What Wix said!
Mythbusters is entertainment, not argument. A big part of the appeal of the show is just blowing stuff up with lots of explosives, just for the fun of it. Even if they never tested myths, if Jamie and Adam hosted a show called Blowing Stuff Up for the Fun of It, would at least have the value of being entertaining.
However, Mythbusters is doing its part to raise the sanity waterline. Adam Savage is only half of Mythbusters, of course. But, in this Discovery show, he's a minor -- but still mainstream -- celebrity communicating the idea that death is not inevitable to a far wider audience than Eliezer or the Singularity Institute could possibly reach, at least right now. This is huge. Death is not inevitable! LessWrongers may forget how much of a shocking message this is to the general population, but now it's on basic cable! Who else is doing anything like this?
The notion we might treat aging as a disease might not have mainstream so much in the general public but aging research's status in the academy has risen quite considerably the last decade and efforts to create therapies to directly battle aging are not (that) frowned upon. Take this Nature Insights for example, I at least wouldn't be that surprised if the academy's attitude towards aging will seep out to the general public in just a few years, but then I might be a bit overoptimistic. . .
Tonight the Discovery Channel had on their Curiosity series a program hosted by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) on whether or not we could live indefinitely. The program probably did have some substantial impact on some people who have not been exposed to that sort of idea before, and may have been especially good at letting people understand that there's a definite possibility that the relevant discoveries might occur in their lifetimes.
However the piece was as a whole decidedly lacking in actual information. First, the entire program was built around the conceit of Savage looking back from his thousandth birthday and talking about all the technologies that had allowed it to happen. In their hypothetical world, due to a severe car accident in 2022, Savage becomes the first person to benefit from a host of different technologies. There were zero actual interviews with scientists and although actual technological proposals were mentioned such as organ cloning and a brief segment on the SENS work of filtering blood cells, the vast majority was high-budget special effects segements of the new technologies. Also, cryonics was not mentioned at all, since in their hypothetical world, Savage had never needed that particular technology. Similarly, no mention is made of uploading, although Savage does gain cybernetic enhancements to his brain.
At a level of evaluation of narrative rather than information, the entire piece was a bit incoherent and inconsistent. For example, Savage declares at one point that at age 130, he is then the oldest person in the world. This makes no sense in context since presumably after the basic technologies have been tested out on him they could then be applied to other people, some of whom will be older than he is. In the same section of the narrative, Savage has apparently become the head-engineer of the world's first space elevator construction project. A few centuries later, Savage then has to deal with an asteroid impact obliterating much of North America. My girlfriend remarked that the program came across almost as fanfic about Savage.
Overall, I can't recommend this much but it might do a good job getting people aware of these issues who don't currently know anything.
Did anyone else see this? What did they think?