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 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.
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.
William Osman and Michael Reeves + the other youtubers
That would mean Failed Mythbuster Allen Pan™ could redeem himself
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.
They did try to bring it back, but it was really a show that needed its core cast to be what it was.
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.
You should checknout SMyths, fan edits that remove the cutting back and forth between stories so you get one myth at a time, and that cut out the repetitive narration meant for people joining mid-episode. Much nicer viewing
On YouTube or somewhere else?
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.
I actually got fired because I told a Flat Earther to leave the store I worked in, it was closing time and he was harassing people… But if you bitch enough to corporate you can get us to walk on water…
Whatever, I’m a Janitor now, never doing retail again.
It’s too easy to debunk flat earth, if it were flat cats would have knocked everything off by now.
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.
but not that confident.
That’s how you bust myths!
I wish more people in general would be OK with being wrong. Noone ever learned something new without knowing they’d been wrong
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.
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.
Quoth Adam Savage: “It’s not ‘my experiment failed’, it’s ‘my experiment yielded data!’”
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?
Thank you so much for sharing this!!
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.
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.
“Failure is always an option.”
It make me really sad when I learned that James and Adam were not friend.
James said their relationship doesn’t really extend beyond the show.
That’s fine and I think its pretty much the perfect example of a solid professional relationship (no need to be buddies or “like a family”) and what greatness can be achieved when you work with same endgame in mind. They may have disagreed plenty but only because they wanted to achieve the best outcomes possible.
While they are not friends, if you follow Adam on youtube, you’ll realize there is a huge amount of mutual respect between the two, even to this day.
You mean Jamie?
No, he means James. James Franklin Hyneman.
Who goes by Jamie, and always has?
Yes, he does always go by Jamie. Cordlesslamp technically wasn’t wrong though, and I think Adam even called Jamie by his full name a couple times for comedic effect.
Yeah, but the “for comedic effect” is key here. Unless you’re going for comedy or confusion, you shouldn’t refer to someone by a name they don’t use.
Yeah, I’m sorry English is my second language, sometimes I’m confused how names are spelled.
Interesting, what’s your first language?
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.
EFF?
Edit: Electronic Frontier Foundation, apparently.
Yep, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Key players in Right To Repair in the US. With good history of “fighting for the user”.
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.
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
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
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
If you’re the type of gamer that gets sucked into Rimworld, then Dwarf Fortress will very likely consume you.
Yes. Be ready for the most fun you’ll ever experience in a game.
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
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.
Or at least use classical conditioning to associate the I’m wrong feeling with the impending new cool facts feeling.
My favorite is the fan mounted to the boat blowing the sail causing the boat to move. I mean there are a shitload more experiments in fun episodes that are far better and more entertaining, but this one is my favorite because it flies in the face of logic. It shouldn’t work. My brain rejects the possibility. But physics and fluid flow work otherwise and I found it pointlessly infuriating only because I’d been unassailable in my confidence that it couldn’t possibly work. Yet there it is with a perfectly logical explanation. I still find it irritating even if I accept the reality of it. (Episode 165 if anyone’s wondering)
That said, I still follow Adam on various platforms. That enthusiasm and joy of discovery is all still there, along with some maturity and some life observations. Literally the only celebrity figure I follow.
