Were Any Myths Deemed Too Simple to Test on MythBusters?
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- Опубліковано 2 січ 2021
- Tested member Morgan Crisp asks Adam, "Are there any MythBusters myths that countered laws of physics that were dismissed for being too simple? Or myths too simple for testing?" Thank you, Morgan, for your question and support (and sorry, everyone, for the ambient noise)! Join this channel to support Tested and get access to perks, like asking Adam a question:
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I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to say this but I'll say it anyway, I think MythBusters will be what you're most remembered for because you and the others touched and changed so many lives whether it be those on the show or those who watched it from its beginning all the way to the end.
Dare you test Dr.Judy Wood and her book "Where did the towers go?"
Your chair sounds like a barking dog! 😂 Lub it up, eh?!
The bomb detecting device reminds me of our American government as a whole, with it's corporate masters. So man, what about a new internet media based Myth Busters? I think it would be a hit all over again!!!! ❤ (Btw, having lost The Amazing Randi not long ago, reminded me the world could sure use a few more to help expose charlatans OF ALL KINDS....)
@@DetroitMicroSound - Can I give you a mind blowing conspiracy theory? What if... that 'bomb detecting device' was just a 'prop' the company used? You know as a front when they laundered money or sold government secrets, to militaries over seas? 🤯 Enjoy you day! 🤗🇨🇦
My theory on dowsing is that finding water for wells in early times was a good paying trade, and dowsers likely had a good understanding of what geological features to look for, but kept that to themselves by using some bogus technique that couldn’t be replicated in order to guard their trade. It’s obvious that it fooled many people, so no surprise that the technique spiraled out of control from there.
I like this idea, it could also come from charlatans and people seeing them do it and trying to replicate it themselves and in doing so end up learning how to read the geography subconsciously
Yeah. My theory is that they did this subconsciously and they actually thought they were doing something
in MANY places if you drill deep enough you get water anyway
I had a similar theory, but that it also sorta worked for non-pros with the dowsing rods helping them to subconsciously draw conclusions. It's easier to come to an important conclusion either if you aren't completely sure or if you need to "blame" anything bad on the mystical device that pointed you there.
I gather that 96% of the Earth has water within drillable distance. The challenge to dowsers should be to find a dry spot.
There was an episode of Mythbusters where they tested the myth that poppy seeds can cause you to fail opiate drug tests. And what they found out was that the tests were bad and that the companies that make them lobby hard to keep them in use. Even though they can send innocent people to jail.
In the same category is lie detector tests. Its effectiveness is practically within the margin of error.
eyyy only my favorite capitalism
Drug tests pretty much will never get you any criminal charges. You might lose your job but you’ll almost certainly never go to jail lmao
@@michaelc.4321if you’re on probation and fail one, yes, you will.
wasn´t that a problem whit that there you are supposed to do two tests.
one is super sensitive and will trigger if you eat enouth poppy seeds. and one that requires a actual amount. I call them light (trigger on poppy seed) and heavy (only trigger on a serious amount)
the ide been you do both tests. if the light test triggers but not the other.. ignore not enouth to be conclusive on).
if the Heavy test triggers but not the light one... something went wrong do it again.
if Both trigger (not you can be sure).
that or cops would just read the light one that on the box state dont only read the light test as it can be triggered by room stuff. and its more to use for calibration of the test room and so on.
Adam: "No one ever wants to ask about my lecture on dowsing but this question is close enough and I'm taking this opportunity."
This might be the best "Nobody asked, but..." video I've ever seen on this site.
still fucking interesting though
The pyramid thing comes from a scientific journal in the 60's or 70's that ran a pyramid power article on April FIRST one year.
A lot of the people who buy into that suffer from an actual pathological inability to distinguish fact from fiction. That group of people has a much higher rate of schizotypal, schizoaffective, and schizophrenic people than the average population. They aren't unintelligent. Just sick.
Most video game myths and rumors came from magazines issued on April 1st.
Something like that rarely happens anymore but it was fun talking about these dumb rumors in school.
"It's the day the internet gets on the internet to make fun of the internet" - Homestar Runner
We did get a great album from Alan Parsons.
😂😅🤣‼️
"I'm done being mad. No, I'm not done being mad, I'm just done being mad on camera!"
I can really empathise with that.
Classic Savage honesty.
That's what I am here for
He can walk 3 paces, pick up a hammer and beat on something until he feels better, that must be carthartic.
He is mad right... how do people go to sleep blah blah... um, what about those at the FOB, invaders in another country... killing people in their own country... Just picture russia having military bases in the USA... and making threats to kill and killing US civilians... LOL okay... well that is what the USA does all over the world... GOOD JOB to those guys getting millions and millions for a device that does not work... maybe the gov should oh idk... test shit first?
@@mattlane2282 huh
@@ThePhrog714 this happens in youtube comments way too often
I still remember an interview with a dowser, he claimed that he had a 90% success rate and literally the next sentence he said there was water under 95% of the land around here.
Every home in the subdiv where I live has a well. Lots are all an acre or more, up to as much as 20 acres, but 2 acres is about the mean and 1.1 acres is modal - but _every_ house in the subdiv has water. The depth of the well varies, but not the fact that across the entire subdiv you can drill a well and in little as 70ft, and I doubt more than 300ft, find enough water to supply a home.
So therefore he had a lower than average success rate of finding water.
Honestly after growing up in swamp land where that water would regularly flood out into the street, I believe it 100%
It's no wonder dowsing culture exists only in places, where it's easy to find water. There's practically no dowsing culture in arid and dry places like middle east.
I mean, ground water is were most of the earth's fresh water is, something like 99% of freshwater is ground water. Dig deep enough, pretty much anywhere, probably even in a desert and you'll hit water.
On dowsing: It is SUPER important to understand that there is subterranean water almost EVERYWHERE on land. Even if the surface is arid and has no rivers or streams. It's not everywhere, but in general the question is not "is there water" but rather "how deep is the water and how easy is it to get to" (also, "what's the refill rate" but we can leave that aside for this).
That means that anywhere a dowser says there is water will likely have water even if the dowser is just guessing.
That being said. There ARE signals on the surface that there is shallow water. The color of leaves/grass, the mix of plants, the smell in the air, the softness of the ground, that area always stays muddier than the surrounding area, the temperature of the ground, maybe even the insect activity. The human mind is capable of knowing things without even REALIZING that it knows those things. (did you know that there is a correct order for adjectives in English (actually, not just English, but you're reading this in English so we'll keep it as that)? Were you ever taught that in school? Doesn't "big red ball" sound more correct than "red big ball"? weird that you can know a thing without realizing that you know it, right?)
It's entirely possible that the HONEST dowsers (the ones who have some level of success and truly believe) just have knowledge of how to read the terrain without realizing that they know how to read it. Of course, then there are also the dowsers that just work in an area that has a lot of shallow water so they get lucky all the time. Then there are the ones that play the part, but don't believe, and so check hydrological maps before they dowse. And then there are the ones who don't believe and are fully aware that they are just taking people's money.
The human brain is a pattern matching and story telling machine. But it doesn't really concern itself with whether those patterns that it finds or stories that it tells are real or not.
Trust the person who can say WHY there should be shallow water at that spot, rather than the person who says it's there because of sticks.
This deserves more likes, this explanantion is great
I have to admit "The yellow little digger" doesn't have the same ring to it
It's not enough to just find water. You want to find groundwater.
If the ground is consistently wet in some location, the water youre finding is likely surface water and not drinkable. That would be a terrible place to drill a well in.
I have a well, as do all of my neighbours. I was lucky in the sense that bedrock is very close to the surface here and there's plenty of groundwater seeping in from it. However, the ground above the bedrock is made up of very fine silt which allows surface water to seep into the well and it fouls the well, making my water undrinkable.
I bet Jamie is very glad that Adam's so willing to talk about Mythbusters this much, just for his own sake
Jamie and very glad do not appear in any sentences. That is not something that happens. He does not fear talking he just doesn't do it.
@@reklezzz9038Was this guy's name Heisenberg?
@@reklezzz9038Waltah stop telling people about your meth empire on UA-cam
@@reklezzz9038 Eyo do drugs if you need to but dont sell em. That's kinda evil of you homie.
@@reklezzz9038silent bobs a good guy man
I just realized the nature of Mythbusters that doesn't try to appease their ego by damning other people is one of the reason that makes the show so endearing to me.
You’re totally right, it’s lovely to have a good side. But I think the flip side, Penn & Teller Bullshit is probably the best example as other commenters have mentioned is equally beneficial. Charlatans deserve no respect.
Agree!
@@sondosoft4603 You would be surprised to know, there are people who _honestly_ think they are dowsers - because they _do_ find water. Nothing magic here, it's a simple ideomotor response (TL;DR: the dowser moves the wands involuntarily). It's people who have a good subconscious idea of where water _ought_ to be, and involuntarily move the wands to mark that place - and chalk it to "magical dowsing" instead to their own knowledge. It's surprisingly well documented, actually. (Hey, even James Randi himself adknowledges those are not charlatans but simply are wrong, and that's truly saying something.) My educated guess is that is THOSE dowsers are the ones Adam and Jamie had no wish to demean.
We need a myth busters like show devoted to exposing all the scammers and conspiracy theories, live streamed flights showing the earth isn't flat.
@@notfeedynotlazy I think this is an excellent point Ive worked in irrigation so I've witnessed people do this successfully multiple times, I've never met a guy who thought it was supernatural ability they possessed it was always done with the acknowledgement of "this is dumb, but for whatever reason it's probably gonna work"
If you point the sticks in one direction there will be water in that direction at some point just gotta walk further 😂
@@davidcarter2368 so the bomb one has to be a moving bomb that makes sense why it didn’t work
@@davidcarter2368 Oh please, any magnetic field created by moving water even on the scale of the Mississippi river would be so monumentally tiny it would completely undetectable against the earth's own magnetic field and it's variations.
.. or bomb 💣
@@davidcarter2368 moving water doesn't create a magnetic field...
@@davidcarter2368 agreed the water or even electricity had to be flowing, something to do with the magnetic field created by following water/electrons. I found an old septic line (solid copper) and an old electrical line that was still live at a property I bought, neither me or the previous owner new it was there. I was dowsing to track a known well line when I find them
Weird fun fact: In 2017, most of the water companies in the UK have admited to using dowsing rods to locate leaks.
They knew that it didn't work, and they chose it because they didn't want to find any
4:06 This is my favourite part of this (tied with his outrage at charlatans knowingly endangering people with a false sense of security). Intuition is that weird outlier in types of intelligence that's often so hard to define it sometimes looks like magic.
It’s an explanation I had never considered. I’m in school for land management and I can tell you with a certain degree of certainty where to find water underground based on the terrain and vegetation. I don’t know why I never stopped to think that’s probably what these dowsers do too, wether they know it or not.
yeah all the "dowsing rod" does is increase your sensory exposure. that's no small tool to have, but it's not detecting water, it's helping you feel the incline shifts of the terrain
@@jamescheddar4896 the dowsing rod does NOT increase your sensory exposure whatsoever. you can feel shifts in the terrain with your feet, and see it with your eyes.... explain to me exactly how waving a rod around in the AIR is helping you feel the TERRAIN? would holding out
it is at best, providing the ILLUSION that it is helping you navigate the terrain, because you'd have to be impossibly sensitive to weight imbalances, almost like a high precision electric weight scale in order to actually detect whether the terrain was changing from a wand you're swinging around. you'd also have to swing the rod up and down in an EXACTLY precise frequency, otherwise, your own extra arm or body movements are causing the wand to move, which is then not at all the result of the terrain changing.
in order for rod dowsing to be even a remotely accurate tool to measure differences in terrain, you would need all 3 of these things:
1. the ability to detect impossibly small imbalances just as a highly precise electric scale does,
2. the ability to impossibly precisely bounce a rod up and down at a perfectly even frequency, as to establish your "zero" for your rod sensing scale.
3. the ability to actually sense these the delta difference in the rods bouncing weight relative to the scale "zero"d weight of your consistent rod swinging.
you can google to find out that nobody has ever been demonstrated the ability to even remotely accurately guess the weights of things, and trust me, MANY people have claimed they could do so, and have failed trying.
even if someone did have the ability to accurately judge weight by waving around a wand (which is an organic impossibility as far as i am concerned), it'd STILL be uncertain whether the swinging is actually detecting the terrain changing, or if it is being caused by small movements from the wrist, or from bouncing from walking, which would cause uneven shifts in weight regardless of the "terrain" you walk on. i think we can say that there's absolutely nothing scientific to support the idea that this rod assists in any way in finding water.
@@ImHeadshotSniper I think you're attributing more to the ability of dowsing rods than James here is claiming. Like you're judging it on the scale of accuracy as a piece of scientific equipment, which quite rightly it isn't, but is that what is meant by "increase sensory exposure"? I don't think so
The dowsing rod works on the same principles as a spirit in a bottle does. For those who don't know, a spirit in a bottle is a bottle with a small pendulum inside of it that you place in the middle of a table, where the participants will place their hands on top. You can then ask the group of participants yes and no questions, and the pendulum inside the bottle will change the way it is swinging to give you either a yes or a no, based on what the participants feel like the answer should be. Same principle as the ouija board.
Obviously that's just a magic parlor trick, but it is based on an actual scientific effect called the ideomotor response. Without consciously making the exact movements in your hands that allows the pendulum to swing one way or the other, your mind will make your hands move in tiny imperceptible ways that travel through the table and the bottle and into the pendulum, giving you the answer that was already in your mind.
Same with the dowsing rods. they can't make you feel or sense or give you an answer to anything that doesn't already exist in your mind, but it can help express those tiny things you're not even conscious of.
@@AliceHearthrow i personally believe that when someone spells out a specific name on a Ouija board for example, that somebody is fully consciously directing the result.
i'm not even convinced that less specific choices like the "yes, no, maybe" would be even remotely unconscious, since someone MUST consciously intend to move their hand in some direction, otherwise they wouldn't move anywhere and the Ouija would be boring, especially when asking a question suggests to the players that there should be an answer.
i believe the same goes for essentially every ideomotor function actually.
the wikipedia page says that ideomotor is a concept in hypnosis research which i think is bullshit, and honest hypnotist performers like SpideyHypnosis on youtube admit that you have to play along/act/role play for hypnosis to convince the audience that it "worked".
if you're going to mention "medical" hypnosis like "memory regression" i would like to point out that what someone claims to suddenly remember might not necessarily be accurate, and could potentially even have been newly made up, possibly even caused by a suggestion from the hypnotizer.
basically, i think the power of suggestion exists vaguely in the sense that if i suggest you to drink water and you're thirsty that you'll (likely) do it, but i don't think that it can help recover lost memories, or convince someone to instantly sleep.
when i ride my bike, i can just "think" about turning left, and i go left. while i can pretend that was unconscious, it required my fully conscious intention to turn left.
just because i didn't catch myself making the incredibly small imperceptible motions i had to in order to make to turn me left on my bike, doesn't mean that i didn't consciously choose to do them.
edit: i think it's important to clarify that i don't mean to imply that the unconscious mind doesn't exist, though i do realise it might seem like i'm saying that. i just don't believe that dowsing (the entertainer consciously going where they choose), and ouija moving are actually unconscious. -----
------ i think unconscious things would be for example, the causal determination of a conscious decision to want to choose to turn left, or to choose to tell people that you can detect water with a special rod when you consciously know that you're not entirely sure yourself that the rod does anything.
now when it comes to dowsing, i don't think it is even remotely plausible for someone to actually judge imperceptive differences (like the ones i make when i "unconsciously" turn my bike left) in the ground level effecting a rod, while they move around to deduce the location of water based on these effects on the rod they definitely can't feel whatsoever.
we must be careful not to conclude that just because a person who found water has a dowsing rod in their hand, does not necessarily mean the rod was any help whatsoever in finding it.
to me, a functioning dowsing rod would lead any trainable person directly to water without the need of ideomotor b.s. to help them.
Seeing Adam answer the question in the first minute and then go on tangents about things he’s clearly just passionate about is so endearing to me.
It's a ton of fun to watch
I think it's an excellent way to make a video. If someone only cares about the answer, they get it quickly and can move on, and the rest of us can enjoy his story.
I was entertained and enthralled by this video. I also learned an awful lot.
So ... wow!
Annoying
It's nice not to be strung along for a garbage answer, but instead earn us staying around because of an interesting rant.
"My old show 'Mythbusters'"
Suddenly feels the years bear down
I’m never going to feel as old as I did hearing that
I'm actually 14 and I felt old
Yeah my age is becoming an issue
How about "way way back in the day"' describing 2008?
Dear God give me the list of the Goofballs
Funny that you mention testing the razor blade sharpening pyramid. That whole thing became a thing when I was about 15 and my Dad was completely into it and it made no sense at all to me so I built several pyramids and tested to the best of my ability considering I didn't have anything like a microscope. I got my Dad to test the pyramid blades against new blades and used blades without him knowing which was which. I even got him to use the pyramid blade, which had been well used before it went into the pyramid, for about a week. A piece of tissue paper dragged across his stubble was the test. By the end of the week it looked like it had gone through a paper shredder. Myth Busted? No-he wanted to believe what he wanted to believe so he thought the pyramid had done some good. Foo!! What can you tell people like that? All you can say is, "Bless your heart, you lovable punkin' head."
The Khufu Pyramid is a sound chamber that was used to enhance people's intelligence, but the shape might have just been for efficiency of materials. Archimedes and Socrates were part of a secret society that did a pilgrimage to egypt where they were put in this sound chamber. Modern medicine has discovered that extended periods of time in darkness and silence heals the brain, if it heals it it can make it more efficient.
I guess you could say he’s... not the sharpest tool 🥁
Confirmation bias is powerful and unavoidable.
Yet still they vote.
Sounds like the same thing as the COVID vaccine effectiveness. Lots of people just want to believe.
I was an aid worker in Iraq and we’d see those “detectors” being used when we went to meetings in government offices and just kind of sigh.
Well, you're not in a billion pieces right now, so OBVIOUSLY they worked exactly as intended!
Pretty sure this is how science works. ( :
It would not surprise me in the slightest if that company was a deliberate front designed to simultaneously leech money out of a target while also undermining that target's security via exploiting their superstitions.
@@GreyAcumen I hate that that makes sense 😬
@@GreyAcumen The only problem with conspiracy is that it requires people to be good enough to predict multiple future events consistently and accurately. In reality, fiasco is usually a better explanation than conspiracy.
The Movenpick Hotel in Bahrain used to use one during the Gulf War that was actually a "golf ball finder". A little black box with a telescopic car radio aerial on it that the gate security guard made a great show of waving all over your car before he would let you into the carpark. I talked to the manager about it and he was convinced it was the real deal. I believe some Brit guy was eventually prosecuted for fraud on that one.
I want to say thank you for the pyramid myth, because it illustrated exactly the difference between motivated thinking and scientific thinking. If you wanted to believe, then the initial result of the pyramid preserving the apple would have been convincing, but if you think like a scientist, you repeat the experiment and show it was something about the set-up that was wrong.
It really taught me how to apply my thinking, not just in science, but also in social circumstances.
Hear HEAR!
Very well said!
i remember seeing that ep along with the mind reading cannon..[chuckles] yes a very silly myth but some things are just MENT and HAS to be busted to have people think in a more reasonable direction
This comment will never have enough likes. I came here to say exactly this. There is nothing to apologize for Adam - that is one memorable episode.
Same. I grew up in the 1970s when the ESP boon was seemingly at an all-time high: pyramid power, ESP, brain waves piloting toy race cars, biorhythms, and such. I loved this episode.
I remember being at FSU going through Meteorology when the episode aired concerning the myth/cartoon where you shoot a bullet straight up and it comes down in the barrel of the gun. EVERYONE in the class knew that was busted in a picosecond...because we had just been going through the rotational constant of the planet. instead of the normal class that day, we got the teacher to help us calculate the distance the shooter moved by virtue of standing still on the planet. we also tackled the Coriolis effect on the bullet as it flew.
Holy shit it’s the Lisan al Gaib
I absolutely adore the show, and all its presenters, but my only criticism of Mythbusters is that occasionally they'd take the Myth being tested too literally. The best trajectory from which to catch the bullet back in the barrel, should not be assumed to be initially vertical.
There still might be some trajectory where it's possible, albeit a 'million to one' shot, and an even less likely catch, especially if bullets tumble at terminal velocity. A vertical barrel might even still work at the poles if the winds were unprecedentedly calm. The sadly missed Grant would've been in heaven building a robot to test this, but looking at what Mark Rober and Stuff Made Here can do, well it's infeasible, hugely challenging and incredibly expensive. But it's a big claim to say it can't be done at all, with the benefit of luck and technology.
@@bigutubefan2738 yes, often times the outcome was dubious because of this. One that stood out to me was "throw like a girl". In the test, the girls flailed the ball, and the boys had better form. Then they had them use their non-dominant arm, and they all flailed. The verdict? Busted.
The phrase isn't suggesting women are incapable of throwing the ball. Women play baseball and softball ffs. The phrase simply means to throw with bad form, or weak. All of the girls brought on had poor form and threw slow. Even with coaching they would still be weaker than avg.
I get it's not pc to say anymore, but cmon.
@@jamesbyrd3740 This is such a weird disconnect from the sports world and the rest of society. In the sports world, there isn't anything even vaguely controversial about this, it's sorta kinda already been born out through human history lol. So much so that most female athletes understand this(just like my scrawny 5'5 135lb ass always understood that I never had a chance at a basketball career, even against a lot of women LOL). I mean, the Williams sisters, as incredible as they've always been, said they could be any male ranked lower than #200, not #20 or #2(and they still lost when the #203 ranked male volunteered, beating Serena 5-0 and Venus 6-1 back to back).
But, the moment you step outside of the sports world, everyone else is playing dumb like they just have no idea how there could be differences between male and female athletes - it's surreal, like some 'Twilight Zone' crap, people just pretending like they don't understand basic reality.
@@jamesbyrd3740you’re misremembering. he myth was the idea that poor-er throwing was due to being a girl. I.e. women tend to throw worse due to being women. This is obviously not true. Women tend to throw worse on average because they don’t have the same amount of training or life experience with sports as men do on average.
They busted it by showing that at the highest level of pitching, both the man and the woman pitcher had virtually identical stats. This shows that the biological differences between men and women don’t matter nearly as much as we think when it comes to a skill like throwing.
Me and some friends in a university town with a big theatre department got in a bit of a spat with a local dowser. We kept replying to her facebook posts about offering 2000$ dousing services with 'This is a WIZARD town, your kind are not welcome here'. She kept blocking us. A few of us showed up to a seminar she hosted dressed like discworld wizards, she was NOT impressed, but I think we might have undermined her beleivablity to at least some of the crowd, might have saved a few fools their money.
Side note, this is an area of Canada with ABUNDANT ground water, may as well be a douser in a fucking swamp for all the service you are actually providing.
The $ goes in front of the number, Mr. Wizard.
@@stargazer7644 A year late and a worthwhile point short, but keep tryin bud.
@@stargazer7644 Do you say dollars 3 or 3 dollars, no idea why it's supposed to be in the front, my currency puts itself after the number and many others as well, so it makes even less sense.
Actually a question, why is $ in the front of the number?
@@mementomori7160 Blame the Brits. The US and Canada are former British colonies, so we both use the British convention where the monetary symbol goes before the number (along with some Latin American countries, too). $10 £2 etc. Why did the Brits do it this way you ask? It appears to have come from the Romans.
@@stargazer7644 Interesting, now I wonder the very beginning of this notation as well as the currency after the number notation, why are there 2 way? I have only more questions
“Were any myths deemed too simple for Mythbusters?”
*No, but let me tell you all about these bullshit dowsing rods*
Edit: Adam made a WHOLE VIDEO about how dowsing is BS and why, yet there are still a bunch of you trying your damndest to convince us it’s real. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
He's worse than Michael Stevens when it comes to tangents
If it was a simple myth, they knew how to build around that, and most of the time it was the trio that got those myths and did a fantastic job.
🤣🤣🤣
But it wasnt a SIMPLE myth. If someone says it works and "really" works for them it becomes problematic to prove wrong. It leaves so much to user: "you didnt hold the stick right" "you didnt have sun over your head" or whatever.
Well, the question was kind of two-fold. Morgan asked if there were any myths that were too simple, but they also asked if there were any myths that “broke the laws of physics” that they didn’t do. He answered both sides, the first being “not really” and the second being the rod story.
“Billy what was your favorite Adam Savage interview?”
“The one where he called dousing bullshit for a looooooong time.”
huh surprise grumps
@@TheMetroidblade xP I just finished watching a couple comps from them too
Adam and everyone deserves a grump rant for something this evil. I'm glad he got that off his chest, not that it helps much but hey "the more you know about corporate greed and scams!"
@@cookiesyruplover The more you know... Doesn't matter because capitalism has proven time and again there's barely any consequences for this kind of evil.
Blood diamonds and sweat shops and scams like this are a thing and the people behind that are still getting rich while poor people go to prison for shoplifting and weed.
The world is shitty and unjust and yet no one is going to do shit to stop it.
The grumps influence has far reaching arms
So basically one of the reasons certain "Myths" that could be busted easily weren't was to not humiliate and demoralize someone who really believed it like the dowser, def can respect that and in a weird way its kind of heartwarming to know that there was that level of integrity hats off good sir.
They definitely could have found somebody that knows how to do it, but isn't committed to it being some sort of metaphysical thing. I learned how to do it back in the '90s from an old time miner, and it still doesn't sit right with me that something seemed to be happening. It would be a lot easier for me to dismiss as a crock if I wasn't able to do it.
Where it does break down is that I have a great degree of skepticism that rods crossing really is in response to something external to the person doing it.
Adam being pure and wholesome for a whole episode is good for the soul.
This went from “was there any myth you didn’t test because it was an easy “do it at home” myth to “DOWSING ISN’T REAL!” In about 2 seconds
He really do be spitting facts doe
I'm here for it
The dowsers are mad😂
Atsc founder Jim McCormick was sentenced to 10 years in 2013. Some may reasonably argue the sentence was too short but he did at least face justice for his fraud.
I dont know if id call 10 years enough to be justice but at least he got something
He was only convicted of fraud.
They should have sent his to a country where his device got someone killed and put him on trial there.
I'm sure the sentencing would be fatal in at least one of the countries.
They should make him 'dowse' for weapons until he misses the one that kills him.
@@douglascampbell9809 On trial in Iraq sure would have been justice!
@Neil Peters @Douglas Campbell Once he is near or after release there is no reason other countries or persons could not go after him legally for other crimes & request extradition ( except that would cost them with little chance of getting a return ). BTW this ( www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-43900624 ) suggests he was due release in Summer of 2020
It’s unreal how there‘s one specific thought, that I keep having every time I watch any of Adams videos: „that guy is one heck of a kind-hearted human being.“
For all his ingenuity, ability to entertain and technical knowledge - it’s his character I find most impressive.
I think out of all people of public exposure, there may not be a single one I am more sure to never hear any disappointing stories about.
I recent did this on a new video, but I feel confident that if America had a "Knighting" system, such as Britain does, that Adam would've been knighted long ago!
He's is indeed an amazing human, in so, so many ways, but his kindness foremost! _(which is also why I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize!)_
For us Europeans, it is hard to believe he really is American... 😂
@@lhploh you’re one of those Europeans lol
I once worked a summer at my old university as a mover for a summer program that rented out class, dorm and lecture hall space for groups and organizations wanting to do summer programs. It was mostly Sports and Education programs for kids and middle schoolers but I remember doing a delivery for this one group using some class rooms and it turned out they were a dowsing group that taught classes in dowsing to people gullible enough to pay for them. The worst part was knowing this was happening on the grounds of a university, a place of higher learning and logic and reasoning. That university, like most, just valued the money they got out of the group in the end.
I'm a hydrogeologist and unfortunately my step dad hires dowsers for his property. His well is in a terrible location on top of a hill, so of course he barely gets anything... But he blames the well driller, while the dowser gets all the praise for "finding water." The reality in the east coast is that you'd be hard pressed to drill a well that DOESN'T produce water.
Have any dowser debunker tests you've heard of map an area hydrologically and then set dowsers loose upon it? I haven't looked much, but the tests I see the folk practice subjected to just deal with bringing water to the rods or taking dowsers to still water out of the ground. Willow dowsing looks like BS to me but copper dowsing kinda makes sense in a moving water and electrical field kinda way, like the person or rods are reacting to the ground condition rather than just the presence of water. Not to say there aren't hacks, charlatans, and idiots and not to say I think dowsing has merit, but to try and find the positive case for scientists to use to debunk or enrich dowsing.
@@PatrickKniesler a fair point of intrigue. Plenty of superstitions and hoaxes were at one point semi-valid. For instance, modern medicine and cleaning techniques has made kosher laws practically pointless, yet at the time it makes sense. Some incenses were used to "purify the air" and do have some anti-bacterial properties (i mean its smoke its anathema to life) and adds a pleasing smell... which was another one, miasma. On average things that smell bad aren't clean, and so considering bad smells a sign of health hazards isn't crazy.
Where I am in the midwest, you can drive wells with a sledge hammer, fencepost driver, or similar manually operated implement. My dad and uncle drove a well in their mom's garage and only used about twenty feet of piping above the three foot wellpoint to get to enough water to run a 5-bedroom house. The biggest problem around here is sand contamination of the well point, which is why they had to drive a new well for the house. It's like the quote about WW2 bombs being 100% accurate in that they hit the ground every time :) Now, when I moved to the west coast, the rumor was that water wells were almost a mile deep. Since they are apt to get less rain in a whole year than my current hometown got in about 90 minutes earlier this summer, that's not too far fetched.
@@PatrickKniesler James Randi did some tests like this. He had several pipes buried and had water running through some, still water, and empty pipes. They didn't even have to get it right every time. They just had to do better than the average person guessing by a small margin. They couldn't do it.
I feel your pain. I work in the IT field, I get asked for advice extremely rarely.
Dude's gonna be in a nursing home still answering questions about Mythbusters one day.
Come on now, Adam´s not *that* old...
He's too Savage to go be in a nursing home. Maybe if he builds one from scrap in another episode of daily builds, but it should have his garage inside.
@@Diortelon But Covid and glboal warming permitting he will be.
@@57thorns What's glbowl warming
Just shows how good the show was.
4:44 made me think someone was knocking at my door!!!
I love how you were the young one when I was a kid and seeing you become the old one is so amazing
This is what happens when that company that sells x-ray glasses in the back of a magazine becomes a defense contractor.
Almost literally what this is. The original inventor was originally selling them as "golf ball detectors" - and then decided to sell them the the cops for detecting drugs in the USA. After that got shut down they moved around the world and started selling them for military purposes (sometimes even the identical model used for "finding" golf balls, but with a different sticker)
@@Artyomthewalrus Most police departments test out the equipment they are looking into buying to see if it works and if it actually helps them do their job. Too bad the military didn't try as hard.
@@benyspensierijr.5973 it wasn't the us military. it was arab militiaries whose ideology makes them hate dogs.
@@toomanyaccounts lmao
I lived in Syria during the early years of the war and would see those sticks being used by military checkpoints outside cities, and of course, they didn't stop any bomb violence. Thank you for shining a light on this and I hope the people responsible get the justice they deserve.
@@markmcelroy1872 I agree that its terrible.. but does the military in these countries have no screening for what they buy?? do their guns work or is it airsoft?
@@djsalose I just presume corruption, just have to know the guy in change of procurement and get his beak wet.
@@djsalose probably because they make people feel safe even when they don't. Just like how our airport security checks work some of the time but not always, people feel safer and they scare off some of the people who don't have the nerve to risk it.
I think the officials who approve of the purchase should also go to jail
@@zym6687 plus a bit of "the others have & use it, if your country falls behind because you didn't buy it as well - it's your head on the line".
MythBusters was such an integral and positive part of my late childhood and early adulthood. I'm so thankful to you for making such educational and instructional videos high on the moral compass.
6:44 That is such a pure and beautiful expression of moral outrage, simply perfect! Thank you Adam!
“I’m sorry for the Pyramid Power myth”.
Just think of the 2020 versions of these things you could test now...
Five Minute Crafts
@@stupidthefish4981 All hail Ann Reardon.
Think you forgot the T in Ann's last name
@@davidmoutray2644 I guess after years of making the show they learned certain things such as what things they *shouldn't* do. I guess the pyramid myth might have made good TV but looking back maybe they thought it cheapened the show by giving some pseudoscience airtime?
Jimmy Hoffa buried at the Meadowlands, 12,000 votes missing in Georgia....
"How do they go to sleep"
"Illegal drugs they bought with the money."
And being completely amoral sleaze.
You wipe your sweaty brow with a disposable $100 bill before shooting it into your golden garbage can, from way out in three-point territory... SWISH!
Ah... Good times. Night kids! Babe, I'm going to the strip club. I'll bring one home for us.
@@dennisthemenace3695 Good gravy, now I'm visualizing Smaug on his pile of loot.
I would also say that even though these guys are assholes, how in the fuck did the Iraqi government spend 60k on each without doing any research on their actual effectiveness?
It's one thing to scam an innocent person, it's another thing to scam a government or organization too stupid to verify your claims. I'd say the lives lost are on the government as they bought these devices. They may have even known they were garbage but knew they would boost morale among superstitious troups.
@@namAehT Bingo. He didnt sell them directly to the roops or try to convince them they worked, the gov. Bought them and conveniently didnt test them kr warn their troops, so it's the gov. Fault
It's fantastic to hear about this. Mythbusters has never really felt disrespectful. It was always about testing ideas, never about testing _people._ It would've been easy not to think too deeply about what you're doing... so it's awesome that you guys took this so seriously, and in hindsight I think the show really speaks for itself in that regard as well. There's a quality to it beyond just the production quality and the quality of its concept, and it comes from things like this.
For all your "mad scientist" vibes, you're a great role model.
This is why I respect Adam. Even if he doesn't agree with or believe what they believe in he doesn't want to make a fool out of them. He chooses to show them a basic level of respect as a fellow human being.
If only more people learned to do this the world would be a better place.
A man in this modern era that isn't out to make an idiot of people he disagrees with even when they might actually be idiots. Adam is too pure for this world.
I think the proviso being that those he disagrees with aren't doing harm.
Ye and he has a point about dowsing being more just a way to read ones own intuition, one would probably need to spend decades being wrong 99% of the time until they saw results
So let's make the world worthy of that notion.
I still think some people should be called out and their awfulness exposed. We put up with far too much pseudoscience.
@@jameshenderson4094 Except unfortunately those who never did their own experiments make comments and yet never tried it. This was shown to me two nights ago. I was able to replicate it over and over on water lines in yards in my neighborhood. I literally could feel the magnetic pull. Why would I lie about that? I have no reason. to push an agenda of disbelief though, so many just try saying "he is lying" to protect their own "belief". As a scientist, it would be nice to see Adam explain the magnetic pull instead of disregarding what he has never tested.
"There are dead people on your dance card" is a phrase I am absolutely going to use.
Gosh I am so happy I discovered this channel.
Glad you mentioned about the clues in the landscape and intuition as that is my concept about how dowsing “works”. It shows that you have an open scientific mind. The Abhorghast should have had a dowser on board and you might have survived that encounter lol
As soon as you brought up dowsing, James Randy was a very first thing that came to my mind and I had a feeling there was a chance you were going to bring him up and his experiments with dowsers.
I love the idea that you would get a douser, let him use his stick to find water, after finding water, taking away the stick for him then finding water again and be like: "the ability to find water was inside you all along"
Yeah, but if he believes he finds because of the stick, he wouldn't find it without it.
Dowsing involves a lot of different types of devices for a lot of different purposes. I cant imagine the forked stick doing anything at all. I have personally used metal divining rods and they definitely move on their own and quite suddenly. I would have been more than happy to go down just to finally have an explanation as to why and how they move on their own because the only thing I could come up with is polarizing the metal with the nervous system. Because they have to be held firmly enough that they don't wiggle when walking, and if you're holding them that tightly, then they only move to cross, they don't move parallel and they don't move away from each other.
As somebody that's generally a believer in science, it bugs me that this seems to violate what I understand the rules to be. Hence, my suspicion that it's probably got to do with magneticism and probably the result of thoughts in the person dowsing rather than something metaphysical.
Where I haven't found any sort of reliable proof of something happening would be the next stage of it actually predicting or locating anything. That's the part where I think that if we ever understand what's going on completely, we'll probably determine conclusively that it doesn't do anything.
I'm an electrician, and I know some older guys who swear by dousing, I even know a few older electricians who say they douse for buried conduit or electrical wiring by holding two lengths of bare copper wire. They were so adamant about it, I didn't feel like arguing, I didn't believe it, but it really wasn't worth getting into it.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeI be used those sticks before.
Half of the ability comes with how far your own personal aura extends.(don’t ask me how I know this, it’s personal)
So, I was actually able to “train” others in how to use the divining rods.
This was most evident in a steel yard, where the interference was so incredible, we couldn’t get a reliable read from any electronic monster we used.
I handed a guy these rods, and we actually did find the underground pipe and the “missing” valve.
We began to dig, and found the pipe that was leaking.
Right after we found it, all of the “white helmets” and crew leads came out, and all their eyes were wide.
“How did you find it?”
We showed them the rods, and then they showed us the VERY old maps of the infrastructure.
We had put cones where we figured the pipe went, and it turned out that were were right on the money!
After that, we always trusted the rods when things were iffy, and whatever underground utilities couldn’t be found.
One of the handiest uses was for underground clay drain tile that was never mapped.
It was laid over 100 years ago to drain water from places, places I never did may research to find out about.
The technique works, and most underground workers know of it, learn it, and trust it.
We just don’t advertise it, or even brag about it.
It’s just a fact we learned to accept and live with.
The real water were the friends we made along the way.
Does seem like dowsing would be a much more of a Penn & Teller, Bulls%$# episode, than a mythbusters show.
Feels too simple for them, too.
I remember someone making an episode about it, but if it wasn't Penn & Teller then I have no idea who. I remember clearly some of the blind experiments with buckets filled with something.
Is according to some linked to magnetoreception.
@Stefan Work: Of the few people who responded to and were actually tested in the Million Dollar Challenge that Randi had available for years, two who actually went through the preliminary tests were dowsers. Seems that their confidence in the efficacy of the ability surpasses that of charlatans like Sylvia Browne and such who are just grifters.
Adam brought up the pyramid power episode and may have not been clear. As I recall after that one and maybe another they banned all ogie bogie (I think that was the term used) myths.
Weird thing to answer since there were so many myths on the show that were on the level of "c'mon you could've calculated it in seconds rather than spend money for explosives"
read the last word you wrote.
That answers why the money is worth it
@@1draigon Well yeah but a simple myth is a simple myth doesn't matter that explosives bring in the views.
I love that you personally knew James Randy. I would've loved to meet him.
*mythbusters in a room together*
"It's too simple, we shouldn't test it"
"Can it be blown up?"
"Ok let's do it"
YES
I suspect every myth, had a C4 rating😁
@@gallimead Well you know Jamie's moto "When in doubt C4!" 💣💥
Why did this make me laugh, im a sullen person?
@@illmakeyoucryboysmallek8461 w h a t
"Two of these boxes are filled with booby-trapped explosives, and one is filled with your payment. Just use your equipment to pick the box without the explosives and you can be on your way."
He will be on his way regardless
You are so fun to watch. Your verbal presentation is so active and thoughtful and rapid fire. Your body is totally fidgety. I'm sure the average camera person would pull out their hair trying to keep you centered and focussed. 😂 Thanks for your enthusiasm and Mythbusters.
When I was 8, I wrote into mythbusters asking them to test if it was possible to flip a fried egg just by flicking the plan.
Now I do that every time I make eggs
“We had some experts who were real goofballs and we ended up making them look great on television.” That’s an odd way to talk about the cast of the show
You know Tim, you’re right. It is weird. But accurate.
I have no proofs but neither doubts (?
"Its hard to prove negatives..."
Oh I am so curious who he rly meant
I'm 100% sufre it was the ninja guy
The best way to test a bomb detecting device is to send the CEO into a mine field with it.
ua-cam.com/video/IwBLL7Z3OvU/v-deo.html&ab_channel=SmithsonianChannel
Surely tho they’d need to show it working to sell so many? I’ve seen a documentary on this but I don’t recall them explaining how they did that
It’s pretty f*cked up
@@daemonork6052 What a legend that guy is.
Basically.
If someones selling a product, especially one that's meant to save lives, and they claim it works; they should be willing to test it themselves to prove it.
Guys who made the first bullet proof vests; literally tested and displayed it? by wearing it and shooting each other. Thats someone who's made a product, believes in it, and will stake their own life on it before putting yours in it.
Falls by the old situation of:
"Oh it's perfectly safe, go ahead!"
"You do it first then and show me"
"Oh I can't do that."
"Then clearly it's not 'perfectly safe'"
This is my favorite video you've posted! Super enlightening!
I really respect that you didn't choose to make a show about making a fool of people who believe in what they are doing.
You know Adam Savage is awesome when he says "our" show after all these years.
Would you want an offended/angry Jamie coming after you, with all the skills he has, the supplies he can access? Oh, and the inside knowledge he'd surely have on Adam:-)
I'm just imagining Jamie on the other side of the camera, arms crossed, his stone-faced walrus mustache and beret just staring at Adam the entire time which is why he sometimes acts nervous XD
Literally at the beginning he says "my old show mythbusters" (0:08)
Not to argue that Adam Savage isnt awesome tho, he is lmao
@@Mythikal13 well it is his show, Jamie’s as well
@@bradlocken2621 Actually, it was Peter's show. He came up with the idea, sold it to Discovery well enough to get some camera and sound equipment and start up money, and found just the right pair of goof balls to do it, including one who just happened to own the exact type of place you would need to pull off a show like that. Adam and Jamie breathed life into the show, turned one-liner myths and legends into something interesting for an hour of TV, and created a television role models for how to take the familiar and question it, test it, learn by doing even if you don't know at the start how this story will end.
"There were some experts who were goofballs and we made them look great!"
This *has* to be that one guy who said he was a ninja.
The "AskaNinja" Ninja was on the program, but I think that was just for the giggles.
Goofball or not that guy spent a while trying to catch an arrow and managed it with some caveats. I dunno if he was just a random guy in a gi, but that guy did look like a great sport. Though again, maybe he was absolute trash behind the scenes and "made them look great".
"Come, Silent Walrus! Let us storm the castle!"
Honestly that one makes sense. But i wonder if any others makes sense cause i cant think of any others....
from some previous research on Mythbusters i don't think it was him it was actually someone who presented themselves as an expert in a topic but i cant quite remember who it was now but it has been mentioned before on fan forums about one of the guests was basically a fraud / wackadoodle
"I'm done being mad ON CAMERA".... That's a good piece of advice...
Love this vid, it’s super interesting just hearing him talk and explain what he is thinking about
"No no no no no no. 'Cuz if it was a bomb, the alarms would go off 'cuz all these hotels have bomb detectors, right?" - Ruby Rhod, _The Fifth Element_
Didn't the bomb detecting alarm go off a moment later?
@@hariman7727 either way, I’m choosing to appreciate the writing and acting in Fifth Element. Very good Movie.
@@Mark_Goddin very good movie
@@Mark_Goddin Definitely a 'cult classic'.(which would then make me a 'cult member'...because I LOVE that movie!!!!!)
@@radioactive9861 I strongly suggest Leon: The Professional, another Luc Besson film.
I'm glad you've stopped using noise reduction in these videos, I'd rather have a little background noise than heavily processed audio.
I LIKED the background noise here. I felt as if I were actually in the shop with Adam.
I was so young when the mythbusters premiered.. boy time flies
I love how real that backtracking was on "I'm done being mad"
Yeah I remember this, the CEO and some of his compatriots were eventually convicted for fraud, those ‘detectors’ were novelty golf ball finders bought in bulk from China with new logo stickers applied.
Apocryphally when one less crooked employee asked if the device actually worked he got the answer; “It does what its supposed to do, It makes money”
lol how does a golf ball finder work
@@pvic6959 I think its a joke item you can pull out to make fun of someone who lost their golf ball
Employee 1: Ah crap! I just got fooled and bought a bogus goofball detector.
Employee 2: When life gives you lemons you rebrand those lemons as yellow diamonds...
@@delciotto ohh lol that makes sense. i imagined those would work just as well as those detectors in the video
@@Murderbits Sadly this is an example of corruption winning contracts. The person that approved the deal clearly cared more about the money as well.
I was in Afghanistan in 2009 and saw those "bomb detection" devices. We had to take a half dozen of them from the Afghanistan Army company we were partnered with because they kept trying to use them to clear mine fields and identify IEDs for us.
Maybe they were just trying to kill off an invading force...
@@mattlane2282 insightful 👌
Well, in fairness if you let enough of them go try they will, in fact, clear the minefield.
@@pramienjager2103 hahahhaa
should have told them that if they believed in the devices they should walk every inch of the minefield with a rake behind them so that their paths could be marked. after seeing a few of their fellows blow up they should then learn to listen to the americans
Well let's face it. Like 88% of business owners would feed their employees and their families feet first into a rock crusher if it would earn them a couple extra dollars a day.
Adam... You truly are a great person morally.... I commend you and your crew for keeping that moral standing
that "fake bomb detector" story reminds me of a story i saw in the news once:
some people sold a police department something they claimed was a "drug detector", a plastic box with an antenna on the side.
someone else opened it up and found NOTHING inside the box.
NOT A SINGLE THING!
literally JUST an antenna connected to NOTHING.
and someone swindled a police department into buying a BUNCH of them!
I think it was sold by the same guy. It was also promoted by Wolfgang Halbig for detecting drugs in a high school. But he's more well known for harassing Sandy Hook parents for Alex Jones.
The police didnt get swindled. Its pretty much just " This drug sniffing device gave me probable cause to search you car."
@@haroldbalzac6336 oh, that reminds me of that "hemet of truth" urban legend, where two cops pretend a COLANDER is a fancy lie-detector!
They didn't just sell this to one police department, they sold it to MANY police departments, enough that the FBI put out a national bulletin about it and was able to secure an injunction that banned their manufacture and sale in the US in 1996.
Here's the kicker: this is the same device Adam is talking about in the video. One of the people who made the original device you're thinking of escaped justice, moved to the UK, started selling exactly the same thing there as a £10,000 bomb detector, and one of the people who bought one realized he'd then been ripped off and started the company Adam is talking about in the video!
How Adam parlayed this question into war crimes is amazing
The tangents are like 80% of the reason I watch these videos and this one REALLY threw me for a loop
War crimes? I don't think this guy was violating the Geneva Conventions.
No one said anything about war crimes, Wickham.
More like war profiteering.
@@stargazer7644 Maybe he was talking generally about the entire Iraq war.
Kudos to Morgan Crisp! One of the better questions! Thanks Adam for your response,
Figuring out what environmental cues tell the dowser where water is would be a great thing to me. My father, who was not a particularly superstitious man, spoke quite casually about occasionally using dowsing AT WORK (he did maintenance for a YMCA summer camp) to find water lines when he needed to dig near them. And apparently was successful most of the time. It beggars belief, but he also wasn't one to make up stories like that, so figuring out how it worked for him would be great, if someone could.
My dad did plumbing stuff and showed me how to bend two metal coat hangers and do this. He said it only worked with moving water and pipes relatively close to the surface of the ground. I was able to recreate it with a pipe he knew the location of, but I did not, in our lawn. He said anytime he was able to get the same 'positive' result after coming from multiple different directions, then he had 100% accuracy. The problem was that not finding something did not mean a pipe wasn't there.
My father-in-law dowses for things like pipes and cables underground before he digs anywhere. He says earth that's been disturbed, even if it's old enough you can't see it, is usually just off enough to make 2 bent coat hangers wiggle if you hold them right while you're walking.
@@jsomebody2289 That coat hanger deal will work, but I think that's quite a bid different than dowsing for groundwater. The coat hangers will work for buried wires too, and it will also do it if you walk under a power line. I think it has something to do with a faint magnetic field. Groundwater dowsers usually use a particular kind of stick (I've heard apple tree and willow tree) and the water they claim to find is often 100 or more feet down, I'm not buying that. The fact is, most places on earth have water under the ground, so I think that lends to the dowser's success rate.
None of them ever do the world a favour and find water in drought stricken areas, or you know try to alleviate famine. They just want your money.
@@bigutubefan2738 There are ways to find underground water, but drowsing isn't one of them. The reason nobody finds water in drought stricken areas is because there isn't any water there to be found.
"If you go out looking for bigfoot and you can't find him, you haven't proven that bigfoot doesn't exist. You've only proven that you don't know how to find bigfoot."
That's a really good way of explaining science as a whole, actually.
However, it is notable that abscence of evidence where evidence is to be expected IS evidence of abscence.
For example, that explosive dowsing rod.
Set up a test with a car park, some cars contain bombs.
The fact that the dowsing rod failed to find anything is absence of evidence. However, it's fairly conclusive evidence of absence since you would expect it to definitely find something.
@@kirotheavenger60 yes and no. You can’t really prove a negative, but you can become more confident that it does not in fact work though never 100%.
@@kirotheavenger60 Absence of expected evidence is evidence of absence to a degree, but I think Adam's point is its not conclusive evidence of absence. You can approach 100% certainty of absence, but you can never reach it with the scientific method.
@@OldWayArtisans This saying does get thrown around a lot but is not quite accurate from what I can tell.
Absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence, but it is in no way proof of absence. And that evidence can be strong or weak depending on the situation.
Evidence and proof are defined terms but that phrase seems to use them interchangeably.
Absence of evidence is not proof of absence. One cannot prove a negative, but that lack of evidence can increase certainty one has in the effects one can expect to see given this scenario again.
@@DejectRS "Absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence"
No it's not. A very simple explanation is that you weren't looking in the right place or were measuring incorrectly.
This in no way provides any evidence for the absence of what you are trying to observe.
People in the past had no way to measure radioactivity for example. Following your logic, they sure had an immense amount of evidence and increased certainty that radiation doesn't exist.
I'm sorry, but that is absurd reasoning.
He's talking about himself when he says they made a goofball look good on TV.
ALSO I mean like a lovable goofball not a crazy deluded one.
And for that we thank him
@@KlintKaras We knew what you meant. But it's good to be clear so Adam knows we love him.
No, it was definitely the 'ninja' catching arrows. He talked about it in some Q&A
I wanted to like but its at 666 likes and I don't want to spoil it
Happy New Year, Adam!
Adam, that's why we love you. I wouldn't want to watch a dowser being made a fool of either. Your kindness is such a beautiful trait.
My three eras of Adam Savage:
Era One: So impressed with Adam's maker ability.
Era Two: So impressed with Adam's enthusiasm.
Era Three (2020 COVID): So impressed with Adam's humanity.
Spot on.
I assume being impressed by his dashing good looks goes without saying?
@@kg4wwn you shouldn't even need to ask.
There was a story this year that those devices were being sold again as COVID detectors. It is terrible 😡
I see a similar issue with temperature detecting cameras in the Security industry. Some fail to show accurate readings when people's foreheads are obscured by hats, scarves, or even sunglasses.
That part about 'we didn't make a 'gotcha!' show' that was just pretty wholesome
As a young man I was working on a wastewater team - renovating old sewer lines. I was choked to learn that they used dowsing to "figure out" where the old sewer lines were. Somehow it only worked if I didn't stood in the way of where the line most probably was 😀
My theory has always been that it detects where the ground has been disturbed. Some sort of interaction between the very weak magnetic field of the human body and the fact that water is dipolar and/or some ground could have magnetic minerals in it that would all be running in a single direction unless they were disturbed. So in some cases it would work, but really it's more of a party trick when you compare it to using something like ground penetrating radar that will work basically all the time, anyone can use, and is far more accurate.
@@michaelmurray6197 well beside it doesnt work it never has, if that small amount of dimagetic be enough to do that then the natural magnetic field of the earth would make the rods point north
@@michaelmurray6197 Heard of a study that concluded a similar thing - sometimes it seems to work, but it usually doesn't. And even if it is real, it is likely the charlatans outweigh those that can do it for real
I really like this cause it started with a bit of nostalgia for MythBusters, then turned into a sweet emphatethic "we don't bring people here to make fun of them and their belief", and then to outrage of smoke sellers taking advantage of people in warzones, quite a rollercoster!
I also like how he said that some of the people who peddle woo probably do deserve to be seen as silly, but that just wasn't what the show was about.
I really respect them for not doing the "gotcha" thing. I remember watching that one episode of Bill Nye's show were they brought in a crystal healer and they just sat there and made fun of them and didn't let him talk for the entire bit.
Like yeah he's objectively wrong, but being an asshole about it and not letting him explain his position is just a dick move.
Where can I find that episode?
Yeah, I've lost respect for Bill Nye over the years sadly.
Someone could die bc of this "healer".
That seems to be the structure of the entire show unfortunately
Instead of letting people share their beliefs and experiences and politely refuting them, they just sit them in a chair and heckle them constantly
@@lucilaos Not really. Medical malpractice is like the 6th leading cause of death in United States, and that doesn't include alternative medicine (with the exception of chiropractor because for some reason the FDA thinks that is a real medicine even though it's not). The worst thing he's doing is scamming rich white women out of their husbands paycheck while he most likely fucks them after waving a crystal over them to cure their case of the Mondays.
I completely respect that they didn't want to make the show a "gotcha" episode good for Adam for sticking to his morals
"We had some people on the show who were real goofballs and we made them look GREAT!"
Was it Jamie?
It was Jamie, wasn't it.
Jk, love ya Jamie ;)
Angry and righteous Adam is just excellent to listen to, what a champion
Ahhhh, Pyramid Power. The infamous “oogie-boogie” myth.
Almost certainly didn't change the opinion of anyone on either side, but it was pretty fun to watch, which in a way was the point.
Also the psychic bike helmet, that was great lol
At the very least, we got a demonstration of confounding variables (if I'm thinking of the right term) in the form of the apple half that got coated in something by the table saw that made it decay less than the control.
@@alphamone That’s a valid point. Just goes to show that you can learn just as much from a failed experiment as a successful one.
LOL! I love that! “I’m going to name names.”
Used dowsing when I worked for the city I live in repairing water mains and sprinkler systems in parks. Always found the “stream” of water for us. Never tried using the method to find a large volume of water however.
His passionate fury and careful delivery knowing kids will be watching him. Look up to him. And his methodical navigation through it all to come off as friendly through it all is.... awe inspiring.
Adam comes off as an aloof guy, who likes to joke.
But I bet he’s sincerely one of the best people you’d ever meet. I wish I had a friend like him. I’m not worthy. Not even close. But I’m jealous of all those who are. He is so awesome.
I, like Adam, have super severe, ADHD. His delivery and methods hit me better than any teacher I ever had in my life. I wish I had Adam to teach me every single subject growing up, I probably would’ve turned out a lot better.
The inventor of the ADE 651 (Bomb detecting dowsing tool) got 10 years in prison for fraud in 2013.
Given what he sold, I am surprised it was only 10. Still, good to know that he got some kind of punishment.
This is by far the nicest craftsman channel on the internet. I can't believe this fell under my radar so long.
Dowsing works as long as the process includes drilling into the ground until you hit water.
I love these videos because it always feels like you're having a personal conversation with Adam who is super excited to tell you about something.
It warms my heart knowing that Myhtbusters always had sensibilities towards other people’s beliefs and a solid morality when testing myths.
Beliefs aside though, science is science.
I'm really struggling with this-so as long as other people hold passionate beliefs then that's acceptable? If someone truly believes in their heart that essential oils cure cancer that shouldn't be scientifically tested? Wouldn't that exclude almost every conspiracy theory out there right now like Flat Earth. Adam mentions the deaths being on someone's scorecard but not testing obvious BS doesn't land those same deaths on his scorecard also?
A scientific test generally beats any arbitrary belief. At least no one should get offended for a scientific result that conflicts with ones previous belief/hypothesis.
@@vanline512 Thats not what he said. I think Adam Savage has proven pretty conclusively that Mythbusters was all about scientific method. He is simply saying they had no desire to embarrass people publicly or make people look foolish. That wasn't the nature of their show. They didn't want to be the "gotcha" kind of show. Really and truly, had Mythbusters been that type of show, it likely wouldn't have been as popular as it was.
@@GoodxLad it's not just a scientific test though. Mythbusters is also a TV show, and there's no good reason to publicly embarrass largely harmless people.
Jeez. Your chair freaks me out. I constantly think there is a dying animal in my house. xD
HA! Yes, I actually paused the video to check on the dog.
Great stuff. Being in the field, it makes me livid too, when someone makes nonsense equipment. Right with you on that point. Subscribed ... fun channel ... Cheers ...
“Way back in the day... 2008.”
Ahh. I’m old
yeah, my brain turned off for a minute trying to figure out where i was when i was 18. getting high and drunk watching youtube and playing guitar hero 3 like a boss!
Last decade was the 90s. No one can tell me otherwise 🙉
UA-cam didn’t exist yet when I was 18...
Adam is immortal
@@BloodWolf2005 stop bring stuck in the past, it'll ruin you
For what it's worth I think debunking ths pyramid power thing was actually helpful. When I was a kid I totally bought the idea that psychics were a thing, or that the Loch Ness Monster existed, all kinds of "mysteries" like that because I was young enough to believe in Santa. Seeing someone test a claim that was presented as if it *could* be true and have it totally fail the test helped me be less gullible.
I was thinking about how James Randi would love to test that question on his show, then Adam mention a conversation with him. Funny that
James Randi did test it. He used underground pipes. The video is on UA-cam.