There is a total unwillingness to reset expectations in the sciences, to
go from the certainty of the expert class to the probabilistic worldview
of a world overrun by data and new entrants. The idea that
non-credentialed experts can generate hypotheses, that roles will be
fluid between citizen and researcher, that “normal” people (as if a
data scientist is normal - she just might not have a
SCOPUS identifier or a PhD) can
generate useful science insight, that publishing on the web might be a
complement to publishing in peer reviewed journals? Those are all easy
to accept with expectations reset by data.
They’re very hard to accept if you attempt to retain the world as it was
before
sequencing
costs were crashing, cloud storage and processing were cheap, and
publishing business models were broken to hell by the internet. Those
scientists (and many pundits of science) at best ignore and at worst
demonstrate bitter anger towards the relentless march of data and
networks that “sail blithely on regardless of the carefully worded
communiqués that emerge from a parade of meetings and consultations,”
as Jonathan
Zittrain once wrote of the internet.