Terry Crews has also been hanging out with Joel Osteen, so that sucks too.

No, but getting a respected “science person” to go on camera and repeat their clean-sounding PR “Deepwater Energy” name is just one of the ways that Big Oil legitimizes their actions to the public, and I’d have hoped someone who spent a decade plus in both the entertainment and soft-science industries could’ve seen through it. It would be like if Bill Nye or Neil DeGrasse Tyson made a multi-part webseries about Clean Coal.

Regardless, it wasn’t the first time the MB cast was tricked into shilling for fossil fuels, but an episode about clean-burning diesel in 2009 is a lot less aggregious than an episode about underwater oil drilling in 2023, in my opinion.

Mythbusters regularly featured weapons but they weren’t shilling for the US Military Industrial Complex.

Not the MIC, but I have no doubt that the NRA or other gun lobbyists helped produce those episodes.

The U-2 Bomber episode was a little shilling, there wasn’t even a myth. But what were they gonna do, not take a cool ass ride to the edge of space?

Getting people excited about science, and then demonstrating a bad way to do science is counter productive.

While I understand the spirit of your argument, I think you’re being a bit too pedantic in a forum where the audience isn’t primarily academic or hard science oriented.

Think of shows like Mythbusters and Bill Nye as modern day equivalents to the big “scientific demonstrations” you’d see people like Edison doing for audiences at the turn-of-the-century. They are in no way there to demonstrate an authentic experience of the scientific method because the minutiae of actual scientific research would never make good television.

That being said, Mythbusters does explain the process of how they design their experiments pretty well. A viewer who works in experimental sciences can easily spot any flaws in their methodology, and a non-scientifically inclined person would never spot them anyways.

No single experiment is ever going to be definitive. More rigor makes an experiment more reliable as a data point, but informal testing is still useful. It can be a “gut check”, or a launchpad for further, more formal, experimentation. Fuck around and find out is a tried and true staple of science.

Ironically the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test is a great example of this kind of testing. There was extreme uncertainty going into the test. There was no way to create a small-scale version of the experiment, no control to compare against. They didn’t know if the bomb would fizzle or ignite the atmosphere. They set it off to see what would happen, and then tweaked their future experiments and designs based on their observations.

Bill Nye is fine if you are in a country where he was broadcast and already have a predisposition towards science. That Mythbusters came at it from a pop-culture direction, and that it wasn’t aimed at children gives it a big boost.

Here are some direct quotes from Feynman regarding his thoughts on the value of science:

“With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries —certainly a grand adventure!”

“It is true that few unscientific people have this particular type of religious experience. Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don’t know why. Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.”

“Hardly anyone can understand the importance of an idea, it is so remarkable. Except that, possibly, some children catch on. And when a child catches on to an idea like that, we have a scientist. It is late—although not too late—for them to get the spirit when they are in our universities, so we must attempt to explain these ideas to children.”

And the full story is too long to quote, but in one of his books Feynman recounts performing his own little Mythbusters style experiment in front of NASA to show how temperature affects O-rings when they were trying to figure out what caused the Challenger to fall apart. An experiment he performed because he was getting sick of the stacks of papers piling up as the discussion went on and all they were doing was ruminating over the minor details. In his own words:

“I say to myself, “Damn it, / can find out about that rubber without having NASA send notes back and forth: I just have to try it! All I have to do is get a sample of the rubber.” I think, “I could do this tomorrow while we’re all sittin’ around, listening to this Cook crap we heard today. We always get ice water in those meetings; that’s something I can do to save time.” Then I think, “No, that would be gauche.” But then I think of Luis Alvarez, the physicist. He’s a guy I admire for his gutsiness and sense of humor, and I think, “If Alvarez was on this commission, he would do it, and that’s good enough for me.””

A lot of his autobiographical stories are filled with examples of him doing these types of experiments, big and small, ever since he was a kid. Ones without a ton of “rigor”. The same style of experiments that Mythbusters tended to do.

So Feynman would totally agree with Xkcd here about what’s really important when it comes to science, sorry to break it to ya. He was a Mythbuster at heart.

I’m dead now.

I’m gonna spook the salons hosted at your parties, like a proper ghost.

Did mythbusters not start with a hypothesis, decide a way to test it, and come to a conclusion based on experimental results? That’s the scientific method. It is science.

Of course it’s not rigorous, has tons of holes, is not breaking new ground, but it’s fun, and shares a scientific approach its viewers can relate to. If I wanted to know the truth beyond an urban legend, I’d probably just take an online opinion and base it on my own knowledge. That’s a horrible way to find “truth”. We’d all be better off (and happier) if we injected some Mythbusters scientific method into our decision making

Is she? I follow her IG and it’s always NASA or science related

I don’t know. We are in a different space for consumption too. I hear what you are saying. I’m just not sure it would be successful. I would watch it too. It’s still one of my favorite shows.

Yeah. Probably one of the larger items that makes going between instances a pain in the ass. Once they all have decent apps it’ll probably be better but still. Maybe even if they could have it ask “Hey you clicked this link. Do you want to go there-there or here-there?”