Jay Bhattacharya

So the immediate question is like, how do I personally, I mean, I do my very best to be grounded by the data.

And I read pretty broadly, including people that I disagree with.

And I have always had, as a scientist, this idea that the best way for me to always be right is when I'm wrong to change my mind.

Like you have to have this sort of epistemic humility in the face of very complicated questions or you're going to be wrong.

I've never met an excellent scientist who didn't believe they were wrong all the time.

Because they're just complicated questions, and you don't know the answer.

You have a hypothesis.

The data you develop don't match the hypothesis.

You have to be open to the possibility of changing your hypothesis, right?

So I think that that kind of scientific training, and especially the epistemic humility around that scientific training, has helped me a ton on that.

And it's hard because you get enamored with your own ideas very, very easily.

especially if you've invested a lot in them.

Let me now answer the broader thing, the broader question about the responsibility of scientific leaders, because that's really what your question is about, right?

Yes.

I don't believe that you can control a conversation in the direction you want by suppressing people's ideas fundamentally.

I mean, I really do believe in the religion of free speech, especially for science, it's important.

And that means that you have to tolerate even wild opinions that you fundamentally disagree with.

Because who knows, maybe they're right.

And there's a secondary effect to this.

If you start to suppress those ideas, and that's what happened during the Biden administration, they systematically used the power of government to suppress that speech online.