I think you are exactly right, and want to add a couple things (): - It's easy to recognize scientific / technological revolutions in hindsight, but at the tim

I think you are exactly right, and want to add a couple things (): - It's easy to recognize scientific / technological revolutions in hindsight, but at the time they're anything but. I think most recognize the importance of persistence in the progenitor of an idea. What's often missed in these discussions is how important the subsequent incremental progress is: working out consequences of a theoretical insight, figuring out what you can build on top of a new tech, etc. - I don't have a strong opinion about the optimal amount of "risk," but I do think making risk existential (as in one would starve without a research breakthrough) would have the opposite effect, because while we all say we like people to take risks, what we really mean is like people to take risks and suceeed. And yes, too little risk can breed complacency. And yes, convolutions are a specific kind of linear transformation, whereas matrices represent linear transformations on vector spaces. The specific structure is that convolutions represent linear transformations that are translation-invariant, a property that many types of data (e.g., images) have, at least approximately. () My perspective as an academic but not a computer scientist.