Bryan Johnson's team is figuring out how to publish health research while handling criticism from established scientists. He notes that experts disagree sharply on wellness, and people online defend their views with high confidence despite the lack of consensus, making productive conversation nearly impossible.
As a team, we have been this past week, we've been talking a lot more about what to share publicly. We've been doing this with rigor and seriousness. We've also been having fun, and the attention that we've gotten has created quite a few responses. And from serious scientists, they want to beat us up a little bit. And so we're thinking very carefully about how we do things going forward and what level of peer review we're going to do, because there's an appetite for a whole variety of things. So we've done a lot more than what we've talked about publicly. At this point, we just need to be thoughtful about what we share and how we share it, because there's a broader community engaged in this and we're trying to be mindful, to be good participants. We've had the same conversation on the discussion forum. How do we bring people together? The level of disagreement is so high from every corner, and the level of confidence that each person attaches to their own viewpoint is so high. It creates this situation where I don't see a whole lot of productive conversations happening in forums because people just want to be heard. When I go out in the world and I engage, it's pretty rowdy in terms of people's own opinions about what we should and should not be doing and how we're approaching things.
