Simple and incremental knowledge gains, and their diffusion

I had blogged here about our propensity to underplay or even gloss over simple and incremental solutions to problems, and instead search for innovative and big-bang solutions.

In the context of explaining the advances made in rock-climbing over the decades, especially the Alex Honnold's free solo (no aids, no protection at all) climb of El Capitan in Yosemite, John Cochrane writes,

In studying economic growth, we (and especially those of us in Silicon Valley) focus way too much on gadgets and too little on simple human knowledge. Southwest Airlines’ ability to get an airliner back in the air in half the time it took in the 1970s (and still does at many larger airlines) is as much about an increase in productivity as it is about installing the latest gadget. Growth is about the knowledge of how to do things, knowledge that is only sometimes embodied in machines. Free Solo is a great example of the expansion of ability, driven purely by advances in knowledge, untethered from machines.

This is important in the growth of such knowledge,

The key insight of modern growth theory is that, in the process described above, the larger the group studying any problem, the faster the knowledge advances. If 1,000 people are figuring out how to climb, and all of their good ideas disseminate through the group, each member of the group gets to use new ideas more quickly than if there are 100 people doing it.

So relevant at multiple levels!