Remember kids: The difference between science and screwing around is writing things down.
Remember kids: publishing negative results is hard.
But super important and not done enough! Disproving something can save humanity such time.
There’s a bit more to it than that
Yes. Being exploited by greedy publishers and a failing academia system, while barely making a living for example.
I wish more people in general would be OK with being wrong. Noone ever learned something new without knowing they’d been wrong
Just because no one else has said, Adam has been involved in EFF for a long time. EEF Podcast episode with him in it:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/podcast-episode-making-hope-adam-savage
Which delights me as he’s more mainstream and so wakes people up to things like the Right To Repair movement.
I miss Mythbusters so much.
It’s amazing to me that Discovery hasn’t tried to bring Mythbusters back. Instead they double down on Ancient Aliens and Pawnstars garbage.
I’m pretty sure they did try to bring it back but it wasn’t as popular because it wasn’t Adam and Jamie
Adam and Jamie were awesome, but I’m certain there are some passionate makers or something out there who could fill the role. It wouldn’t be the same, but it could be it’s own thing. Whoever the new hosts were must have just been the wrong casting, but also I don’t know how much Discovery cared because I didn’t know about it and I was a huge Mythbusters fan. I guess I just didn’t pay attention because Discovery had already killed everything that was worth paying attention to them for by that point.
It’s been a while since I watched them but I recall feeling like the new hosts weren’t genuine. It felt more like a YouTube reaction video than an episode of Mythbusters.
Mythbusters fundamentally needs to capture the joy of engineering more than the joy of explosions. (Not that those aren’t fun too.)
I remember during the run of Mythbusters either Discovery or History or one of those tried to launch another show to cash in on Mythbusters’ success, it was called Smash Lab, and it’s clear the creation of this show involved a pie chart titled “Elements of Mythbusters by screen time” and there was one pie wedge labelled “explosions.” It didn’t last long IIRC.
William Osman and Michael Reeves + the other youtubers
That would mean Failed Mythbuster Allen Pan™ could redeem himself
From listening to podcasts done by people involved in those attempts to bring the show back, it seems the show runners/studios in charge didn’t understand what made the show good and tried to steer their recreations in bad directions. It does seem like most every host they brought on had good intentions and skillsets, but were held back in some way.
IIRC I read that the hosts hated one another and refuse to work with each other ever again.
If you’re talking about Adam and Jamie, this is not true and has been repeatedly debunked by both of them.
They did try to bring it back, but it was really a show that needed its core cast to be what it was.
If you need you fix Adam savage is very active on YouTube and is just a wonder human being. It’s not MythBusters but Adam was a light during Covid and someone I put on regularly on YouTube.
Yeah, I watch him. It’s not Mythbusters, but it’s still entertaining usually, even when he’s doing the most boring things. It really shows how good he was as an entertainer.
My favorite thing about Adam’s videos is the way they are edited, they leave in some silence so you can see Adam’s head gears working as he’s solving a problem. It sorta feels like we’re solving the problem with him.
Adam is such an inspiration. The kind of person who restores a little faith in humanity.
Yeah its a real monkeys paw situation too. Will they be able to catch that same lightning in a jar again without the same cast?
If they understood what made it great, maybe. They don’t though, and definitely won’t care to try.
Real Science attracts smart people who want to learn a thing or two about the world, Fake Science attracts the kind of gullible kooks you can sell snake oil and orgonite devices to… and I say this as someone who “wants to believe”
Same reason why scam e-mails and telemarketers intentionally leave big gaping holes in their stories while using dozens of spelling errors. If you’re the kind of person who can notice things like that, you’re too smart to buy what they’re selling.
Quoth Adam Savage: “It’s not ‘my experiment failed’, it’s ‘my experiment yielded data!’”
The Elephant and Mice episode was so wild, because if I remember correctly, the elephant didn’t act afraid of the mouse, it acted afraid it would step on and harm the mouse; as if the elephant had a basic understanding and concern for the wellbeing of another creature conspicuously lacking in many human beasts
Yep. Elephants are wonderfully kind creatures. With my very limited understanding of elephant body language, it didn’t look like an ‘oh no, im scared’ it was more ‘oh hey little guy, didn’t see ya there. ill get outta your way.’
Just smart as hell. This video makes me wonder if elephants legit have a sense of humor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VOvEFHDOaU
Animal behavior can be difficult to interpret (and even when descriptions come from experts, I often find myself asking “yeah, but how do we really know that?”), but this looks very close to being like someone who’s known for lighthearted pranks.
Oh my goooooood. This is so delightful, you can almost see the smirk. Thank you for sharing. <3
I WANT to believe this but I’ve seen too many elephant videos that turned out to be just elephants trained to do a quirky thing for tourists and there’s someone off camera subtly directing them.
New core memory unlocked, thanks!
Elephants are wonderfully kind creatures
So long as they’re not a bull in musth.
It’s amazing how intelligent and emotionally mature elephants are. It’s not wonder why people were willing to believe that “Elephants have a moon religion!” line for so long, it seems believable with how often elephants seem to act like chonky humans with a trunk instead of arms.
If we would, we would be all vegan.
Being able to separate your ego and desire to be right from the learning process is such an important skill.
I remember being stubborn, being proved wrong, continuing to be stubborn, and being proved wrong even harder, in front of others.
It’s such a pathetic and embarrassing feeling to be that wrong.
I don’t want to be wrong a moment longer than I need to be.
There’s no shame in being corrected, but there is in holding on to shit ideas.
This is the right attitude more people should have. But all too often, when people are proven wrong, they genuinely believe that it must be the other person/group, because they cannot accept the emotional consequences of being wrong.
I know that I’ve had a hard time learning this because growing up I was never held to account for my actions on an emotional level. It was the 80s and 90s, and adults at that time would either shrug it off, or go straight to the nuclear punishment of corporal punishment. Never once would they sit down and talk to you about why what you did was wrong and how to do it better next time. I, anecdotally, believe that a lot of genx suffer this same way. They simply haven’t learned that there is a better way.
Well, talking to kids and explaining things to them takes time, and it’s basically work. How inconvenient.
Also, you have to know what a better way to handle a situation is. If someone’s the type of person who hits a kid for misbehavior, maybe they don’t know how to do better.
My husband and I are in our mid thirties, and are actively holding off on kids until we feel like we’ve gotten better at managing our emotions. Our parents had kids much earlier, and ended up exercising their emotional dysfunction on small children
I could be completely wrong, but my life experience so far suggests that the best way to get better at something is to put yourself into situations where you have to actually practice the skill. I’ve been fostering cats and kittens for a few years, and I think it has really pushed me to learn how to manage my emotions better.
We’re doing all sorts of things to get better at it 😊
It’s amazing how social norms have changed.
I’ve got a two year old, who drives me absolutely insane sometimes. I think if I grew up in my parents culture, where it was acceptable to smack kids or shout at them, I probably would.
That’s a horrible thing to say, but I’m glad I’m aware of the fact that it’s counter-productive. I’m almost jealous of my child, to know they’ve got someone like me as a father, as opposed to my father.
Or at least use classical conditioning to associate the I’m wrong feeling with the impending new cool facts feeling.
Plus being able to figure out a semilegitimate excuse to blow stuff up. “This could be very dangerous so we’re going to do several things to make it safer. That’s teaching safe lab techniques, so it’s educational!”
For anyone missing the show, there was a wonderful project called Streamlined Mythbusters where fans edited each episode down to remove the filler, pre and post ad recaps, etc. They usually also would reorder things so each individual myth was seld contained.
It’s wonderful, but some episodes legitimately got cut down to be 16 minutes long with no real content loss, which can be kind of jarring.
There is also Smyths, which is the same thing.
Unfortunately Mythbusters edits have a tendency to get pulled from the typical video sharing sites rather quickly. I wish someone would make a torrent of the entire series edited this way, and call it a day.
What, like the pinned post on the smyths reddit page?
Excellent; thanks. I cached the torrent to Real-Debrid, so if anyone reading this so happens to be using that service, you can download the torrent directly at 1Gbps by pasting the magnet link (the first one) in Torrents section of the website.
Thank you so much for sharing this!!
Oh god, I forgot, it was during the “REALITY TV!” boom where marketing and hype had more substance than the shows themselves, and if the show had substance… edit it like it is Reality TV…
I do not miss that.
Thanks for the Rec! I definitely miss the show. Adam’s YouTube channel sometimes scratches the itch, but not always.
You can find a torrent of all of them. I love putting Plex on shuffle when I’m doing chores around the house.
This is why most skepticism based programs don’t work, and Mythbusters did.
They didn’t try to be smug about it, they didn’t belittle people who believed in the myths, they never brought religion and politics into it, and the biggest pitfall they avoided: They never pretended that the “science was settled” and that they “already knew everything”, they simply did the research and went where the data took them.
Too many skepticism based programs seem to think the scientific method is running into a church, yelling “FAKE!”, and then running outside to hurl insults at passersby.
Mythbusters didn’t do that, they skipped the dogma and went straight to the science.
Also, most of the myths weren’t “serious”- it wasn’t like they were debunking flat earth or something.
I hate that debunking flat earth is now seen as serious rather than a 5th grade science experiment.
True enough.
I mostly watch that one guy on YT for his dog…
it wasn’t like they were debunking flat earth or something
Though you could do that. And with equipment and a type of experiment that would make sense on their show. The experiment conducted at the very end of the documentary Behind the Curve is perfect. Great big lasers, a simple and easy-to-visualise pass condition. If they had wanted to, they absolutely could have done it.
Could’ve had an episode where they tried as many experiments as they could fit into a two-week production.
I mean, yes.
but their myths generally didn’t piss surprisingly large segments of the population off. it was more… the urban legends that gave them an excuse to blow stuff up, shoot stuff, or otherwise crash stuff; all in slow motion.
It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.
I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn’t risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.
What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12’ long from tip to tail and probably 2’ in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn’t attack me on land either - but not that confident.
So, we meet at last, Florida Man!
No way! I left and I still have all my teeth.
but not that confident.
That’s how you bust myths!
Ive told people this many times, we need to create more room for failure. From school, to jobs, to building businesses, to loans, to health.
If we can try something because if we fail we can try something else, we would find a hell of a lot more to care about in this world.
And the most important thing we would care more about is ourselves
Science and academia, too. There’s way too few papers being published about failed experimemts. “I thought A, so I did B in order to achieve C, but it didn’t work out because of D.” is a very useful result.
Oh is it better to separate school from science and academia. Thank you, noted
I cannot agree enough with this statement and especially love your closing. We definitely don’t tend to be able to take enough time to really care for ourselves and try and fail at new things.
Oh thank you very much
Mandatory Dwarf Fortress in every school.
Okay thats it im tired of people commenting about this Dwarf fortress. How much of my soul does it cost? Whats that in hours needed?
First, read Boatmurdered. Then realise it’s worth whatever the cost is
Yes. Be ready for the most fun you’ll ever experience in a game.
If you’re the type of gamer that gets sucked into Rimworld, then Dwarf Fortress will very likely consume you.
Sometimes they called stuff busted because they couldn’t personally do it though, even though the myth involved elite athletics. I was pretty stoked when they brought in an actual ninja to test if ninjas can grab arrows out of the air. The guy actually did catch some arrows, which was quite amazing.
Yeah… There are many pitfalls to doing a Skepticism based program, sadly one of the few Mythbusters DIDN’T avoid was “Well I can’t personally do it, so it’s impossible for everyone!”
“Could the DOOM marine actually carry all those weapons while running around?” - Adam and Jamie couldn’t manage it, but they brought in someone who could.
Ha! That was fun.
Man i should rewatch the whole thing. I only watched few of the earlier seasons, totally missed this one.
I thought you were joking till I clicked the link.
Which was ridiculous considering they’re a couple of science nerds with no physical aptitude at all. LOL. They nailed the science stuff though.
I liked the one where they tested it you could stop a sword by slapping your palms together to stop the swing like in ninja movies They actually built a machine with rubber hands to simulate it. Long and short of it … No you can’t
But maybe… JK. The strength required to do that would be inhuman.
Yeah, one that I always think of is the see-saw one where a sky diver’s parachute failed so he aimed for a see-saw with a girl sitting on one end which resulted in the girl launched shot upwards and then landing safely on top of a building.
Their first test used basically a metal plank on a fulcrum and the forces did more to bend the plank than they did to launch the girl and she didn’t get high enough.
Their second attempt used a see-saw that was built using suspension bridge tech to essentially make it instructable, resulting in fatal forces from the launch. At this point, they called it busted.
But I see two unrealistic extremes where reality would exist somewhere in the middle where see-saws are designed to not break easily but not to the point of being indestructible and there might be a sweet spot where the forces are high enough to launch girl several stories up but not high enough that she dies from the forces.
Also, for the bull in a china shop one, I’m guessing that saying resulted from a bull ending up inside a china shop during a running of the bulls event, where stress would be high and there wouldn’t be an easy and obvious path out on the other side, plus maybe a shopkeeper suddenly trying to get it out in a panic. I think that would get the expected result, especially after a few shelves have broken and each step makes more broken sounds.
If you want to accelerate a person to “fly high into the air” speed over a distance of a see saw’s arc is going to kill the person. There is no sweet spot
The last comments in the image are exactly right.
It bothers me when I screw up and someone says “I fixed that for you” without explaining how I screwed things up, or how they fixed it.
If I’m wrong, I get it. I’m not always right, nobody can be right 100% of the time, IMO, that’s impossible. But when I’m wrong, let me learn so I can avoid being wrong in the same way twice.
IMO, schools have failed us, they teach us what we should know but don’t encourage us to always be curious and always be learning. It’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to be wrong. What’s not okay is never learning from your mistakes, and being so stubborn that when you are wrong, you double down on being wrong instead of seeking more information so you can be correct next time.
Being wrong is always condemned. You get low grades, you fail and get held back in some cases… It’s been rare that any teacher I’ve ever had would review anything from a test after its over. A very small number went back and said “a lot of people had trouble with x question from the test, here’s the answer and this is why it’s the correct answer”. IMO, that should be way more common… Review the test after its over and let the class know that low marks are not the end, they’re a wonderful beginning to learning. If you know what you don’t know and you have even the smallest amount of ability and willingness to improve, with the addition of opportunities to learn that, then you will always succeed.
Be successful. Get a bunch of shit wrong.
I’m glad you addressed the aversion to being wrong because I think that’s part of the core of what’s causing so many problems in America today (and maybe other places, but I can only speak to my own familiarity).
I feel like as a society we have created an environment where we demonstrate and reinforce to children from like kindergarten onward that the worst thing you can possibly do is be wrong. Someone who is always right is seen as smart, capable…in short, a winner.
Conversely, if you’re ever wrong, that completely and permanently undoes your entire argument/position and not only that, but you’re branded as unreliable/untrustworthy, uninformed, stupid, dishonest, or naive.
We expect perfection in correctness, and while being right is the expectation, being wrong is a permanent black mark that is treated as a more serious negative than being right is considered as a positive. Nobody just assumes that if you’re right about one thing that you’ll be right about all things, but if you get something wrong, there’s a very real shift toward double-checking or verifying anything else that comes after.
We even tease friends, family, and children for mispronouncing words or singing incorrect lyrics. Basically, being incorrect is so stigmatized that we reinforce to everyone, children and adults alike, that it’s better to not even try…not even make an attempt or join into a conversation…than to risk being wrong. When someone is wrong we use words like “admit” like it’s a crime, or admit defeat…and that just creates an environment where nobody is ever encouraged to speak up about anything for fear of (gasp!) being wrong.
And now we’re coming full circle on this at the highest levels, with our leaders being blatantly and objectively wrong…and absolutely dead set on avoiding having to admit that at all costs, setting a precedent that has oozed into even casual discourse among regular people. It seems like it used to be that being wrong was bad enough, but to dig in and refuse to admit it was even worse…lately it seems that admitting you were wrong is now even worse than doubling down on it…so now we have a situation where we can’t even agree on basic facts because one or more sides will be wrong but would rather insist on their position than just acknowledge they were incorrect.
You’re hitting on every point I could make.
My advice to anyone reading, and wanting to be okay in being wrong, the first step is admitting you don’t know something. Even if it’s something you should know. For example if you’re considered to be an “expert” or at least very knowledgeable about something and someone asks you about that specific thing, but it’s not something you know, avoid making things up, or trying to derive an answer from what you do know. Explain that you’re not sure what the right answer is, but you’ll figure it out, then do some research to figure it out. Don’t go off the cuff and start informing people of what you presume it is based on what you know, without knowing for sure.
The next step is when someone contradicts what you believe to be true, hear them out, then do whatever lookups and research you need to figure out if they’re right, or you’re right. Don’t immediately tell them they’re wrong, just listen, then find the truth and go from there.
The other thing I do, is I stay away from absolute statements as much as I can. Instead of saying that this thing I know is absolute and true, I preface it with qualifying statements like “I believe…” Eg, “I believe you need to use that switch over there to do the thing” rather than “use that switch to do the thing”. If you’re wrong then it was qualified as an uncertainty which can make a correction sting that much less.
Finally, always pursue the truth above all else. The point shouldn’t be whether you are right or wrong, the point is getting and giving true information to/from others. When getting seemingly true information from someone, trust but verify anything you’re told before passing that information along, whenever possible.
Always be learning, always be seeking the truth, always verify the statements of others. After a while, you’ll find that you’re right far more often than when you’re wrong… Having that kind of track record will help in your ability to handle the times that you’re found to be wrong and you’ll have a much easier time with it.
The whole thing is a process, so don’t beat yourself up over it. You will falter and catch yourself doing things wrong and making assumptions and providing information you later determine to be wrong. It will happen. Learn the correct information and move forward. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
There’s a ton more that I could say on the matter, but I think that’s the core points.
For me, I got a huge wake-up call while working at a large software provider doing end user support. I went to the escalation team and asked them about a problem, and they asked me about some of the details, when I provided them, they questioned “did you verify this? Or did you just take the customers word for it?”… I didn’t verify the information. They sent me back to verify the situation before they would engage on the matter, and IIRC, it ended up being one of the assumptions that the end user, or I made, which wasn’t configured correctly, that caused the problem. I managed to avoid needing escalation. From then on, “trust but verify” was a constant mantra. I’ve been growing and learning ever since.
More great points, I agree.
Also…it might just be me, but I find that I subconsciously have more respect for a person, both as a person and as a reliable source of information, if they present things with qualification, as you suggest. To me, it’s a sign of humility and an indication of an appreciation for the complexity of any given subject if someone is knowledgeable enough to both field questions and demonstrate proficiency while also being careful to qualify and delineate between what’s fact, what’s generally accepted, what’s their understanding, and what’s their opinion or guess.
I listened to a podcast last year about TOP GUN instructors and the grueling process they go through to become subject matter experts in their specific subject, and one of the things that stuck out to me was that they’re less worried about being right all the time and more worried about three qualities: being knowledgeable, approachable, and humble…with the understanding that with those three qualities, you’re going to eventually get to the point where you’re almost always right, with the added benefit that you’ve trained yourself to remove ego from the equation, so you’re less likely to fall prey to the trap of clinging to bad information/belief/assumption just because you want to look correct.
I only had time to read a few paragraphs, but yeah. That’s a good one.
I’ll try to return to this and finish this reading.
I loved their episode where they made a led balloon.
Surprise origami!
I would say escaping from quick sand and escaping from an alligator chasing me were two major concerns in my childhood. LoL, global climate change was maybe not even on the list, for which I will curse the petroleum industry.
