Eric Topol

I mean, how do you reconcile this sense that you shouldn't go so far?

Don't search for absolute perfection of proof.

Yeah, it's, I think, exceptionally important that, you know, there's this kind of spectrum or continuum in the following science and search for truth and that kind of distinction, I think, really nails it.

Now, one of the things that's unique in the book is you don't just go through all the different types of how you would get to proof, but you also talk about how the evidence is acted on.

And, for example, you quote, they spent a lot of time misinforming themselves.

This is the whole idea of taking data and torturing it or using it, dredging it however way you want to support data.

either conspiracy theories or, you know, alternative facts, you know, basically manipulating, sometimes even emasculating what evidence and data we have

And one of the sentences, or I guess this is from Sir Francis Bacon, truth is the daughter of time, but the added part is not authority.

So here we have our president here that repeats things that are wrong, fabricated or wrong, and he keeps repeating to the point that people believe it's true.

But on the other hand, you could say truth is a daughter of time because you like to not accept any truth immediately.

You like to see it get replicated and further supported, backed up.

So in that one sentence, truth is a daughter of time, not authority, there's the whole ball of wax here.

Can you take us through that?

Because I just think that people don't understand that truth,

truth being tested over time, but also manipulated by its repetition, this is a part of the big problem that we live in right now.

Yeah, I think this is perhaps one of, if not the most essential part here, is that to try to deal with the different views, we have biases, as you emphasized throughout.

But if you can use these different types of proof to have a sound view,

discussion, conversation, refutation, whereby you don't summarily dismiss another view, which may be skewed and maybe just absolutely wrong, maybe fabricated, whatever, but that you can engage and say, here's why.

These are my proof points, or this is why there's some extent of certainty you can have regarding this view of the data

I think this is so fundamental because, unfortunately, as we saw during the pandemic, the strident minority, which were the anti-science, anti-vaxxers, they were summarily dismissed as being kooks and adopting conspiracy theories without the right engagement.