hey folks adam savage here in my cave answering questions about my tenure on mythbusters
uh these questions have been submitted in advance by tested patrons and this is a really
this is a nifty question c-morgan says that they use the results from the roundabouts are
more efficient than four-way stops experiment in a cyber security class they teach at university as
an analogy to demonstrate how it is beneficial for internet users to make an informed choice about
risks through a program of security awareness rather than blocking their access indiscriminately
what a lovely analogy to make from the traffic tricks episode to that c morgan wants to know what
other uses of the results from mythbusters experiments have you been made aware of
um by teachers i mostly hear about i number one i think that for for a while now we've been
we've been one of the default science classes for the home schooling crowd which means
i would i don't know if there's been an uptick in that during covid um i haven't gotten a lot
of emails or i haven't been tracking that so i don't know so i know a lot of parents
use mythbusters who are homeschooling to show their kids about science i know a lot of science
teachers use mythbusters as a reward um but one of my favorite things i've heard is science educators
using mythbusters as a way of demonstrating to people how messy and creative science is um that
is something i really deeply appreciate because it wasn't something i understood before we
started making the show it was something that i came to grasp as we made the show
i already understood the scientific method was a creative process
robert pearsig in zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance goes to some
lengths to explain that the scientific method is a deeply creative process
form a hypothesis
is a creative act out of what from what well your experience and your knowledge but still
it's coming from in here it's generated by by you and your experience but he noticed something about
forming hypotheses which is the more you form the more you can form they seem to be self-generating
which is a definition of a creative act like the more you come up with the more you can come up
with um so i really appreciated that because look mythbusters was we loved the controversy when
it happened for airplane on a conveyor belt or something like that that controversy was
bread and butter to us it's totally great we're we didn't have a horse in the race we don't care what
the answer is we just wanted to build a suitable methodology for testing and coming to an answer um
but as to what that answer is we we give two craps there's no we're agnostic with every test as to
what the final result would be um and building a good methodology is hard and exciting and
when you do it it's thrilling it's really thrilling um but that controversy meant
that a lot of people were constantly complaining you know calling us idiots go
i mean i i per standard practice of a youtuber i don't read my comments for the most part
uh but in those early mythbuster days the comment boards were just packed with people being like
these two idiots don't know what they're doing and there are particular people who got upset at the
way we performed science a particular group of people um and if i had excuse me just a moment
right as i was saying there's a particular class of people that took the most umbrage
at mythbuster's way of performing science and that group of people i would classify as grad students
i'm only being sort of facetious i think grad students get upset about our methodology because
they still believe that there's some perfect answer out there but the people that would jump to
our defense would always be the working scientists of the world who would explain yeah no sure their
iterations are small sure they're working under ridiculous constrictions sometimes but
they mythbusters i'm so proud of this thing that we did which was that we showed that
the scientific method is messy and confusing and creative and beautiful none of these words show up
in a fourth grade science class or none of those words showed up in my fourth grade science classes
but the more we help people understand those things about scientific discovery the more we help
them understand that science isn't some monolith of facts out there that some people know and most
people don't that's a really damaging cultural way to think about discovery and knowledge
it's not something that other people know it's something that you could know
it's something that you could grasp and the more we understand that the
better stewards of our culture and our world and our neighbors we can be
so
it is that it's that it's this it's the it's the educators who have explained to me that
they've used mythbusters to show the messiness and creativeness of science creativity of science that
is the other use i've heard of for mythbusters and it's one i'm incredibly proud of thank you
so much uh see morgan for that awesome question tested patrons keep submitting your questions
and i will continue to answer them some of the answers will be long some of them will be short
they'll all come for me safe and i'll see you guys next time