I was just saying that it was a marvel of the modern capitalist system

[james_davis_nicoll]

that I automatically assume all statements from companies are misleading or outright lies unless I can prove otherwise. This covers a lot of educational programs: Phil Plait cheerfully pushed utter rot on people when he was on TV.

Wil Wheaton just discovered Discovery is owned by a profit-oriented entity.

(I am not making fun of him. I was very peeved over the crap physics on Plait's show)

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And yet they are willing to accept one consequence of non-contrived science, which is accepting results that were unexpected rather than fixing them to suit the model.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

Or so they state loudly, and so they have led you to believe.

It's all television. It's all pre-recorded, heavily edited, and interspersed with enough commercials that the number of people available to cause REALLY interesting results to get ditched is probably close to the number of people in the audience.

For all I know, they spend longer on Mythbuster storyboards then they do on Simpsons shows. The bulls running around the styrofoam china shop could have been pure CGI. Maybe the stars are CGI too. I have no way of knowing, and no dependable reason to trust them.

I'm exaggerating of course. The likelihood that pure CGI is used is very low, because of the expense it would mean. But there is NO place where I can set my trust level and be confident it's in the right spot.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I'm confident Mythbusters chooses myths after deciding they would make for entertaining television AND consulting with experts so they know what the outcome will be well before they even start. But none of the stars are very good actors, so it's the moments of (probably) genuine excitement, anger, and surprise that I watch for. Also, I'm not gonna lie, I like watching things explode.

Also, I notice that the hosts are in the same set of clothes both for an original failed experiment AND the retry that's allegedly some time later. They just filmed the failures and successes all on the same day and didn't try too hard to make it look otherwise.