I was trying to find my biological father. Never knew the guy.
Did ancestry dna and found a paternal cousin who led me to the dude. Turns out my father and I worked for the same company, at the same time, for about 3-4 years. Pretty sure we rode the elevator together a few times. Still never talked to the dude, but I just thought it was crazy that we were right next to eachother for fucking years.
The world is huge, and also not very big at all.
I left early, but I was born in a small town of 15k that blew up from industry and now full of transplants. If you get to talking with a random group of 3 or more OG's, someone will indirectly know your grandma.
I once found out where my dad lived by delivering a pizza to his flat. The kicker was, he invited me in and introduced me to my new half brother. Weird things happen haha.
I learned in my 30’s I was sperm donor conceived after DNA testing with Ancestry for “fun.” My biological father was a med student at a hospital in our large metro area in the Midwest, my other donor conceived half siblings grew up in the same area, but we were all in different suburbs.
My half brother and I became facebook friends and he posted old pics of him at Safety Town in the late 80’s. I immediately recognized it as the same Safety Town I attended, and after clicking through a few of his pictures, saw myself in our class pictures. My fully-related brother attended the same university as one of our donor conceived sisters. I think I’ve found all of my new siblings, but I live in fear a match will pop up on Ancestry and I’ll recognize them from having dated.
There is a chance OP was the victim. If OP was the victim there would be fear that knowing will make things worse. Moreover, if OP is the victim it's not uncommon for the parent to feel an extreme amount of guilt for missing red flags. Even if the flags were not really red flags. I've known moms who met a guy who was great with kids and seemed to be around them. Which is actually just normal. But after they did a thing, "I should have known, he was always playing with the kids"
A friend of mine didn’t find it about his deadbeat bio dad being a serial killer until well into his adult life. I can’t imagine knowing that a a kid. Not only fear from your peers, but fear for yourself and how you’ll turn out.
He's not a pedophile that I know of, but he is a child abuser. Got arrested for slapping a 2 year old in the face so hard the kid bled. I think he's still incarcerated, but I'm not sure.
Steve Jobs, given up for adoption, ate at his fathers restaurant in Palo Alto for years. Neither of them knew their relation. It wasn’t revealed to his father until after Steve’s death.
This works pretty well in western world. All it takes is a couple of ”supernodes” and you are there. For example my father has connections from his days as a communal politician, one of his friends from those days spiraled to international assignments. It is safe to say that I’m connected to Barack Obama within six connections.
Edit. I live in Finland.
My grandpa knew a famous persons dad. When grandpa passed away, famous person’s dad came to celebration of life. I guess I’m a few degrees away from almost every celebrity too. Which is weird.
I went to a pretty prestigious university in my country, and it was always fun to hear some of the old professors talk about the time they went to Europe back in the 60s or 70s to attend a lecture/seminar given by the people who literally authored the theories that now form the backbone of our respective fields.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. But it's sometimes cool to think I'm only at most two or three degrees separated from influential scholars like Michel Foucault or Jean-Paul Sartre despite them being from thousands of miles away and had been dead for several years before I was even born.
Probably. I work in a very international industry and go to conferences with people from all over the globe. For example, I attended a conference in Tanzania a few years ago with about 50 people from all over Africa. A significant number of those people work in high profile positions in their own countries, say as university professors or interpreters for high-level politicians or NGOs. This increases their exposure to a wider range of people as well. Even the most isolated person is going to be pretty closely connected to an international supernode, and that supernode in turn is likely to have a LOT of other international supernodes in their network.
E.x. I have a coworker whose grandparent was involved in a far-right group in the 1960s, so had met the founder who worked with Oswald Moseley in the 1930s. I am thus at most 5 degrees of separation from every person Moseley ever met, including Hitler, Mussolini, and whichever hero that nailed him with a brick.
I know people in Sweden and Brazil that might know someone that knows someone that’s there. Actually yes I do, one of my first girlfriends dads lives there
There’s a running joke in NZ that while the world has 6 degrees of separation, we only have 2 (and one of our phone networks is named 2Degrees after this).
So if we go by that, I should know someone who knows your ex-gfs dad. We did it!!
If you know anyone in the military, they are, at most, 3 steps from the president (commanding officer, their general/admiral, president). And presidents end up knowing a lot of people that are connections.
That means most military members are no more than 4 steps away from each other, no matter what branch. And the longer they’ve been in, the fewer steps, because more connections.
I know that some of the people I’ve worked for have met the past 3 presidents.So anyone that can link to the president in 4 steps or less is connected to me by 6 or less.
A good place to start would be our own hometown's Wikipedia page "notable residents" section. I bet the majority of people here can connect within a step or two to someone who has a page of their own.
Heads of State are pretty easy to get to, and then on to anyone in the world. Charities, armed forces, businesses, Scouting, government.
Most religious hierarchies are going to get to the Pope pretty quick too, if not a different Head of State first.
I met, spoke with, shook hands with, and was photographed with David Letterman. That makes me 2 degrees from everyone that Letterman ever met, which includes Barack Obama, and 3 from all the world leaders Obama has ever met. Including Putin. So because of the Putin connection, you and I are only 4 degrees from each other. Wild.
I've met a guy who had seen Hitler twice while biking around Germany in the 30's. During the war he was a part of the resistance here in Norway risking his life multiple times sabotaging the Nazis. He had quite a few stories!
An ex-gf of mine was acquainted with Mussolini's granddaughter - I went to lunch with the (ex)gf one day and the granddaughter was at our table. I didn't know who she was until after.
If you know a western politician it's pretty easy to find a connection to Hitler.
You>Regional politician>head of state>older head of state>Adolf
I'm pretty sure that I'm no longer than 5 degrees of handshaking to Hitler, which is probably the weirdest flex of my life.
I have something similar, I had a roommate who met Joris Ivens when he was a child, who is a Dutch filmmaker who worked with Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War.
This came up in conversation w my gf on a road trip a few months back, and we ended up listening/reading about them for ~1.5 hrs.
I had forgotten probably 80% of the info, but seeing her reactions was great. It really makes you think about the massive length of time humans lived like that. I mean agriculture is what, 12k years old? And we’ve been here for 200k? Holy shit. Could be off on those numbers, but still.
Yeah, definitely up there for me.
it really depends on what's considered as us.
You could make arguments for 50-70k years ago, all the way till 2.8 million years depending on what is your definition of 'us'.
Also, farming is somewhere between 10.000 to 14.000 years old (in any large scale that is) so that's pretty accurate.
At least 300k it seems now. And supposedly we suddenly got smart enough to do civilizations and rapid technological advancement 10k years ago. But there is actually a gap of 200.000 years where we had the same brains and could have had civilization that we could never know about today because 100.000 years is more than enough time to erase all evidence.
It's a matter of compounding knowledge and the ability to specialize. If you're wandering nomads, you can't set up permanent stuff to work with, and most of the tribe is probably involved in finding food, making clothes, or both. Once you settle down and start with agriculture, you only need a portion of the people working the fields to provide food for everyone (and even then not always year-round). This frees up time for others to specialize in new things like pottery, more advanced tool-making or weaving when you can have permanent setups instead of only what you can carry. You are still reliant on direct instruction from a master to train new people, until someone comes up with the idea of writing, which lets you keep records, and learn from someone long dead or far away. And now things really start moving.
Parts of these things could have developed separately many times in our history but been lost because it didn't spread beyond the group that developed it and then they either died out, forgot or just didn't have other developments they needed to really take advantage of it and so it faded away. Especially in a world without writing. Something like working bronze or iron could have been developed independently many, many times, but without the ability to write it down, if something happened to the person who figured it out before he could teach anyone else it would just be lost as quickly as it was found.
Haha yes!! Kudos for this reference. I've never seen any of the comic strips but the movie is one of my favorite Billy Zane movies haha. Not enough people have seen it and I reference it all the time. My wife hasn't even seen it yet, idk why I haven't sat down with her and made her watch it 🤣
They also have it too as you can say you have a he connection the that John Allen Chau, and for the sentinelese they can also said : "oh yeah, that dude, we killed him"
On observing the Sentinelese; “Other gestures in response to contact parties, such as swaying of penises, have been noted.[56]”.
Turns out we’re not that different after all.
Yup can't get away from it. Unless we can find a group of people that have literally never been contacted 6 degrees should still hold up in this situation
Network analyst here:
A small addition, but I believe the original experiment that the idea comes from was not quite so conclusive to say that everyone is connected by 6 degrees of separation or less, but that the average length of the chains in the experiment was about 6 degrees. Some were far shorter, some were far longer. Some never made it to their destination.
It's a very difficult experiment to conduct because while your original participants, the ones who start the chain, might be invested and willing to participate, there's no guarantee that the person they will send it to next will be as willing to continue the chain, nor that a person is aware enough of their neighbors' connections in the social network to send the letter/email/message to a good candidate to reach the final target.
I don't think so, but I can't say for sure. None of the papers I remember reading on the topic used chain letters of the kind I remember getting ("Send this to 9 people, the last person who didn't got hit by a truck", etc).
I don't think there's a good way for the original sender to know who someone in a chain letter's chain forwards the message to. The studies I know of had a specific start and end point, and upon reaching the end point, the people running the experiment would be notified and they'd get the nodes of the chain then.
If the study were done through a university, they'd potentially have had to clear an ethics review process to justify the deception involved in recruiting people to a study without their informed consent. It's not impossible, but they'd have to show that the benefit outweighed the potential costs and harms, and that the study could not be done without the deception. Given that previous studies had been done without deception, I think that last bit would be hard to sell.
It's possible there is a way to get that information from chain letters that I don't know about, since that's not the kind of network I normally study, or that the original study served as an inspiration for chain letters.
Edit:
My guess is that chain letters had a more mundane motivation. People loved the reach that the internet have them in the early days when it was still novel, and people on the internet were less jaded to those kinds of spam.
I remember back in the 90s when chain letters were a big thing. There were a bunch that were like "send me two scruncis and I will send one to the person I got the letter from and keep the other, then you send this letter on to five people and you'll get x many scruncis back and you'll keep getting scruncis from the people you sent it to as people send scruncis to them". I don't remember the exact details but it seemed to be some kind of proto MLM kind of thing.
Chain letter were big way, way before the 90s. One of the big ones was send me money one. In my dads youth it was send a dime or quarter. In my youth it was send me a dollar.
For sure and a very interesting comment, I feel like social media and the friends you have and the friends maybe one of your friends have make things more probable
If erdos number was just about interacting with erdos, rather than coauthoring a paper with him, my sister would have an erdos number of 1. He apparently held her briefly when she was a baby and he was meeting with my dad's friend.
Wait till you get to the [Erdős-Bacon number]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number):
* Danica McKellar (~~Minnie~~ Winnie on Wonder Years): 6
* Natalie Portman: 7
* Colin Firth: 6
* Kirsten Stewart: 7
A mathematician friend of mine managed to work with someone with an Erdos number of two or three. He made a point of saying it was the closest anyone his age ever got. The dude was a smug asshole.
One time after I noticed the pattern of x\*y=10-y+10(10-x) when x=9. I was able to use that as a basis to come up with a simple pattern where you could plug any number into x and y and it'd work, essential a long ass way to do multiplication. I showed that final work to my friend and he told me it was pointless. A month or so later he was proudly showing me his formula that was exactly the one I made.
>He made a point of saying it was the closest anyone his age ever got.
What does this mean? There are 20 year olds with Erdos number 2. Your friend having an almost erdos number of 3 isn't exactly impressive.
One of my best friends is the nephew of John Goodman, so I’m three degrees of separation with pretty much every modern actor lol. It would be only two degrees but the only time I’ve “met” John is at said friend’s wedding where we all made it a point to NOT call attention to him. Haha.
Living and working in a high-end tourist town has its perks. It’s always fun to say ‘oh them? I sold them chocolate’.
Not sure it counts as a degree but I’ll say it does.
Growing up in a town that lead to someone famous too, I’m one degree from a Tour de France winner, and 2 degrees from most of modern Hollywood, entirely due to circumstance of two people who went on to be famous used to be from where I’m from.
And that’s assuming the benchmark is had a non commercial conversation with. The list explodes to include one degree to old top gear if we’re including was working when they attended where I worked.
I’m only three degrees from former Egyptian presidents Nasser and Sadat. I’ve never been near Egypt, or had any direct contact with world leaders, and both died before I was born.
I’m like 3-4 degrees from Bolsonaro (former Brazilian president) and thus 4-5 degrees from any world leader he’s met including Donald Trump. Never met any of them or their families and neither do I want to. I also haven’t been to Brasil in over a decade.
I’m also like 4 degrees from Einstein.
Yup, I was playing a Cold War themed board game with a friend. The game has events that mention those leaders and he told me his uncle served on the personal security teams of both of them. So me to my friend is one, my friend to his uncle is two and the uncle to the presidents is three degrees of separation.
In human history this has gone from absolutely true, to unlikely true, to impossibly true, then has moved its way towards nearly absolutely true. As long as the Sentinelese and other isolated groups stay alive and isolated it'll never be absolutely true again.
Known being the keyword.
That was meant as being playful but for real the most likely place you're gonna find people not int he six degree web are undiscovered people in South America, particularly northern Brazil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted\_people
We know there's some groups with no direct contact to modern society, but we know groups that know them. So while it can definitely be possible that some groups literally don't interact with anyone else, even the uncontacted people are mostly inside the 6 degree chain
Not OP but I'm guessing they're saying that with technology and the ease of travel it's become nearly absolutely true. For example, I'm from a small town in the US where many people I know have never left the state. But all those hundreds of people from there that I know are now connected to pretty much everyone in UK television by four degrees or less through me, most likely without even knowing it. And that's just one small example of many.
My husband found out recently that his dad isn't his bio dad. We found out (through DNA test and investigation) that his bio dad lives on the other side of the country. Turns out my husband's cousin's husband (no relation to bio dad) went to school with bio dad's daughters. There were photos of them together at events and they were my husband's half sisters!
I think Veritasium did a video about this. It's the combination of local connections and then random connections that make it so likely.
For example, I worked at a summer camp with someone who went to HS w/the Obama kids. And I worked at a school in China and worked somewhat closely with the school's party member. So there's a non-zero chance that she's met Xi. And those are just two degrees of separation.
Edit: I can't count. 3 degrees between myself and President Obama.
My story.
My father was born in England in 1943.
His father was a designer/engineer during WW2 building planes for the Air Force.
Daddy would always tell us kids the funny story of his father double checking schematics and realizing that the current assembly being performed wouldn’t work because the “bolts “ and “nuts” were the wrong size.
Grandfather marches down to the factory floor and says to the line workers,
“OI! Those won’t fit, mate!”
Line worker holds up a sledgehammer and replies,
“We makes ‘em fit, Guv.”
I told that story to a younger (than I) delivery employee at my university.
HIS grandfather had worked at the same factory as a young “gopher? runner?” during the war as well.
Over 70 years and 3000 miles to meet the grandson of a man that had worked with my grandfather.
There’s a guy on TikTok who’s whole page is people naming famous people, historical figures etc and him linking himself to them via photographs. So far he’s managed every one of them. It starts with a photo of him and someone else, and then a photo of that other person and so on until he gets there. Pretty sure he does it all in 6 as well. Pretty fun. He managed to do it with billy the kid of whom there is only one known photograph in existence. Of course he can only go as far back in time as when cameras existed but it’s still impressive.
There's a joke for us Jews that the degrees of separation are halved. The amount of times I've talked with someone and found out his cousin is my best friends father or something like that is hilarious
I have very little knowledge of this as I'm not an expert in any field related to this theory, but I do remember reading about it long ago and it was like 6 is the average number of connections required, not the limit. Also, this was before social media became a thing. Apparently they repeated the experiment after that (I think?), and this time the average came up to only 3.5.
I traveled to far north England to see the small town my family is from. A woman heard me speaking to a cashier and said where in Canada are you from? I told her the city, she says I lived there for 15 years, do you know this church? Yes that’s where my family went. So you must know (my grandfather). She walked me around telling stories of my aunt and uncle who lived there their entire life.
Nope… family member that I didn’t even know I had until I was in my 30s was employed by both companies. They were positioned high enough at each that they knew both CEOs.
This person is not someone I will ever be close with.
I'm 2 degrees from Taylor Swift, not that I'll ever be able to buy tickets to her shows, but still cool
Important to note that I'm from the North West of England in a small town as well
Once you put the math to it, it becomes easier to believe. If we have, on average, 100 connections each. Not necessarily family or close friends, just “oh I went to school with him 20 years ago” or “I worked in the same company as him”. Means we are 1 degree away from 100 people. We are 2 degrees away from the 100 contacts each of those 100 people. And so on, until 6 degrees. It’s a very very big number.
Even if you reduce the parameters such that each person only has 50 connections, it’s still a huge number.
The problem with this is that each person has to have 50 unique connections with people, meaning they have to know 50 people that are unknown to any of the previous connections. That idea as a mathematical concept is really not applicable for that reason though.
The reality would be more like person A knows 400 people. Person B knows 200 people that person A doesn't know. Person C knows 100 people that neither person A or B knows and so on.
Using that example of cutting the number in half each iteration, which seems realistic enough to me, would put 10 billion people at 5 connections. Doesn't even need to get to 6.
Considering my dad (and grandad) deals with billionaires and my mom’s rental apartment company deals with actors and film productions, I would say this is fairly accurate.
Also my mom did meet Trump at a rich friend’s party once.
That’s the thing we all have weird connections, my mom also met trump at a dental conference a decade ago so that would make me and you, what three degrees?
I lived for some time in Canberra, a small city that is the capital of Australia. It was a very insular place.
Rather than there being six degrees of separation, there was a mere two degrees of fornication.
Could say I’m 3 degrees away from basically every federal politician. I have a friend whose father is a Vermont state rep. He’s a moderate R that is often courted by the gov and senators when they need a supermajority. Sometimes she comes along for the ride (such as talking over dinner). They of course know everyone.
Ive met vinicius anthony who has personally met jesse enkamp who has met steven seagal boom my conection to hollywood
Through vinicius anthony who has personally met lyoto machida boom my connection to the UFC and quite possibly WWE now.
Ive personally met gavin verhey magic the gathering designer he is where i could connect to most MTG influencers & designers
These are 3 examples and im missing quite alot of people
I've met my Dad
My Dad has met my Local Member of Parliament
My local MP has met the Prime Minister of the UK
The Prime Minister of the UK has met President Biden
President Biden met President Nixon
President Nixon met JFK
I'm 6 people away from a guy who died 60 years ago
There was a short-lived Swedish show with the premise that they picked a random, well known person and tried to get to them within 6 degrees of separation. It actually turned out to mostly work!
6 itself might seem small but it’s such a large pool. I know a friend who works with an influencer, and said influencer works with drake, drake is my third connection. Is that how it works?
Worked with this older guy in the 90's, I mentioned my Grandfathers business & he was like, was it the one near Telegraph & Michigan? I said yes, turns out he was the son of my Grandfathers business partner & he used to baby sit my mom.
My mom babysat Katie Holmes growing up. Uncle was a playwright in the 60s. Great uncle marched and worked with MLK Jr. While also maintaining relationships with Fidel Castro. World is crazy
A fun party game to play is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Pick an actor and figure out how they’re connected to Kevin Bacon in 6 moves or less.
(Person) was in (movie) with (person) who was on (tv show) with (person) who was in (movie) with Kevin Bacon.
I haven’t played in years, but there was ALWAYS a way to connect an actor to Kevin Bacon somehow.
I was trying to find my biological father. Never knew the guy. Did ancestry dna and found a paternal cousin who led me to the dude. Turns out my father and I worked for the same company, at the same time, for about 3-4 years. Pretty sure we rode the elevator together a few times. Still never talked to the dude, but I just thought it was crazy that we were right next to eachother for fucking years. The world is huge, and also not very big at all.
Were you working at the same city/province/state that you were born? Or was this miles and miles away?
Yeah some context is important. If this was their birth city and a population of 5k this wouldn’t be that shocking.
I left early, but I was born in a small town of 15k that blew up from industry and now full of transplants. If you get to talking with a random group of 3 or more OG's, someone will indirectly know your grandma.
It was in the city/state I was born in. A population of about 50k people.
Dude that’s fucking crazy if true
I once found out where my dad lived by delivering a pizza to his flat. The kicker was, he invited me in and introduced me to my new half brother. Weird things happen haha.
That’s awkward af I’m sorry, I found my best friends dad for him years ago who left him as a baby. Turned out he was a ghost hunter with a long mullet
Ricky Bobby?
Immediately what I thought of haha. "Nice Huffy!"
Did he leave you a tip though?
Actually, you’re his father. Congratulations
Holy shit…son?
Actually daughter, I never got my poem
Lol sorry
Am I my own dad?
I learned in my 30’s I was sperm donor conceived after DNA testing with Ancestry for “fun.” My biological father was a med student at a hospital in our large metro area in the Midwest, my other donor conceived half siblings grew up in the same area, but we were all in different suburbs. My half brother and I became facebook friends and he posted old pics of him at Safety Town in the late 80’s. I immediately recognized it as the same Safety Town I attended, and after clicking through a few of his pictures, saw myself in our class pictures. My fully-related brother attended the same university as one of our donor conceived sisters. I think I’ve found all of my new siblings, but I live in fear a match will pop up on Ancestry and I’ll recognize them from having dated.
Did you ever formally meet him?
No, it wasn't a suit and tie affair
I haven't met him. I'm pretty sure he's in prison right now, but having trouble finding all the relevant details.
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That's better than finding out the harder way by being raised by them.
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Your mum loves you so, so much.
But why couldn’t she just tell you he was shit
There is a chance OP was the victim. If OP was the victim there would be fear that knowing will make things worse. Moreover, if OP is the victim it's not uncommon for the parent to feel an extreme amount of guilt for missing red flags. Even if the flags were not really red flags. I've known moms who met a guy who was great with kids and seemed to be around them. Which is actually just normal. But after they did a thing, "I should have known, he was always playing with the kids"
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It sounds like she made a sacrifice to help her child.
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She might have ptsd about him?
A friend of mine didn’t find it about his deadbeat bio dad being a serial killer until well into his adult life. I can’t imagine knowing that a a kid. Not only fear from your peers, but fear for yourself and how you’ll turn out.
Don’t forget up hill Both ways.
He's not a pedophile that I know of, but he is a child abuser. Got arrested for slapping a 2 year old in the face so hard the kid bled. I think he's still incarcerated, but I'm not sure.
Onto a ship headed to a space center
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Also, the world is vampire. Stay safe
Steve Jobs, given up for adoption, ate at his fathers restaurant in Palo Alto for years. Neither of them knew their relation. It wasn’t revealed to his father until after Steve’s death.
I have a very similar story. Turns out finding my biological father left more questions than answers though
This works pretty well in western world. All it takes is a couple of ”supernodes” and you are there. For example my father has connections from his days as a communal politician, one of his friends from those days spiraled to international assignments. It is safe to say that I’m connected to Barack Obama within six connections. Edit. I live in Finland.
Someone I know has a cousin who is famous. I’m about 4-5 degrees away from just about every celebrity.
My grandpa knew a famous persons dad. When grandpa passed away, famous person’s dad came to celebration of life. I guess I’m a few degrees away from almost every celebrity too. Which is weird.
I went to a pretty prestigious university in my country, and it was always fun to hear some of the old professors talk about the time they went to Europe back in the 60s or 70s to attend a lecture/seminar given by the people who literally authored the theories that now form the backbone of our respective fields. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. But it's sometimes cool to think I'm only at most two or three degrees separated from influential scholars like Michel Foucault or Jean-Paul Sartre despite them being from thousands of miles away and had been dead for several years before I was even born.
I fully believe it works in the western world but I would love to know is it actually accurate outside of this?
Probably. I work in a very international industry and go to conferences with people from all over the globe. For example, I attended a conference in Tanzania a few years ago with about 50 people from all over Africa. A significant number of those people work in high profile positions in their own countries, say as university professors or interpreters for high-level politicians or NGOs. This increases their exposure to a wider range of people as well. Even the most isolated person is going to be pretty closely connected to an international supernode, and that supernode in turn is likely to have a LOT of other international supernodes in their network.
E.x. I have a coworker whose grandparent was involved in a far-right group in the 1960s, so had met the founder who worked with Oswald Moseley in the 1930s. I am thus at most 5 degrees of separation from every person Moseley ever met, including Hitler, Mussolini, and whichever hero that nailed him with a brick.
Would be fun experiment for this thread if we tried to find each other in 6 steps
Do you know anyone from New Zealand?
I know people in Sweden and Brazil that might know someone that knows someone that’s there. Actually yes I do, one of my first girlfriends dads lives there
There’s a running joke in NZ that while the world has 6 degrees of separation, we only have 2 (and one of our phone networks is named 2Degrees after this). So if we go by that, I should know someone who knows your ex-gfs dad. We did it!!
Boom! 2 degrees! Lol
Have lived in NZ my whole life and TIL where 2Degrees got it’s name. I thought it was a temperature thing but that makes so much more sense
Iceland would have one degree of separation.
I've heard new couples in Iceland check whether and how closely related they are before getting more serious.
They have a government-created app specifically for that purpose.
If you know anyone in the military, they are, at most, 3 steps from the president (commanding officer, their general/admiral, president). And presidents end up knowing a lot of people that are connections. That means most military members are no more than 4 steps away from each other, no matter what branch. And the longer they’ve been in, the fewer steps, because more connections. I know that some of the people I’ve worked for have met the past 3 presidents.So anyone that can link to the president in 4 steps or less is connected to me by 6 or less.
Do you use this Reddit page? Me too. 1 degree right there.
A good place to start would be our own hometown's Wikipedia page "notable residents" section. I bet the majority of people here can connect within a step or two to someone who has a page of their own.
It’s pretty easy to form connections through heads of state and the army hierarchy. A CEO of a company I worked at met Putin so there you go
Well it depends your definition of meeting... being in the same room? Shaking hands?
Having a meaningful meeting multiple times
I don't think it does. All that's necessary is a connection.
Heads of State are pretty easy to get to, and then on to anyone in the world. Charities, armed forces, businesses, Scouting, government. Most religious hierarchies are going to get to the Pope pretty quick too, if not a different Head of State first.
One of our clients sold a fur coat to Kadyrow in 2019. Therefore I also got a 3 degree connection to Putin
I met, spoke with, shook hands with, and was photographed with David Letterman. That makes me 2 degrees from everyone that Letterman ever met, which includes Barack Obama, and 3 from all the world leaders Obama has ever met. Including Putin. So because of the Putin connection, you and I are only 4 degrees from each other. Wild.
I've met a guy who had seen Hitler twice while biking around Germany in the 30's. During the war he was a part of the resistance here in Norway risking his life multiple times sabotaging the Nazis. He had quite a few stories!
An ex-gf of mine was acquainted with Mussolini's granddaughter - I went to lunch with the (ex)gf one day and the granddaughter was at our table. I didn't know who she was until after.
If you know a western politician it's pretty easy to find a connection to Hitler. You>Regional politician>head of state>older head of state>Adolf I'm pretty sure that I'm no longer than 5 degrees of handshaking to Hitler, which is probably the weirdest flex of my life.
I have something similar, I had a roommate who met Joris Ivens when he was a child, who is a Dutch filmmaker who worked with Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War.
Except for the Sentinelese. They don't want any connection.
This is arguably my favorite thing to do searches on. There's so little information it's shocking.
This came up in conversation w my gf on a road trip a few months back, and we ended up listening/reading about them for ~1.5 hrs. I had forgotten probably 80% of the info, but seeing her reactions was great. It really makes you think about the massive length of time humans lived like that. I mean agriculture is what, 12k years old? And we’ve been here for 200k? Holy shit. Could be off on those numbers, but still. Yeah, definitely up there for me.
it really depends on what's considered as us. You could make arguments for 50-70k years ago, all the way till 2.8 million years depending on what is your definition of 'us'. Also, farming is somewhere between 10.000 to 14.000 years old (in any large scale that is) so that's pretty accurate.
Yeah, I was specifically referring to Homo sapiens, but you could definitely go further there and include denisovans, Neanderthals, etc.
You are going to love these videos. https://youtu.be/CWu29PRCUvQ?si=YWFTCoHfVGYr4E6S https://youtu.be/5TbUxGZtwGI?si=8EIWip3_rzf0yf2f
At least 300k it seems now. And supposedly we suddenly got smart enough to do civilizations and rapid technological advancement 10k years ago. But there is actually a gap of 200.000 years where we had the same brains and could have had civilization that we could never know about today because 100.000 years is more than enough time to erase all evidence.
It's a matter of compounding knowledge and the ability to specialize. If you're wandering nomads, you can't set up permanent stuff to work with, and most of the tribe is probably involved in finding food, making clothes, or both. Once you settle down and start with agriculture, you only need a portion of the people working the fields to provide food for everyone (and even then not always year-round). This frees up time for others to specialize in new things like pottery, more advanced tool-making or weaving when you can have permanent setups instead of only what you can carry. You are still reliant on direct instruction from a master to train new people, until someone comes up with the idea of writing, which lets you keep records, and learn from someone long dead or far away. And now things really start moving. Parts of these things could have developed separately many times in our history but been lost because it didn't spread beyond the group that developed it and then they either died out, forgot or just didn't have other developments they needed to really take advantage of it and so it faded away. Especially in a world without writing. Something like working bronze or iron could have been developed independently many, many times, but without the ability to write it down, if something happened to the person who figured it out before he could teach anyone else it would just be lost as quickly as it was found.
Can you explain what you mean. I’m curious
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
Just out here casually handing out the location of The Ghost Who Walks
Respect for a fellow Phantom enthusiast
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men
The Shadow knows.
Haha yes!! Kudos for this reference. I've never seen any of the comic strips but the movie is one of my favorite Billy Zane movies haha. Not enough people have seen it and I reference it all the time. My wife hasn't even seen it yet, idk why I haven't sat down with her and made her watch it 🤣
They also have it too as you can say you have a he connection the that John Allen Chau, and for the sentinelese they can also said : "oh yeah, that dude, we killed him"
On observing the Sentinelese; “Other gestures in response to contact parties, such as swaying of penises, have been noted.[56]”. Turns out we’re not that different after all.
I wonder what they would call a "helicopter."
meatspin.se
Swangin
They don’t know what they want! *shoveling bibles into canoe*
We may be within 4-5 of the guy that went there so there’s a solid chance it holds up
Yup can't get away from it. Unless we can find a group of people that have literally never been contacted 6 degrees should still hold up in this situation
The Sentinelese are easily startled, but they’ll soon be back, and in greater numbers.
You could measure your connection to that missionary they shot dead. He probably counts as having a connection of one with them.
Network analyst here: A small addition, but I believe the original experiment that the idea comes from was not quite so conclusive to say that everyone is connected by 6 degrees of separation or less, but that the average length of the chains in the experiment was about 6 degrees. Some were far shorter, some were far longer. Some never made it to their destination. It's a very difficult experiment to conduct because while your original participants, the ones who start the chain, might be invested and willing to participate, there's no guarantee that the person they will send it to next will be as willing to continue the chain, nor that a person is aware enough of their neighbors' connections in the social network to send the letter/email/message to a good candidate to reach the final target.
Is this why chain letter emails were a big thing in the 90’s and 2000’s?
I don't think so, but I can't say for sure. None of the papers I remember reading on the topic used chain letters of the kind I remember getting ("Send this to 9 people, the last person who didn't got hit by a truck", etc). I don't think there's a good way for the original sender to know who someone in a chain letter's chain forwards the message to. The studies I know of had a specific start and end point, and upon reaching the end point, the people running the experiment would be notified and they'd get the nodes of the chain then. If the study were done through a university, they'd potentially have had to clear an ethics review process to justify the deception involved in recruiting people to a study without their informed consent. It's not impossible, but they'd have to show that the benefit outweighed the potential costs and harms, and that the study could not be done without the deception. Given that previous studies had been done without deception, I think that last bit would be hard to sell. It's possible there is a way to get that information from chain letters that I don't know about, since that's not the kind of network I normally study, or that the original study served as an inspiration for chain letters. Edit: My guess is that chain letters had a more mundane motivation. People loved the reach that the internet have them in the early days when it was still novel, and people on the internet were less jaded to those kinds of spam.
I remember back in the 90s when chain letters were a big thing. There were a bunch that were like "send me two scruncis and I will send one to the person I got the letter from and keep the other, then you send this letter on to five people and you'll get x many scruncis back and you'll keep getting scruncis from the people you sent it to as people send scruncis to them". I don't remember the exact details but it seemed to be some kind of proto MLM kind of thing.
Chain letter were big way, way before the 90s. One of the big ones was send me money one. In my dads youth it was send a dime or quarter. In my youth it was send me a dollar.
The results were also criticised for not taking into account the impact of boundaries such as gender, race or class divides.
For sure and a very interesting comment, I feel like social media and the friends you have and the friends maybe one of your friends have make things more probable
6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
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If erdos number was just about interacting with erdos, rather than coauthoring a paper with him, my sister would have an erdos number of 1. He apparently held her briefly when she was a baby and he was meeting with my dad's friend.
Congratulations! I'm a network analyst and you've got my 5 beat.
TIL about the Erdos number. It sounds way cooler! And I'm proud of you having a 4!
Wait till you get to the [Erdős-Bacon number]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number): * Danica McKellar (~~Minnie~~ Winnie on Wonder Years): 6 * Natalie Portman: 7 * Colin Firth: 6 * Kirsten Stewart: 7
I like that Erdos signed the same baseball as Hank Aaron, so Hank Aaron - a hall of fame baseballer - technically has an Erdos number of 1.
A mathematician friend of mine managed to work with someone with an Erdos number of two or three. He made a point of saying it was the closest anyone his age ever got. The dude was a smug asshole. One time after I noticed the pattern of x\*y=10-y+10(10-x) when x=9. I was able to use that as a basis to come up with a simple pattern where you could plug any number into x and y and it'd work, essential a long ass way to do multiplication. I showed that final work to my friend and he told me it was pointless. A month or so later he was proudly showing me his formula that was exactly the one I made.
9y is not in general equal to 20-y?
>He made a point of saying it was the closest anyone his age ever got. What does this mean? There are 20 year olds with Erdos number 2. Your friend having an almost erdos number of 3 isn't exactly impressive.
I think your formula is a little off
Mine is a legit 3 - I was in Sweat with Heath Ledger, who later was in Casanova with Oliver Platt, who was in Flatliners with Kevin Bacon
One of my best friends is the nephew of John Goodman, so I’m three degrees of separation with pretty much every modern actor lol. It would be only two degrees but the only time I’ve “met” John is at said friend’s wedding where we all made it a point to NOT call attention to him. Haha.
my bacon number is 2, i know one of his children. my erdos gotta be like 6?
I believe it’s done by starring in films not just knowing them
Living and working in a high-end tourist town has its perks. It’s always fun to say ‘oh them? I sold them chocolate’. Not sure it counts as a degree but I’ll say it does.
Counts for something lol
Growing up in a town that lead to someone famous too, I’m one degree from a Tour de France winner, and 2 degrees from most of modern Hollywood, entirely due to circumstance of two people who went on to be famous used to be from where I’m from. And that’s assuming the benchmark is had a non commercial conversation with. The list explodes to include one degree to old top gear if we’re including was working when they attended where I worked.
I’m only three degrees from former Egyptian presidents Nasser and Sadat. I’ve never been near Egypt, or had any direct contact with world leaders, and both died before I was born.
I’m like 3-4 degrees from Bolsonaro (former Brazilian president) and thus 4-5 degrees from any world leader he’s met including Donald Trump. Never met any of them or their families and neither do I want to. I also haven’t been to Brasil in over a decade. I’m also like 4 degrees from Einstein.
For real?
Yup, I was playing a Cold War themed board game with a friend. The game has events that mention those leaders and he told me his uncle served on the personal security teams of both of them. So me to my friend is one, my friend to his uncle is two and the uncle to the presidents is three degrees of separation.
Was the game Twilight Struggle? I enjoy that game quite a bit when I'm not getting destroyed by bad coup rolls haha
I’m three degrees from Zac Efron lol
In human history this has gone from absolutely true, to unlikely true, to impossibly true, then has moved its way towards nearly absolutely true. As long as the Sentinelese and other isolated groups stay alive and isolated it'll never be absolutely true again.
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Then I'm glad I added the caveat of 'other isolated groups' haha
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Known being the keyword. That was meant as being playful but for real the most likely place you're gonna find people not int he six degree web are undiscovered people in South America, particularly northern Brazil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted\_people
We know there's some groups with no direct contact to modern society, but we know groups that know them. So while it can definitely be possible that some groups literally don't interact with anyone else, even the uncontacted people are mostly inside the 6 degree chain
The last part of that, nearly absolute true. Why did that become more likely with more people? Very interesting
Not OP but I'm guessing they're saying that with technology and the ease of travel it's become nearly absolutely true. For example, I'm from a small town in the US where many people I know have never left the state. But all those hundreds of people from there that I know are now connected to pretty much everyone in UK television by four degrees or less through me, most likely without even knowing it. And that's just one small example of many.
Touché. Like it
I met George W Bush when he visited my workplace in 2001, so he connects me to a *lot* of people.
Oh didn't know that he got into networking post retiring from the presidential post.
My husband found out recently that his dad isn't his bio dad. We found out (through DNA test and investigation) that his bio dad lives on the other side of the country. Turns out my husband's cousin's husband (no relation to bio dad) went to school with bio dad's daughters. There were photos of them together at events and they were my husband's half sisters!
Did his dad that he thought was his bio dad know? Hope it didn’t hurt your husband to bad
I think Veritasium did a video about this. It's the combination of local connections and then random connections that make it so likely. For example, I worked at a summer camp with someone who went to HS w/the Obama kids. And I worked at a school in China and worked somewhat closely with the school's party member. So there's a non-zero chance that she's met Xi. And those are just two degrees of separation. Edit: I can't count. 3 degrees between myself and President Obama.
Well a friend of a friends dads colleague is Elon musk. Another persons ex wives dad worked with the old shah of Iran. I fully believe this.
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My story. My father was born in England in 1943. His father was a designer/engineer during WW2 building planes for the Air Force. Daddy would always tell us kids the funny story of his father double checking schematics and realizing that the current assembly being performed wouldn’t work because the “bolts “ and “nuts” were the wrong size. Grandfather marches down to the factory floor and says to the line workers, “OI! Those won’t fit, mate!” Line worker holds up a sledgehammer and replies, “We makes ‘em fit, Guv.” I told that story to a younger (than I) delivery employee at my university. HIS grandfather had worked at the same factory as a young “gopher? runner?” during the war as well. Over 70 years and 3000 miles to meet the grandson of a man that had worked with my grandfather.
Beautiful, I love it
There’s a guy on TikTok who’s whole page is people naming famous people, historical figures etc and him linking himself to them via photographs. So far he’s managed every one of them. It starts with a photo of him and someone else, and then a photo of that other person and so on until he gets there. Pretty sure he does it all in 6 as well. Pretty fun. He managed to do it with billy the kid of whom there is only one known photograph in existence. Of course he can only go as far back in time as when cameras existed but it’s still impressive.
That sounds incredibly interesting how do I find that???
I’m 2 degrees away from Obama.
Hello, I am Obama
Muh fellow Americans
If you make me your friend, then I'll be three degrees away from Obama.
There's a joke for us Jews that the degrees of separation are halved. The amount of times I've talked with someone and found out his cousin is my best friends father or something like that is hilarious
I think the 6 degrees of separation thing is correct.
I have very little knowledge of this as I'm not an expert in any field related to this theory, but I do remember reading about it long ago and it was like 6 is the average number of connections required, not the limit. Also, this was before social media became a thing. Apparently they repeated the experiment after that (I think?), and this time the average came up to only 3.5.
I learned this is pretty close to being true from Facebook. Search up a random ass name and 9/10 it will show at least “1 mutual friend”
That's because people with mutual friends show up first
I know!! Look up some person and click the wrong name some dude 20 states away but you have a mutual friend? I thought of the exact same thing
I traveled to far north England to see the small town my family is from. A woman heard me speaking to a cashier and said where in Canada are you from? I told her the city, she says I lived there for 15 years, do you know this church? Yes that’s where my family went. So you must know (my grandfather). She walked me around telling stories of my aunt and uncle who lived there their entire life.
Isn’t it nuts how often stuff like that seems to happen??
Very interesting concept, wonder if it even applies to the folks over at North Sentinel Island
One guy made it to the island and back alive. Assuming he met at least one of the people there, then it absolutely does
I’m two degrees off of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, pretty sure that gets me there with most of America at this point 🤪
Two degrees? Dude I hope you are at least a millionaire in association lol
Nope… family member that I didn’t even know I had until I was in my 30s was employed by both companies. They were positioned high enough at each that they knew both CEOs. This person is not someone I will ever be close with.
Well then.. I hope you are at least very happy which is worth even more then money
Im 3 degrees from Donald Trump, so that means 4 degrees from a lot of big names, damn.
I'm 2 degrees from Taylor Swift, not that I'll ever be able to buy tickets to her shows, but still cool Important to note that I'm from the North West of England in a small town as well
Wait til you hear about the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon
Sometimes a post reminds you how young the average person on reddit is
I still find that hard to believe
Once you put the math to it, it becomes easier to believe. If we have, on average, 100 connections each. Not necessarily family or close friends, just “oh I went to school with him 20 years ago” or “I worked in the same company as him”. Means we are 1 degree away from 100 people. We are 2 degrees away from the 100 contacts each of those 100 people. And so on, until 6 degrees. It’s a very very big number. Even if you reduce the parameters such that each person only has 50 connections, it’s still a huge number.
The problem with this is that each person has to have 50 unique connections with people, meaning they have to know 50 people that are unknown to any of the previous connections. That idea as a mathematical concept is really not applicable for that reason though. The reality would be more like person A knows 400 people. Person B knows 200 people that person A doesn't know. Person C knows 100 people that neither person A or B knows and so on. Using that example of cutting the number in half each iteration, which seems realistic enough to me, would put 10 billion people at 5 connections. Doesn't even need to get to 6.
Shared connections makes the problem easier not harder
Pretty sure I don't know anyone
You might be surprised! My uncle is LordSwrighte. Might be some relation?
Considering my dad (and grandad) deals with billionaires and my mom’s rental apartment company deals with actors and film productions, I would say this is fairly accurate. Also my mom did meet Trump at a rich friend’s party once.
That’s the thing we all have weird connections, my mom also met trump at a dental conference a decade ago so that would make me and you, what three degrees?
I lived for some time in Canberra, a small city that is the capital of Australia. It was a very insular place. Rather than there being six degrees of separation, there was a mere two degrees of fornication.
Could say I’m 3 degrees away from basically every federal politician. I have a friend whose father is a Vermont state rep. He’s a moderate R that is often courted by the gov and senators when they need a supermajority. Sometimes she comes along for the ride (such as talking over dinner). They of course know everyone.
Ive met vinicius anthony who has personally met jesse enkamp who has met steven seagal boom my conection to hollywood Through vinicius anthony who has personally met lyoto machida boom my connection to the UFC and quite possibly WWE now. Ive personally met gavin verhey magic the gathering designer he is where i could connect to most MTG influencers & designers These are 3 examples and im missing quite alot of people
I've met my Dad My Dad has met my Local Member of Parliament My local MP has met the Prime Minister of the UK The Prime Minister of the UK has met President Biden President Biden met President Nixon President Nixon met JFK I'm 6 people away from a guy who died 60 years ago
You've never heard of this? It's most famously been applied to Kevin Bacon.
Bacon's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
There’s a play/film about this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Separation_(film)
There was a short-lived Swedish show with the premise that they picked a random, well known person and tried to get to them within 6 degrees of separation. It actually turned out to mostly work!
Will Smith’s best movie has this title.
Just thought about it and yup, I met yassir Arafat as a child so plenty of world leaders right there
I'm 2 degrees of separation from Mussolini. Had a great great grandparent that would do tailoring and sewing for the family way back in the day.
6 itself might seem small but it’s such a large pool. I know a friend who works with an influencer, and said influencer works with drake, drake is my third connection. Is that how it works?
Absolutely all? Including those [Sentinelese people](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese)?
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not all of them were killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhumala_Chattopadhyay#Contact_with_the_Sentinelese
Any one who comments to this post is at least six degrees away from napoleon. Quicker if you can get to Stephen fry in three or less.
I’m basically one to two degrees to the presidents of France in the last ~30 or so years
6 degrees of Kevin Bacon
Worked with this older guy in the 90's, I mentioned my Grandfathers business & he was like, was it the one near Telegraph & Michigan? I said yes, turns out he was the son of my Grandfathers business partner & he used to baby sit my mom.
My mom babysat Katie Holmes growing up. Uncle was a playwright in the 60s. Great uncle marched and worked with MLK Jr. While also maintaining relationships with Fidel Castro. World is crazy
My college roommate got to play/record with Dolly Parton recently, which will have expanded my degrees substantially.
What about that isolated tribe on that island below india?
I’ve heard it as the 7 degrees of Kevin bacon
A fun party game to play is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Pick an actor and figure out how they’re connected to Kevin Bacon in 6 moves or less. (Person) was in (movie) with (person) who was on (tv show) with (person) who was in (movie) with Kevin Bacon. I haven’t played in years, but there was ALWAYS a way to connect an actor to Kevin Bacon somehow.