Forgive me if this sounds naive but it sort of reminds me of life in a way. I equate these little steps to the way most of our industries or institutions focus on producing incremental and predictable progress. In such an environment many of the power gives way to manager and administrator type participants. Think of academia or how most of tech has become (ie sass).

On the other hand, while that is certainly useful, it pales in comparison to that being combined with a non-linear aoproach, where you’re not trying to optimize a known process but fundamentally rethink the question altogether. To me that’s reminiscent of physics in the early twentieth century, democracy and liberal economies during the enlightenment, and even modern literature, in a sense, like Joyce.

I don’t really have a point beyond that, and it’s just an analogy after all. It’s still neat to think about and recognize similarities between a discovery in the computational world and a personal observation about our own world. Even if it’s a misguided analogy, it feels true.