[chrito]

The fundamental point around "incrementalism" makes a lot of sense.

Even government is largely incremental these days... the margin of winning the presidency seemed so small that it probably boiled downed to a series of micro-optimizations. If you buy that... why would a great micro-optimizer run the country any differently?

And even with technological progress poster-child Apple... the big outstanding question is whether Tim Cook will end up turning the company in to a micro-optimization that converges toward it's current local maxima?

But maybe it's all just cyclical... once all the low hanging fruit is picked over 1000 of times, the world at large will naturally be forced to be less incremental.