Change - [insert metaphor here] - seldom a blinding light on the Damascus Road, anyway
Thinking about change, and changing people's ideas, and the take-up of new technologies, and how this tends to be much slower.
Comment to a post the other day about forceps and how shocking that the Chambelen family kept them a trade secret for so long; however, even when the secret was out a lot of doctors were fairly hostile to the idea and they certainly didn't catch on as any kind of standard procedure in obstructed childbirth for quite a long time. See also, Semmelweiss and his colleagues thinking he was mad to suggest that maybe it wasn't a great idea to come straight from the dissecting room to the labour ward without washing.
Once heard a lecture that indicated that far from falling upon the stethoscope with glad cries once Laennec had demonstrated its utility, the medical profession took it up very slowly indeed.
Over on another journal I had occasion to point out that clitoridectomies to 'cure masturbation' in young girls are reported to have been occurring in the USA at least as late as the 1940s (it was certainly a procedure still being mentioned in a standard N American paediatric textbook of the 1930s).
Some of this is doubtless due to docs adhering to what they learnt at medical school when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
But also, more generally, in people's lives, change isn't necessarily a blinding light and sudden conversion thing - or even if there is some moment of revelation, the process of actually changing as a result is usually much more gradual and involves going round and round and iterating. Ideas take time to percolate and to affect actions. (Yeast? Seeds germinating? - organic metaphors.)
Revelations and debates about ideas aren't had once for all and never need repeating. This came up strongly in the Internet Drama panel at Wiscon. I don't think I said, but it was I think implicit in a lot of what was being said generally, that even if the people being actively debated with aren't convinced (and may just dig in deeper), the effect of the debate on the lurking viewers is important - that speaking up, even if it feels like a pointless wrangle at the obvious level of interchange, is nonetheless a form of testifying that may influence non-participants.*
*[Okay, I once gave a paper on the use of the English courtroom and test-cases as a means of publicising taboo causes like birth control, and that the case didn't need to be won for it to be a win.]