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Busting the MythBusters' Yawn Experiment
markmcb writes "Most everyone knows and loves the MythBusters, two guys who attempt to set the story straight on things people just take for granted. Well, maybe everyone except Brandon Hansen, who has offered them a taste of their own medicine as he busts the MythBusters' improper use of statistics in their experiment to determine whether yawning is contagious. While the article maintains that the contagion of yawns is still a possibility, Hansen is clearly giving the MythBusters no credit for proving such a claim, 'not with a correlation coefficient of .045835.'"
In almost every episode they do something that invalidates their own findings.
Sometimes they don't things more than once (even when required), other times they don't adequately recreate the conditions of the "myth."
The show is entertaining as hell, and sometimes they do conclusively prove things.
Latewire
At least, it can be. A quick search at Pubmed brings up eight studies that examine the phenomenon of 'contagious yawning,' including in macaques and chimps. So even if the mythbusters experimental setup was pretty crappy, and their sample was too small to have enough power to find an effect, at least their conclusion agreed with the literature.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
What "science" doesn't need, though, is the attitude that "real science" is above casual entertainment because "real science" is so staggeringly boring that hardly anyone would want to watch it. Science isn't some ivory tower, exclusive club that only the most arrogant can subscribe to. All science is, and this is what programs like Mythbusters try to get across, is applying logic and investigation to theories, instead of believing heresay and anecdote without question. You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to do science. Kids do science in science class every day in schools across the world. Teaching those kids normally involves simple examples of science to get them interested in asking more in-depth questions over time. This is what program like Mythbusters are all about. That some adults like to watch them because they "blow shit up" helps to broaden its appeal so that it doesn't get cancelled. It's not supposed to be rigorous, it's supposed to get you thinking. Here we are on Slashdot talking about it, so it achieved something.
Of course that's not to say there isn't room for more demanding science shows on television, and you cite a good example, because whether TV forces you to think or not is purely down to the quality of the programming. There is a serious issue in terms of the bias TV has towards undemanding entertainment, but where should the blame lie? Ultimately the people behind these stations are trying to make money, and they do that by giving people what they want (or what they think they want). We've created a monster.
Hey, they're teaching kids to go out and prove things for themselves rather than believe them off the bat, and that's never a bad thing.
Yes it fucking well is a bad thing when they don't teach you how to do it. They're teaching skepticism but then they're teaching hillbilly scientific practice instead of logic and the scientific method. The result is you get a bunch of kids who are rude, and think they know everything just because they can provide a counter-argument backed up with nothing but the shoddiest proof. That is very much a bad thing.
The Mythbusters basically piss on the scientific method in every show, drawing wild conclusions from a single lll thought out experiment, often with no controls (or weak ones), and often testing a single instance or brand and then generalising for all of that type of product.
Another poster put it correctly. People watch because they blow shit up, which is fine as far as entertainment goes. However no other show presents bad pseudo-science as science and fucks up the minds of kids who then think they understand science, when at best they understand skepticism.
Every time I've said this here I've been modded down but fuck it, it needs to be said.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This is another example of bad setups.. the guns that is.
.50 cal however). All of them shoot into water fine without shattering the bullet. My brother is in the army and they are taught that water is not cover and show them what a .50 cal can do to water and even brick bulidings! To make a long story short. Thay are just plain wrong.
While I was in NZ I had some pretty big rifles (not a
But as others have said. If you watch for science then you are the fool. But it would be nice if they didn't claim to be so accurate (implied anyway.)
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
It's only a good thing if they're first taught how to think critically and how to prove things. Too much of people "going out and proving things for themselves" involves three steps;
1/ Whoah! This is very complicated! It would take years of study to fully understand it.
2/ Screw that, I'm just going to apply my in depth knowledge of what looks right, and what seems to me to be common sense. That'll do just as well, be a whole lot easier and won't involve me admitting I'm out of my depth.
3/ My conclusion are in, can be summed up in one easy paragraph, and are just as valid as the guys who've spent 30 years studying the subject.
That doesn't mean that the Ministers are running around getting under-age girls pregnant, but rather that during the drought people turned to "simple pleasures" and sought spiritual easing of their hardships. Often a high correlation implies nothing about causation, but rather that two statistics are simply measuring the same thing.
The other thing I taught my students was that in most cases, Fischer's r is simply a tool used to apply for grant money, and should be regarded as an exploratory tool unless you're damn sure that you have a solid experimental design.
I don't know about the validity of their testing or the best scientific way of going about it, but some common sense provides quite a bit of insight here. Try doing a belly flop from a height of about 5 feet in a pool. Stings, doesn't it? Now do it from a 15 foot height and tell me how you feel. That numbness you feel is from the increased pressure of the impact. You can also do it with your hand. Smack the water real hard with your hand flat. You feel the impact of the water. Now do the same thing only VERY slowly. No impact pressure, huh?
Now consider the increased impact on a bullet the higher the velocity. It isn't difficult to understand that the faster the bullet is traveling, the greater the damage to the bullet. Further common sense would tell us that the shape of the bullet would matter too. The sharper the point in the end, the better it should be able to enter the water without damage.
Scientifically, it's all about viscosity. Water has a high enough viscosity so that at great speeds it can be frighteningly destructive. You can cut through steel plates with a stream of water thin enough and at a high enough velocity. Bullets hitting water is the reverse scenario, but the ability to do damage is still the same, it just isn't concentrated like it would be with a stream of water.
i would put the scientific accuracy between 2% and 98%, depending on the myth.. i mean, why buy a boat and try to ram it into a channel marker if you can simply solve the problem on paper? again.. entertainment. remember freshman physics where the prof made you draw a crappy little diagram for every problem so you could "visualize" it? yea, think how fun it's got to be to just straight up crash the boat; no diagram needed. :D which brings me to my 2nd point. i do, in fact, watch mythbusters for scientific reasons. sure, you wouldnt be caught dead doing that dirty physics in a lab or at class, but the show has a scientific air to it. the show is not a research lab.. it's not supposed to push the forefront of modern science.. but what it does do, it does extremely well: it gets the average TV watching American interested in science, at least so some degree. i mean, what person could possibly see several episodes without pondering the outcome of one of the myths during a commercial break? that desire to predict and understand results is the spirit of science that we should hope young people embrace and get excited about. anyway, you know geeks dont watch for the science anyway.. Kari and Jess are enough to get most geeks watching week after week.. i mean, theres something about a girl who looks that good and is smarter than i am to boot. must.. watch.. show....
"Luke, you've switched off your targeting computer, what's wrong?"
Why can't a privately funded entity teach science? What makes a government school the best choice to teach science? I agree that this particular show is not a good choice, but let's not just wipe TV or the internet out and put government schools up on a pedestal.
At the very least, scientific TV shows encourage people to learn more about science and the scientific method.
Carl Sagan taught me more about science with his Cosmos series (that has stuck with me) than any government school ever did. When I heard about this search engine named "Google" back on Slashdot so many years ago, I can still remember thinking back to the Cosmos episode where Sagan was talking about large numbers, like googol and googolplex. To see him try to roll out a piece of paper not with a googolplex of numbers on it, but merely the standard notation of googolplex (1 followed by a googol zeroes), it sticks with you. And on the smaller scale, to watch him place a drop of oil on a lake, and come back an hour later to explain that the entire surface of the lake now had a microscopic layer of oil across the entire surface. Or to demonstrate Einstein's theories of gravity with a stretchy sheet of material and some heavy balls of different sizes. Or demonstrating the 4th dimension by showing a "shadow" of a 4th dimensional item as a 3 dimensional item, much as we can see the shadow of a 3 dimensional item drawn on paper. I haven't seen Cosmos in a decade, and can still remember things he talked about.
This is something government schools rarely ever do, unless you happen to be assigned to the one-in-a-million inspirational teacher.
Another example -- planet earth, now running on Discovery HD Theatre. An absolutely stunning piece of scientifically interesting video.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.