Sean Carroll is a great physicist and science communicator. Among other things, he is interested in theories about what underlies quantum mechanics. His preferred theory is called “many worlds” but there are a number of plausible theories out there. If you listen to his podcasts or read his books you’ll often hear him say something along the lines of: “I think the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the theory that is most likely to be the correct one. But I hope people continue to work on alternative theories in case I’m wrong.”
For this particular question, it just so happens that we aren’t likely able to any experiments to give us one way or another so the extent to which Carroll or any other physicist can leverage data to make arguments both for their own theory and against other theories is extremely limited. So it would be an untenable position for anyone to argue that their theory was the truth.
You rarely (never?) hear people say similar things in epidemiology. When I hear people talk, they appear to be convinced of their theories. And I’ve never heard anyone come close to saying that someone with an opposing theory should continue to work on their theory in case they’re right. You might say that this might make more sense in epidemiology because we have more data and evidence. But often that’s not true. Particularly when there are no high quality RCTs, the available data is consistent with many possibilities and we should be just as uncertain as the physicists mentioned above.
Hearing Carroll say both that he hopes people with differing views continue their work and that his theory could potentially be wrong set me on a different path. I mean, it’s a path I was kind of taking, or aspiring to, but his words really pushed me down that path. Particularly when I teach a topic where the science is not settled, I like to say things like, “I’m convinced by this view but many really smart people prefer this other view.” Some examples include the validity or usefulness of Mendelian randomization and the importance of the consistency assumption.
Recently, I’ve had a rash of occasions where people I deeply admire expressed views that differed from mine, sometimes greatly. Approaching these interactions with Carroll’s mentality makes them feel genuinely exciting. Like, either we’re going to find out some interesting reason why our views differ (and we might continue with differing views) or one of us will convince the other and that person will learn something interesting. It’s really a win-win situation.
I’ll hopefully write more about uncertainty because the more I think about it, the more I think we are waaaaay more certain that is reasonable.
