I, for one, am profoundly thankful that the ~300 year mania around innovation and newness is beginning to wane. You don't need to read that many history books to appreciate that the values that we have today are profoundly different than what they were previously. It takes a few more books, and a pinch of humility, to appreciate that today's values are neither universal nor the necessary outcome of a teleological evolutionary process. The reworking that Tao suggests here reaches far beyond math. The fact that mathematicians are starting to wrestle with these questions is cause for great optimism. Once VCs do the same thing, we'll be on the other side of the storm.