> (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
There's no gradual path to some goals. It's annoying beyond belief to only know something well enough to solve toy problems, and not have any way to see how you can extend your knowledge so you can solve non-toy problems.
I read it as the other way. Acknowledging that iterative improvements on fixed assumptions goes nowhere is quite liberating.
Perhaps I have been watching too much Gurren Lagann lately, but my corollary to rule 31 would be: if you are underground, you can only find sunlight by digging up.
Actually that image perfectly represents the concept. To get to the moon they had to abandon puller rockets (like the one in the image), and use pusher rockets instead. That isn't just a higher tree, that's completely re-imagining the way a rocket works.
So "higher trees" might be a good way to learn how to re-engineer the idea so that you can get to the moon.
> (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
There's no gradual path to some goals. It's annoying beyond belief to only know something well enough to solve toy problems, and not have any way to see how you can extend your knowledge so you can solve non-toy problems.
Sometimes, you can't get there from here.