Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. Tinkering with
the American Dream
How can hacking create a more optimistic future?
Jamie: We work under the premise that science is not just for scientists. We are the poster children for that. We are not trained scientists, yet somehow, we end up doing a lot of science on our show. The reason is that we aren’t coming at it as trained scientists, but we do want to do a good job. We have a passion for experimentation and building new things. To satisfy that passion and hunger to build and experiment we have to do a good job. We can’t screw around (although there are benefits to doing that), we have to be methodical about our work if we want to move ahead and come to understand the problems that we find ourselves against.
That’s all science is. Science isn’t just for guys in lab coats. It is for anyone that simply wants to understand something and do a good job. The more methodical, diligent, and careful you are about your work, the more you write it down and are organized about it, the better chance you will have of being successful and coming up with particular solutions and answers.
That’s what we do. It’s a pretty profound thing. When we plan an episode, we don’t come into the room and say, “Let’s go do some science!” We just start thinking in an organized way. That’s a very positive note for people at large, simply do a good job at thinking about things. In our modern world, things change with all these different inputs all the time, the rate of change is increasing. To keep up with it or to behave appropriately with our world, we need to do a good job. That means being methodical which means doing some sort of science.
Adam: The key phrase is breaking down the steps. After fifteen years in the special effects industry, working on movies like Star Wars, I thought that I came to MythBusters with skills. But I didn’t know anything when I started. The skills I have received since doing this show easily doubled or tripled anything I learned before. That is about taking a problem, process, or concept that I have never had experience with and learning enough to do a viable episode. That always involves breaking it down into understandable chunks. Take a problem that seems insurmountable and break it into pieces. Then attack each piece.
If you are talking about social movements, the key aspect there is community. Jamie and I are a weird lesson in community. I can’t say we don’t get along because we do, we are very productive together, but neither of us really enjoys the process. That process of working together. We drive each other nuts, but in that we have a fidelity to the best solution, not what solution happens to be the one we are invested in. We take it as a point of pride to be able to turn on a dime and change direction.
One of the great impedances to human progress, and when I think progress I think the elimination of human misery, is bias. People are unwilling to see what is in front of them or to look at viable ways to change what is in front of them. Those are things that we have to work together to achieve.
But when half of the people in this country think Earth is six thousand years old; half the people think global warming is total fiction; or people aren’t sure if President Obama was born in our country, we clearly have a problem of people not listening to each other.
Jamie: One of the primary things that we’ve learned is that the most difficult part is right at the beginning where you have to be very clear about the questions you’re trying to answer. What is the problem? What is it that you’re actually facing? Once you do that and are very clear about what you’re asking, finding out the answer is just like filling in the blanks. It is pretty much done for you. Now you just need to go through the motions methodically. We’ve often found that when we start off on a project, we get pulled in all different directions. We end up floundering in the brier, not knowing how to deal with something when it’s not working. We’ve shown it on MythBusters, and we’ve seen it for ourselves. Often all it takes is to stop for a second to look at what you’ve been doing and then clarify what it is you’re actually after. Once you do that, everything becomes very clear and you can move ahead.
The first thing we do is stop ourselves and say, “This is a myth.” We ask, “Is there more than one thing involved in this myth?” Often, there is. Do we need to deal with them separately? Perhaps. Now, if you go in and start trying to define the questions that you want to answer, it can all be broken down into bite-size chunks in an orderly fashion. Before you know it, you’re done. That same approach can apply to building a house. If you are going to build a house, you’re going to want to know all about what the functions of the house are supposed to be. What problem is it going to address? What are all the different components? Well, you break it all down into little chunks. You buy the materials. You start to assemble them but you have a plan. If you don’t have a plan and haven’t been methodical about what you are going to do with that house, then you’re not going to have a very nice house or you’re going to take a long time to build it. It applies to everything from your daily life to doing science to building things, or even farming.
If you want to do a good job, you need to be very careful about what you define as your goals—all the little pieces that you need to put together to come to an end result. Then, go pick them off one after the other in a methodical way. Before you know it, you’ve accomplished your task.
