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adamisom comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong
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If there are a few weaknesses in the article, I'm not sure this is one of them.
The field of cognitive biases have only been around 40 years; free access to most scientific knowledge has been greatly enhanced by Google Scholars and since it's otherwise fettered, that part's not unreasonable; even the Bayesian interpretation of probability theory has only been accepted for... well, I'm not sure, but I think only since World War II; and perhaps most restricting of all, the Web enables large communities that probably couldn't otherwise exist and is pretty new.
These facts in conjunction make his statement reasonable.
Try half a century later. Until very recently -- about twenty years ago -- the Bayesian view of probability was very much a minority view, and it has only really picked up steam in the last 10 years. Several things happened around 20 years ago:
Faster and cheaper computers became available. Bayesian methods tend to be computationally intensive, and this limited their use.
Rule-based expert systems fizzled out and began to be replaced by Bayesian networks after practical algorithms for inference with BNs were developed.
Awareness of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods (which can be used to sample from a Bayesian posterior distribution) spread to the statistics community, and the free BUGS software made it easy for non-experts to create and evaluate new Bayesian models.
These developments made it practical to apply Bayesian methods... and people started finding out how well they could work.