It isn't the number of voices; it is the speed and cost of setting up special interest communities. A bunch of health freaks with a penchant for experimentation would get together and start learning things. Not an overnight process but it'd be insanely quick compared to the sluggish speed of the last few millennia.
> Btw, early modern medicine was pretty much unencumbered by regulation - so there would be little change.
Not so; the early work was encumbered by rules against graverobbing. There were some famous advances made by .. someone who's name I do not recall, but he'd have been in trouble if people knew what he was up to.
Yes, there were some rules holding back anatomy to some extent at certain times, but really pretty much free for all in a lot of other areas.
Those health freaks would do the right things why? Why would other communities not seek to stop or block them from doing what they are doing (these experiments would have at times pretty dire consequences)? Why would there be zero rules for what those health freaks are doing? There is just no reason to assume this would just work out.
Why hasn't the internet brought insane advances in science if it is such a force multiplier for it?
> Those health freaks would do the right things why? Why would other communities not seek to stop or block them from doing what they are doing (these experiments would have at times pretty dire consequences)?
It's research and rediscovering a field. Of course they'd get a bunch of stuff wrong. That is how medical research works; people try things that don't work all the time.
And we're imaging a world with presumably no antibiotics. Nobody cares if people are accidentally killing themselves, death lurks behind every shrub.
> Why hasn't the internet brought insane advances in science if it is such a force multiplier for it?
... have I dropped into an alternate universe? The rate of scientific progress is unreal right now. We're progressing at a pace that is unparalleled in human history at a global scale. There is even a risk we'll obsolete the human mind this decade. Something has been force-multiplying scientific progress.
I suppose I should say technological progress rather than scientific, technically science has been slowing down since they've discovered most things. Maybe that was the point of confusion here. But the rate of knowledge dissemination is resulting in massive quality of life improvements that mean outcomes on the ground are improving in unreal ways. Look at the dissemination of things like iPhones for example.
Like in the past people didn't care about things like dissecting corpses?
What technical and scientific progress at unreal rates? The amount of information and data increased, but a lot of other things are highly incremental at best. If the progress is so great, why hasn't productivity increased a lot or life expectancy? Parallel universe indeed.
The idea that we discovered most things has quite a lot of hubris in it, given the vast sways of things we only have a poor grasp on.
Not sure the iPhone is an example of improved quality of life as the effect varies quite a lot between use cases.
> Btw, early modern medicine was pretty much unencumbered by regulation - so there would be little change.
Not so; the early work was encumbered by rules against graverobbing. There were some famous advances made by .. someone who's name I do not recall, but he'd have been in trouble if people knew what he was up to.