Jessica Riskin wrote this interesting review slamming a book by biologist Robert Sapolsky. The book in question argues that people and animals have no free will, and Riskin does not find Sapolsky’s argument convincing.
The interesting angle to me in this story is that it seems that Sapolsky backs up his argument based on unreplicated studies of social priming and the like. I haven’t looked at Sapolsky’s book, but just as an example, here’s a New York Times article he wrote in 2010 where he refers to multiple “brilliant studies” by John Bargh, author of the elderly walking study that later notoriously failed to replicate. It may be that Sapolsky has moved on from Bargh, but if you read that NYT article you’ll see he’s leaning very heavily on the social-priming paradigm.
Indeed this came up on the blog a couple years ago, when we discussed this post by Kevin Mitchell, who wrote:
Gotta hand it to Sapolsky here . . . it’s quite ballsy to uber-confidently assert we do not have “the slightest scrap of agency” and then support that with one discredited social psych study after another . . .
Thinking about it now, though, I have some sympathy for Sapolsky. Sure, he got conned by all that social priming stuff, but a lot of people got conned: the editors of Psychological Science and PNAS; the staff at NPR, Ted, and Freakonomics; Daniel Kahneman, Larry Bartels; . . . indeed, I assume that Bargh etc. themselves were conned, in that they were presumably true believers in their theories. Sapolsky’s a biologist–he’s not a psychologist or a statistician and would have no particular expertise in the theory of social priming (such as it is) or the quality of the evidence behind it. So it would seem unfair of me to expect that that he would’ve escaped this particular mass delusion of academic and public social psychology.
Now it’s 2025 and Sapolsky should know better, but, hey, he’s a busy man and probably does not have the time or energy to rethink his premises. That’s too bad but maybe is to be expected.
Amusingly, if you follow the links, you’ll see that Mitchell was pointing to a podcast where Sapolsky was being interviewed by . . . junk-science-promoting physicist Sean Carroll (see here)!
Put ’em on NPR or Ted all at once and we’ll have achieved the black hole of junk science, from which no bad idea, once it enters, can ever escape.
Riskin’s review is interesting for its historical perspective and also in that it connects Sapolsky’s arguments against free will with his credulity regarding junk psychology experiments. This is interesting–I hadn’t thought it about this way before, and I think Riskin has a point. If it were really true that people were so easily manipulable by subliminal signals, then the world would be a much different place. Conversely, now that we know that that people aren’t so easily manipulated–you can’t really cause large shifts in people’s attitudes on immigration by flashing subliminal smiley faces on a screen–, this should cast doubt on the anti-free-will position.
Also relevant is our piranha paper, which explains mathematically why all these large effects cannot coexist.
To return to the general topic addressed here: It makes sense to use scientific findings to inform philosophical ideas. Science will not determine your philosophy but it should constrain it. The error made by Sapolsky and others is to choose a philosophy based on false or unsupported claims as if they were true. Given the problems with that social-priming research, I think Sapolsky etc. should either revise their philosophical views, or else explain why their views remain unchanged after removing the scientific evidence they were using as support for these views.
P.S. There’s only one thing in Riskin’s article that seems wrong to me. She writes:
Sapolsky’s solution to the problem of what to do with those convicted of crimes is radically at odds with this definition of humanitarian policy. He recommends that society regard them as the passive objects of their fate and commit them to a medical-style “quarantine.” He gives few details, but does mention a familiar array of practices, from physically confining people to requiring them to register with the local police and wear tracking bracelets. It’s hard to see how this would be better than, or even very different from, being punished in the existing system.
Are you kidding? Being constrained by having to being requited to “register with the local police and wear tracking bracelets” seems a lot better than being put in jail or prison. You can see your friends and family, you can go to work, all sorts of things, within whatever the restrictions of your sentence. From what I’ve read, jail and prison can be barbaric, also it puts you in constant contact with other criminals and isolates you from civil society. I get that Riskin disagrees with Sapolsky’s philosophy and his politics, but that’s no reason to say that non-prison confinement or restrictions on freedom are no better than jail or prison.
It’s certainly bad for Sapolsky to keep citing discredited studies, but I think abandoning them would have no impact on his claims. The case for determinism never rested on those studies to begin with.
To re-use your example, the fact that people’s attitudes are not as vulnerable to manipulation as has been claimed does not imply that these attitudes are any less determined, and any more up to free will. It just implies that they were strongly determined by earlier factors, and not easily modified by more recent factors. Yet they may be entirely deterministic with no space for free will.
As far as I understand this debate, the best counter-arguments to Sapolsky may be on Kevin Mitchell’s side, who argued for some fundamental indeterminacy at some level. However I didn’t quite understand how he adjucated between indeterminacy and unknown determinism, nor how indeterminacy could be equated with free will. But this goes well beyond this blog…
If theory of social priming -> determinism.
If not the theory of social priming -> determinism.
This is a very deterministic argument.
I am not a philosopher, but wouldn’t it be very, very hard to empirically disprove free will using experiments? I imagine that it would require a (1) 100% accurate predictive model (otherwise, we cannot distinguish free will from randomness), that (2) generalizes well beyond the simple lab experiments into important life decisions (people could operate more or less on autopilot in a lab experiment which is inconsequential, but think hard about major life decisions).
“…wouldn’t it be very, very hard to empirically disprove free will using experiments?”
It is tantalizing to think that if a scientist could just one time prove that an act of human behavior was based on free will, determinism would be dead. But alas, determinism is a just-so story, it can’t be proven or disproven.
The problem with experimentation in this case is that the determinism need not occur at any specific level of functioning to still be considered as potentially being in control of the outcome. In this sense it is exactly analogous to God’s will, it works in mysterious ways (or more precisely, you can’t prove that it doesn’t). And that’s what the determinist folks will say when you claim that your experiment validates free will. Just because you can’t see how an act could possibly have been pre-determined, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t, because determination is the invisible hand that manipulates in mysterious ways.
Agreed. Logically speaking we have two potential issues I can see:
1) If everything is literally predetermined then it doesn’t matter what we think about stuff, things will just happen, including our impressions and thinking about stuff, without any possibility for them to be otherwise.
2) If on the other hand there is some kind of “choice” that can be made, then we need to act as if those choices matter, and hold people accountable for when they do bad stuff, etc. So, although I’m a prison abolitionist, I still think people who do harm to others should be asked to do things to right the wrongs they caused, that people who have mental illness should be cared for in ways that may include restricting their general access to society if they are prone to homicidal or violent tendencies etc, and of course that victims of harm have the right to defend themselves against their harmers.
Furthermore, since 2 is compatible with 1, we should just pick 2.
That is, regardless of whether everything is predetermined by the initial conditions of the universe, we should pick 2, which we either will do because it’s predetermined, or we should do because it’s the right choice and choice is possible. If we haven’t yet picked 2 we should continue to argue for 2 which we will either do because it’s determined, or because it’s the right thing. If we never get to 2 then it’s either because 2 was impossible based on the initial conditions of the universe, or we’ve failed in our choices.
“He gives few details, but does mention a familiar array of practices, from physically confining people to requiring them to register with the local police and wear tracking bracelets. It’s hard to see how this would be better than, or even very different from, being punished in the existing system.” … “Are you kidding? Being constrained by having to being requited to “register with the local police and wear tracking bracelets” seems a lot better than being put in jail or prison. ”
Isn’t putting people in the slam physically confining them?
I’m also confused by Andrew’s comments on this specific point.
What I understood Riskin to mean is approximately the following:
Physically confining them = jail/prison
Registering with the local police and wear tracking bracelets = probation with electronic tagging
With this in mind, Riskin seems entirely correct in saying that it’s not clear how this would be different to the current practices.
The review is paywalled with only a brief snippit available. I thought this was the purview of physics and philosophy anyway. I’m not sure how experimental biology/psychology would help here….now *that* would be one clever experiment lol!
Back in my student days I once got into a discussion with a philosophy student about free will. I was studying physics, and was thinking somewhere along the lines if, if the world is deterministic, does free will exist?
His take was: if it makes sense to hold someone/something accountable for their actions, they have free will.
By that definition, people have free will, dogs have free will, as rewarding/punishing good/bad behaviour can change that behaviour. The criminally insane may at moments not have free will. A rock does not have free will.
By that reasoning, priming does not diminish our free will. A person primed to take action A can still be held accountable for action A.
Also, by that reasoning, although at the time AI was still very much in it’s beginning phase, reinforcement learning algorithms do have free will…
‘Also, by that reasoning, although at the time AI was still very much in it’s [sic!] beginning phase, reinforcement learning algorithms do have free will…’
Although I agree that free will is necessary for accountability, I would not put reinforcement learning in the same category. In my opinion, it is problematic to ‘hold AI accountable’. AI does not make any choices; humans delegate their choices to a deterministic (though quasi-random) system. The fact that AI is a deterministic system makes the idea of it having free will doubly strange.
I have generally come to lean towards compatibilism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism), which this seems to relate to.
Namely, what do we mean by “free will”, and why are we concerned with it?
Do we mean “the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events”. If so, what if our choices were entirely random? Does this really count as “free will” to choose?
Alternatively, does “free will” mean “the capacity to do what we want to do”? If so, free will does not seem to depend upon the determinism of the universe, because even if the situation and our preferences are all determined, we can (usually) act based upon those preferences.
In my view, when questions about accountability etc. are considered in this context, it is because we are concerned with whether people should be accountable for “doing things they wanted to do” more-so than “doing things undetermined by past events”. That is: it is more the latter definition of “free will” that is of concern to us, rather than the former.
Agreed, so much space is taken up arguing against some sort of “magical” free will, that is neither determined by physical conditions and inputs to the brain, nor influenced by random events outside the control of the agent.
In my experience Philosophers don’t have free will. They believe whatever they were destined to believe and nothing – least of all evidence – can change their mind.
Say humans create a chaotic (in the deterministic but highly dependent on initial conditions sense) simulation. It has so many ultra-precise interacting variables that the only way to predict the next state is to actually step through the simulation.
Also note we are used to thinking in terms of simplified markovian models, but it seems likely our universe is non-markovian. Ie knowing the current state perfectly is *still* insufficient to deduce the subsequent state, you need to perfectly know *all* previous states.
However, if restarted, the exact same sequence of states will play out. So you can “predict” the future state if you have a record of previous runs.
Could we say an element (or agent-like collection of elements) of this simulation has free will? Or any will?
Seems to me the answer is no, from the outside perspective. The possible use of repeated simulation runs precludes it.
But from an inside perspective, it seems nondeterministic, which allows for free will and “randomness”. And based on knowledge of the simulation states, there can be a 50/50 mix, or anything in between. The more you know, the more deterministic it seems.
Finally, if you wanted to code a simulation with agents that really had free will, how could you do it?
“Also note we are used to thinking in terms of simplified markovian models, but it seems likely our universe is non-markovian. Ie knowing the current state perfectly is *still* insufficient to deduce the subsequent state, you need to perfectly know *all* previous states.”
How do you mean that? Knowing all previous states of the universe won’t help you to predict the next, if you don’t know the laws of physics in it’s entirety. Conversely, if you know exactly the laws of physics it should be enough to know the current state of the universe.
This is all provided there is no true randomness, if there is, then there is no way to know the next state.
Markovian: Events at step t + 1 are completely determined by the laws and state at step t.
Non-markovian: Events at step t + 1 are determined by the laws and state at step t, along with the state at step t – 1, etc.
If I get time I’ll write a small simulation later today/tomorrow. I guess you are arguing state at step t – 1, etc can be uniquely determined from state at step t?
I think what I’m saying is: if we assume a deterministic system and complete knowledge of the laws and of the state at time t—down to the position of every atom—then that should be sufficient to determine both future and past states. So from that perspective, there’s no need to explicitly include state t–1, because it’s already implied by the full information at t.
In a markovian universe that would be true. In non-markovian the current state is more like a lossy compressed version of the entire history of past states.
In other words: Multiple histories can be consistent with the same current state, and you cannot tell which one is correct without the entire history.
However, maybe the history is stored internally within the universe itself (as part of the state), which would require it to be constantly growing larger in some sense.
Surprising that it’s a biologist claiming that there’s no such thing as free will: it’s usually physicists doing that.
Jerry Coyne is well-known as an adherent of the ‘determinism’ perspective. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/
I’m glad to see this post and Riskin’s NY Review article. I read Sapolsky’s 2017 book, Behave, and thoght something was off in the way he bombards the reader with “facts” from obscure studies. I looked up a random sample of articles from the book’s bibliography and concluded Sapolsky must be the biggest living example of the confirmation bias. I skipped his 2023 follow-up book, Determined, as he has no credibility with me.
By the way, I think Riskin’s comment about Sapolsky’s rahter vague proscriptions for judicial reform being not very different from the current system just means we already have home confinement, probation, registration and GPS tracking as options. She seems to be saying Sapolsky endorses expanded use of these options, but so do many reform-minded people, so its not so radical an idea. I don’t see she is saying they are no better than jail or prison, which she doesn’t mention at all.
What you all fail to realize is that Sopolsky had no choice but to use discredited social priming studies: no free will, remember?
The belief that determinism implies no free will is wrong. Giving up determinism doesn’t give you free will: If your actions aren’t determined by what you wanted to do before you did it, how is that free will? People are confused as to what free will is. Daniel Dennett had some good discussions of how to sensibly define “free will”.
The free will versus determinism debate has always struck me as a philosophical issue rather than an empirical, scientific issue. Every effort to bolster one position or another with empirical research seems silly.
David:
That could be. And it’s even sillier to bolster a position with bad empirical research!
True Dat!
Stephen Hawkings said that he had noticed that even people who think everything is determined look before they cross a road.
Of course they do, they can’t help it! Unless they ‘choose’ not to do it, in which case they didn’t have any choice but to choose that way.
It’s determinism all the way down.
We are programmed and determined to care about our survival and to try to stay alive. Those who did not did not leave copies of their genes behind. In the jungle they also watched for lions. Those of us who don’t believe in free will don’t think we don’t make decisions. What we think is that our decisions are not free.
It’s never clear to me what that POV means in the context of free will. If you are saying that our decisions are made within a network of constraints that arise from our biological limitations including evolutionary inheritance, our personal histories and circumstances and life opportunities, then that seems a very weak negation of free will. However much I will it, I’m not going to make it into the Wimbledon draw this year, nor am I going to run a 4 minute mile next month, but I might decide to improve my tennis game and my mile times. I was tired this evening and chose to watch some golf on TV although at various times I went downstairs to make a cup of tea and then to check for slugs in the garden. Wandering around the garden in the dark with a torch checking plants for slugs is tedious and requires an assessment of the potential costs and benefits of doing or not doing so, and that was a decision I made. Once you allow for the freedom of will to make decisions at that level, you pretty much lose the possibility of shutting out free will across the board – unless, again, you’re referring to a very weak negation of free will involving the fact that we are all constrained by circumstances. But that’s not where the “argument” around free will lies.
I’ve heard Sapolsky cite the fact that judges give harsher sentences before lunch than after it as evidence that everything is determined. This baffles me. No one can accurately predict sentences from blood sugar levels. In any case, if judges were made aware of this effect (which is probably weak), they can easily use their free will to correct it. The real argument is a philosophical one, not based on scientific experiments. It all comes down to whether or not you believe the connection between brain and mind is strictly bottom up or also top down. Plenty of scientists, most famously Roger Sperry, believe in top down causation which is a mechanism for free will.
Larry:
I also wonder whether Sapolsky would take a finding that judges don’t give harsher sentences before lunch as evidence against free will.
More generally: what role does scientific evidence play in forming or altering his philosophical position?
I guess Sean Carroll will ask him in his next hard-hitting interview, ha ha.
This comment references the hungry judge effect, which first appeared in this article AFAIK: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
Also note the Pubpeer entry, and the Wikipedia article on the ‘hungry judge effect’.
Perhaps Sapolsky judges research studies more harshly before lunch than after lunch.
And don’t forget that timeless research finding, “Participants reported being hungrier when they walked into the café (mean = 7.38, SD = 2.20) than when they walked out [mean = 1.53, SD = 2.70, F(1, 75) = 107.68, P < 0.001].”
Does Sapolsky believe he had to believe in determinism? Does he not answer when the waiter asks what he wants for dessert or does he say “give me whatever the universe ordained?” I doubt it. I bet he also cites the Libet experiment which merely shows that much of mental life operates below consciousness. We knew that since Freud. This all reminds me of the explorers who are lost and one looks at a map and points while saying, “See that mountain? We are on top of it”. My reply would be you need better map reading skills. Your answer is absurd. How does free will work? We don’t yet know how the brain creates consciousness. When (or if) we figure that out, we will have our answer.
“Amusingly, if you follow the links, you’ll see that Mitchell was pointing to a podcast where Sapolsky was being interviewed by . . . junk-science-promoting physicist Sean Carroll (see here)!”
I listen to a lot of Sean M. Carroll podcasts. He is anything BUT a junk science promoter. Though he does sometimes go softball on his interviewees, and in areas in which he is not experienced or has expertise (such as tax law which I have experience in), he has demonstrated less rigor in screening the interviewee ahead of time (some are on the fringe of their fields) because of a lack of depth and understanding. As for Sapolsky, I was wary from the first time I saw some of his lectures on Youtube . . . and I have not seen the Mindscape interview and I have not read his book (I disagreed with his premise from the get go, so I had no interest in hearing or reading what he had to say). All that being said: Sean M. Carroll is NOT a junk science promoter.
John:
I’ve only looked at one Sean Carroll podcast, so all I can say on the matter is that he was an enthusiastic promoter of junk science on his podcast at least once.
Peter Woit seems to think that Sean Carrol is “an enthusiastic promoter of junk science”. Here, “junk science” means string theory. As a non-physicist, it sure sounds to me that Woit is correct on this.
For example: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=94
“If a compelling fundamental theory existed that made lots of correct testable predictions, and such a theory predicted lots of unobservable universes, I’d happily believe in their existence. But, absent such a compelling theory, people who go on about unobservable multiple universes are not behaving very differently from those theologians who supposedly took an interest in angels and pins.”
David:
OK, then Carroll was an enthusiastic promoter of junk science on his podcast at least twice.
It would be great if he could invite Peter Woit on his show to discuss string theory and invite Nick Brown to discuss mind-body research.
Yes I agree with you John,
What I like about Sean Carroll is that he’s knowledgeable enough to give his interviewee the space and context to describe whatever research they’re pursuing in a way that allows the listener to see where they’re coming from warts and all.
So I just listened to the Carroll/Sapolsky podcast and found it enlightening. I disagree with Sapolsky’s interpretations but feel like I’ve I’ve come to a better understanding of why (note that Carroll also disagrees with Sapolsky and says as much at various points). To my mind the nature of Sapolsky’s research rather traps him in a mechanistic interpretation of human behaviour that current research tools are insufficient to shed appropriate light on. It may be that he’s right and neurobiology might eventually uncover the molecular/deterministic basis of human behaviour but we’re light years away from that now.
Actually I learned from the podcast that Sapolsky advocates for the “weak negation” of free will that I referred to just above: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/18/junk-science-used-to-promote-arguments-against-free-will/#comment-2399183
I don’t have a problem with that, though it seems that Sapolsky’s “evidence” base is not really up to the task of supporting even that interpretation. Kudos for Sean Carroll for giving us the opportunity to engage with and assess Sapolsky’s ideas.
Chris:
Just as calibration, I’m curious what you think of Carroll’s interview with Ellen Langer. I read the transcript of that interview and I found it to be a credulous promotion of junk science; see discussion here. But you might interpret the interview differently?
I did listen to some of the Ellen Langer podcast! In fact these two are the only podcasts I’ve listened to (only recently came across Sean Carroll and that was in the context of a discussion with someone called Weinstein – Carroll was insightful in showing up the appalling behaviour of that guy and his laughable “non-theory of everything” – since Weinstein seems to be very much on the side of the dreary anti-academia stuff going on in the US I thought it was good that Carroll felt able to engage with that guy and show him up though I suspect it may not do him much good!).
Not sure what to make of the Ellen Langer interview. Again Carroll gave her the space to describe her stuff and since she seems to be an engaging individual it was an interesting listen – I might go back and listen to the end.
Do I agree with Langer’s interpretation? Maybe like Sapolsky she has achieved a celebrity status by over-interpreting weak observations and constructing a sellable package – but i don’t know enough of her research to be particularly critical. I don’t think either of Sapolsky or Langer are grifting at all, and there may be something meaningful in each of their research programs. Langer’s mindfullness stuff seems quite harmless and potentially valuable though I totally agree that any junk science aspects of their research should be called out. Perhaps the issue is that their research areas lack much of a critical framework.
Chris:
I have no idea if Langer is “grifting.” The line between “true believer” and “grifter” is fuzzy: if you’re a true believer then I guess you’re not grifting, but this creates an incentive for people who are making money on an idea to cultivate a true-believer attitude within themselves so that they can feel like they are on the ethical side of the line.
Regarding Carroll’s interview, here’s one bit that really bothered me, where he was showing 100% credulity regarding outlandish claims:
Actually I don’t think the data are there.
And another from that Carroll interview:
And another from that interview. Langer gives a long and inaccurate description of one of her studies, and Carroll responds:
To which I say, umm, no. Langer was saying things that were false.
For more background on Langer’s work, see this research article. The skepticism of this work is not coming from me. People have been questioning these claims for a long time; see for example here.
Yeah, Sean Carroll is anything but a promoter of junk science. Just because he doesn’t attempt to rebut people’s work to their face while they appear on his podcast and gives them the benefit of the doubt, doesn’t mean he himself cosigns their arguments. Pathetic. All that your field does, btw, is promote junk science, almost as a matter of course and necessarily. Something you must know well as an alleged political science professor.
You agree with someone else in the comments that Carroll is a string theory promoter because anti-string theory crusader Peter Woit said so. I’ve been listening to Carroll for years and he correctly points out that string theory has no evidentiary support and disappointed us in light of the LHC’s lack of finding supersymmetry. Nonetheless, he also correctly points out that string theory is useful for exploring the theoretical parameter space in mathematics where physically relevant theories may appear. Can you imagine? It’s not black and white, shocker.
Are you expecting Carroll to invite these people on and dissect their every word, essentially disrespectfully, instead of letting them give their potentially false views for the viewer to decide on? Carroll is not a journalist and is not doing “interviews”. You seem quite full of yourself.
Corey:
You write, “Sean Carroll is anything but a promoter of junk science.” But in two cases (that of Sapolsky mentioned in the above post and that of Langer discussed here), he did promote junk science!
So, if you don’t want to describe Sean Carroll as “a promoter of junk science,” fair enough. Instead we can describe him as “someone who on two occasions has promoted junk science.”
You might be right regarding string theory. On that, I have no idea. I’m referring specifically to Carroll’s promotion of junk psychology.
Unfortunately, it seems that Carroll is part of the celebrity science club and he’s happy to credulously promote unfounded claims by other science celebrities.
I’m not expecting Carroll to “dissect their every word,” I’m just asking him to behave like a thinking human and to express the same skepticism regarding a Harvard professor’s unfounded claims of mind-body healing as he might express with some inventor’s claim to have produced a car that gets 400 miles per gallon of fuel efficiency.
I don’t think the cause of science is served by softball interviews with celebrity scientists who are promoting junk science and misrepresenting their data.
What about all the people doing legitimate psychology research? Why aren’t they on Carroll’s show? Oh yeah, I get it. If you do legitimate research, you end up with less dramatic results. Boring stuff. As a science celebrity, Carroll (and others such as Levitt, Gladwell, Huberman, Sunstein, etc.) want to promote the exciting findings, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve had this replication crisis in the first place, that there’s this demand for dramatic results, a demand which is satisfied by the Sapolskys, Langers, and Arielys of the world.
Carroll can do what he wants. But if he’s going to uncritically promote junk psychology research, it makes sense that he’ll be called on it by people such as me who are annoyed by junk psychology research. I expect that’s a tradeoff he’s willing to make, as there are millions of people who enjoy Ted talks and only thousands of people who read this blog. So, not to worry, he’s doing just fine, as are Sapolsky, Langer, etc. You can sleep well at night knowing that all these people are worldly successes.
Also, nobody’s perfect. Carroll on two occasions promoted junk science. But they could’ve been lapses. As I wrote here, Carroll may himself come to believe that he made a mistake by uncritically promoting that crap, in which case I recommend he invite Nick Brown on his show to explore what went wrong in those cases. I’m serious with this suggestion! I think it could be a great episode.
P.S. In a time when the U.S. government is promoting vaccine denial, I think Sean Carroll is actively doing a bad thing by promoting unfounded claims of mind-body healing, in the same way that Andrew Huberman is doing damage by promoting unfounded claims about cold showers, dietary supplements, and so forth. Carroll may think of himself as promoting science but in this case he’s promoting anti-science faith healing. I’m not saying that Carroll is a bad person–he may be a really nice guy–just that in this case he’s joining up with the anti-science movement. Maybe he could interview some anti-vax scientist next who can explain why measles is a good thing.
To be fair, a gigantic measles pandemic in adults is predicted by the standard SIR models. We are in what is called the “honeymoon period” after a failed eradication attempt.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32359782/