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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
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
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.