Thread by @balajis

The difference between a religious and secular society is that the latter is ostensibly predicated on scientific fact.

The similarity is that most people in both societies rely on authorities rather than personally discovering scientific facts.

Most people do social diligence, only a few do technical diligence.

This also suggests that open science will be a bigger deal in the long run than people think.

Peer-to-peer discovery and communication of facts without intermediating authorities.

Reproducible research is much more important than institutional prestige. github.com/leipzig/awesom…

“Don’t believe me? Just Google it.”

Google trained billions to look things up for themselves. Thirty years ago only professional researchers were fixtures in the library.

Now wearables are giving people the ability to collect and analyze their own data. github.com/woop/awesome-q…

Decentralized instrumentation plus pseudonymous aggregation will eventually give rise to the largest longitudinal health studies we’ve ever seen.

Voluntary, international, pseudonymous, and outside academia.

This is a key enabling technology: security.googleblog.com/2019/06/helpin…

Health data is medical, so it’s private. But it’s statistical, so it requires aggregation.

Homomorphic encryption and/or federated learning may allow privacy-preserving aggregations.

Crypto can incentivize people to contribute data. Upload to download. ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federa…

The internet turned everyone into publishers.

Crypto is turning everyone into investors.

Quantified self may turn everyone into scientists.