When The Mythbusters Changed Their Mind

A story, quote, and lesson about willing to update what you know

Is it better to run or walk?

In 2003, MythBusters tested a simple piece of wisdom: if you’re caught in the rain, should you walk or run to stay drier?

In their first official episode “Exploding Toilet”, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman set up a controlled experiment with artificial rainfall and measured how much water soaked into their clothing. Their verdict surprised a lot of people: running got you wetter, so the idea that “running keeps you drier” was marked Busted. 

And honestly, it’s easy to see why the conclusion stuck. It felt clean and reliable, like a little law of physics you could keep in your back pocket. Walk, don’t run. Case closed.

But two years later, in MythBusters Revisited, they took another swing at the same question, this time letting the experiment live in a more realistic world.

Instead of a perfectly even, predictable shower, they started accounting for what rain is actually like: wind pushing water into you, uneven rainfall, and conditions that don’t behave politely for the camera. With those environmental factors included, the result flipped. Their revisit concluded that running is actually better than walking if you want to stay drier.

Same show. Same curiosity. Same basic claim. But a better test, because they admitted that life rarely gives you laboratory weather.

“My take away from running in the rain… It does not make a big enough difference if you run or walk. But slipping, falling and making yourself a joke is a lot more likely when running in the rain.”

- A viewer’s comments when talking about the newer episode.

That whole arc, confident conclusion, new evidence, changed mind, feels like a blueprint for growing up and learning new things.

Because we all have our own “verdicts.” Things we believe with sincerity. Stories we tell ourselves with receipts. Patterns we’ve observed enough times that they start to feel permanent: This is how people are. This is how I am. This always happens when I try. I already know what will work and what will not.

And to be fair, sometimes those beliefs were earned. They were the best explanation we had with the information available. But the danger is how quickly “best explanation so far” turns into our “unchangeable truth.”

When new evidence shows up, it rarely announces itself as evidence. It often arrives disguised as an inconvenience: a detail you didn’t measure, a voice you didn’t include, a context you didn’t consider. Wind. Uneven rainfall. The variables you’d rather ignore because they complicate the story you already like and are already used to.

That’s where biases sneak in, not just in the obvious ways, but in quiet ones: selectively noticing what supports us, discounting what challenges us, preferring certainty over curiosity because certainty feels safer.

The real flex isn’t having a verdict. It’s being willing to re-run the experiment when you realize you didn’t test the whole world the first time.

So now I ask you:

What belief in your life feels “proven”, but might change if you revisited it with one missing variable finally included?

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