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Young Adult Degrees of Separation 186 Views
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Description:
No, this isn't like making a PhD and an MA go to their rooms because they’ve been fighting all evening. You're thinking of a Separation of Degrees.
Transcript
- 00:04
Degrees of Separation, a la Shmoop. See that random guy across the aisle from
- 00:09
you in the grocery store?
- 00:10
Thank goodness you don't know him, or have anything to do with him.
- 00:13
Hey, buddy... you sure you don't need a few more pizza stains on your sweatpants, fella?
- 00:18
Hold on there, Captain Judgmental.
Full Transcript
- 00:20
Officer Pepperoni Residue may be closer to you than you realize...
- 00:24
A theory known as Six Degrees of Separation was first proposed in 1929...
- 00:28
...in a play by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy. <<free-yesh kah-rin-thee>>
- 00:33
It introduced the idea that you can pick any two people, anywhere in the world...
- 00:37
...and connect them in no more than six steps.
- 00:40
So, that weirdo in the freezer section...
- 00:42
...he knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows...
- 00:46
...you. Sends shivers up your spine, doesn't it?
- 00:50
And not just because you're standing too close to the ice cream.
- 00:53
Psychologist Stanley Milgram tried testing the theory in the 1960s...
- 00:56
...by asking people to address a letter to a particular person...
- 01:00
...then mailing that letter to all their personal friends and asking them to forward to everyone
- 01:05
they knew...
- 01:06
...until it got to its intended target.
- 01:09
And spam was born.
- 01:11
However, Milgram got some pretty interesting results.
- 01:13
It never took more than 5 hops for the letters to get to their intended addressee.
- 01:18
Some argue that he didn't set up his experiment ideally though...
- 01:21
...so most consider the experiment inconclusive. The concept was further fleshed out in a second
- 01:28
play...
- 01:28
...written in 1990, and actually titled Six Degrees of Separation.
- 01:33
It was adapted to a film by the same name.
- 01:35
Will Smith starred in it. Back when he was just a wee little thing.
- 01:39
But the Six Degrees phenomenon was just picking up steam.
- 01:41
Three students at Albright College created a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon...
- 01:46
...who is this actor guy. He's been in a few films. Or 76.
- 01:51
The software they engineered allowed you to plug in any actor's name...
- 01:55
...as long as they had at least one credit on imdb...
- 01:59
...and they could connect that actor to Kevin Bacon in 6 steps or fewer.
- 02:04
You could even connect any actor to any other actor... Mr. Bacon did not even necessarily
- 02:09
need to be involved.
- 02:11
Although he does tend to get a little pouty when you leave him out of things.
- 02:15
In 2011, researchers at the University of Milan crunched some numbers...
- 02:19
...and found that, on average, Facebook users worldwide were separated by only 4.74 degrees.
- 02:28
And when they zeroed in on a single country, users were only 3 degrees apart.
- 02:33
So the next time you logon to Facebook and the site recommends some users you may be
- 02:37
friends with...
- 02:38
...don't be surprised to see this guy.
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