But that’s not what this is about. In the end, it’s about increasing the probability that we get things right over the way that we try to get things right today. And the philosophies of science that served us so well in our history of expensive, unavailable data will not serve us well in our current history and its inheritors, who have to figure out what data to delete, not what data to save.

Models will help. Open data will help. But a more supple, more finely tuned epistemology

of science, one that understands how data can drive the creation of hypothesis, not simply emerge as part of its proof, is the real key. Because the data, and the quantitative research that can emerge from it, is often going to be better at making predictions than the gut instinct that’s driven many of the narrative sciences (and I’m including both biology and health in there, though not chemistry or physics).

But it will take the establishment class either getting with the program, or getting swept away by the tide. Because in science and health, the funding is controlled by the elites. And they’re still deep in the grips of a pre-data way of knowing what they know.