you, I sent an email out to about 8 people, one of those people put it on their facebook (I don't think that option was excluded)and one of their facebook friends sent it to a contact, and THAT contact knew you. So I was able to make the connection in just 4 degrees of separation! BUT unfortunately the friend of a friend of a friend that knew you said that the two of you had some sort of a falling out and wasn't comfortable sending you an email. I was sad, but it's all right. At least I know that it is possible, even if it wasn't accomplished on my behalf :)
I didn't know where to start. I thought about trying my science teacher, but my school is so small I knew that it would take at least 3 steps to leave the state.... :( Maybe I'll try to send you one once I get to University... :D
i messaged my australian friend on facebook explaining it before i emailed him, and he thought it was kinda weird but went along with it. he even went through mutual friends list and found a path that might work. the guy he contacted ended up putting together a hilarious pdf that included my original email since most of the communications happened via facebook instead. he made a spot for the 4th person who should have been the last step but idk if she ever sent it on. i'm guessing we would know by now if our message made it though. oh well. that's what i get for going the Australian grad student/academic route- she was probably busy
Switzerland! How did you guys make it? :)
Funny you mention this, Filip And Dredrik, 2 famous TV_show hosts are doing a show about exactly this topic. They will travel the world and try to prove it is true.
Unfortunatley for the english speakers i think it will be in Swedish only, anyways, first of 6, 2 hour long episodes starts tommorrow +8h GMT
Yeahhhhh Luxemburg is in the list :) I'm surprised to see that. :)
HOLY SCIENCE ! You have recieved an email from BRAZIL !? OMFG I should have tried !
No idea how far mine got. I tried targeting towards Destin, since I know someone whose uncle and aunt work in the Alabama university system. I sent her an email, and she said she'd send the email to her aunt or uncle, but beyond that, I never knew how far it got.
I think a very big part of this is peoples' unwillingness to be seen as taking part in a chain letter. With the physical package, people might send it on out of respect for the initial sender's commitment. But I don't believe any of my opening emails were forwarded even once, simply because people worry the recipient might find it annoying. This could easily explain part of the shortness of your connection chains: you expect an exponential drop-off in number of messages that have been passed on. It's actually worse than exponential: the further it gets from the sender, the less likely a person is to care enough to forward it.
Definitely. I personally didn't participate because I didn't want to bother my friends or put them in a situation where they have to bother someone for the sake of doing me a favor.
Dang it! Should have emailed you from Peru!
+2veritasium You ask why you didn't receive more emails I think there is another reason you didn't mention in the video: It has to do with risk aversion and the value we place on the relationships that act as the intermediaries.
So to use me as an example: I'm confident that I could reach you with only two intermediaries...
Me > A Museum Director I know professionally > A CZcamsr you've been in a video with > You
I'm very confident that this would have been a successful path to you. But to ask that first intermediary to take part in this experiment would have been outside the bounds of our (professional) relationship. I made a judgement call that the potential reward didn't justify the potential risk to that relationship and ultimately did not participate in the experiment at all. Just something to think about.
And on a side note: I'm happy you got so many emails but I'm also surprised. My guess was that you'd get less than 30.
Of all the e-mails received, I wonder which was the longest chain beyond 6 degrees.
Pretty cool
I was at that beach this weekend. :)
I didn't try to send one because I don't really have any contacts on my email. It's mostly for newsletter or registration purposes. I would have loved to try, seeing as there were emails from the Philippines that have reached you. I could have tried Facebook. But things like these are usually just seen as spam specially after you sent out the email and you can't reason with your sendee, saying that what you sent wasn't spam.
so cooooolllll
That was an awesome fan :D
but the more separation the more likely one person in the chain isn't going to send the e-mail. so it is biased to lower numbers.
Veritasium mailing list....completed !
I watch the experiment way too late :C I would have been happy to try it because I can't think of anyone that knows you given that I'm from Colombia
"Let's get even closer" Veritassium 2015. one question though, what would happen if we tried this experiment, in let's say 20 years, this channel grows alot, we get to futhur regions of space, and we can inhabit more harsh enviorments, I mean assuming we survive.
Seems like a cool experiment! I'm disappointed I missed out on it
I sent a request but the person I sent it to said that he found this annoying. Kind of like a chain email. I actually liked the experiment. I checked on linkedin and I am 3rd degree connected to Derek. I have over 1,000 connections on linkedin and 633K 2nd degree connections so it was likely that one of 2nd degree connections was connected to Derek. If Derek was a second degree connection, I would know which one to send the email. We want to be connected to those we care about and do not want to be bothered by those we do not. Personally, I think a lot of people have an interesting story to tell if we just know how to connect to them. Unfortunately, there are also a few scammers out there that you have to be careful about.
What would really interest me is: How many sources did the mails come from in the last step (of course like "A:35, B:15 etc, not as real names ;)).
This would show if there is a small or broad overlap of people who knew you and also were connected to "us", or if it was always the same 10 people who did the last forwarding step
I was going to send an email but I completely forgot about it haha
I'm a physics student and one of my professors, who's kind of close to me, is doing a postdoc at Standford, so I thought I could reach you through him. Too bad I didn't try
Hi 2veritasium I was wondering what is your favorite part if science??
Where are you filming this? Looks beautiful.
+topher793 It's Vancouver, Canada
Oh man, typical, right? Craft Beer and Whitecaps all the way! ;)
Northern Ireland is in the UK
Ecuador, I live here and if I had sent the email to a friend of mine in Australia who is into science, I guess I would have reached his email in less than 6 steps
Im interested what kind of person was the last step in the seperation degrees. How well does that person know you? Is it a close friend or a family member or is it one of those strange acquaintances that widens your social influence?
Shoutout to whoever sent an email from Denmark
hi
K
hi