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It was the norm from the early 1800s, but that norm started degrading in the 1920s, and was definitively over by 1970.
Not coincidentally, the rate of breaking new ground in terms of technological innovation ground to a screeching halt roughly 20 years after that.
During the telecom boom?
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What does this mean though?
There was simply much less stuff to DO before the 1800s, and certainly before say, the 1600s. It wouldn't have made sense to let people deploy new LLMs without regulations, or let factories pollute as much as they wanted, or let people go diving in untested carbon fiber submarines, because there was no AI and no factories and no submarines.
And for what scientific research did exist, there were certainly norms that regulated it. Dissecting dead bodies was taboo in various times and places, for example. Or, you know, the whole Galileo kerfuffle.
This is a tangent but Galileo wasn’t prosecuted for his research, he was prosecuted for lese majeste violations against the pope while making enemies in the dumbest ways possible. I’m not going to claim that’s a good thing, but it’s not actually an example of scientific research being hushed up.
The thing you get prosecuted for being different from the reason they really want you put away is not a new phenomenon. I'm vaguely annoyed by the extent to which Catholic apologetic regarding the Galileo affair seems to have won the day (I blame Kuhn, who gave Catholics the greatest apologetic they could ever want). The post-Trent Catholic Church really was pretty hostile to science (the medieval church far less so), and that really did contribute to their sucking the exhaust of Northwestern Europe for 450 years.
And when Galileo published his theory initially, he got away with it. Where he started getting in trouble was when he decided to defend his theory by making ad hominems on powerful and well connected people, which escalated to him calling the pope a moron.
Lese majeste laws against figures who are technically correct but being assholes is not a good thing, but it also isn’t an example of prosecuting scientists.
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