ScientificDataOnBlockchains

@athie_gnome @timbray

No equivocation. Maybe my point isn't clear. I agree that the BTC accounting network isn't the same as the news network. BTC doesn't solve the problem of Fox News.

That doesn't mean, tho, that parallels between the two aren't important or that they can't learn from each other.

Let me give you an example of, say, an interesting intermediate position. You could imagine a consortium of major universities and academic publishers in the world, agreeing to put the data from all published research on blockchain.

Anything that got through peer review and accepted by these prestigious publications would have ALL data available to public inspection and signed on the blockchain.

Now anyone, journalists / public who wanted to know definitively what academia thinks about X, can check a signed, authenticated, unfalsifiable copy of what that research said.

We might even have signed automatic inclusion of, say, statistical models or code. So you'd KNOW that when researchers say they used this method to analyse the data, they really did.

Now this doesn't stop fake universities publishing fake research. Or even just random people lying about it on YouTube. But it does make it a lot easier for everyone to get the "definitive academic opinion". There's no excuse for a newspaper spinning a "both sides" story when it's so easy and obvious what the "official academic opinion" is.

OK. That will lead to more arguments about the validity of academic opinion, of group think etc. But it might just prevent contemporary science getting entirely swamped by spin and misinformation.