“lots of humans can make small incremental progress”
You could easily imagine that the contribution each sub-genius makes is only appreciated or assimilated in part, since it’s easier to derive trivial results from powerful theorems than to construct proofs of powerful theorems from trivial results. The problem is gathering seemingly disparate and disconnected pieces of knowledge together in a single mind and linking them into a coherent whole, and a genius who produced many of these bits of knowledge by himself is in a much better position to do this than somebody who has to learn everything from external sources, struggling against the inadequacy of memory for learned material althewhile. So the “minor” contributions are lost to time simply because they’re not sufficiently important to be studied widely.
“lots of humans can make small incremental progress”
You could easily imagine that the contribution each sub-genius makes is only appreciated or assimilated in part, since it’s easier to derive trivial results from powerful theorems than to construct proofs of powerful theorems from trivial results. The problem is gathering seemingly disparate and disconnected pieces of knowledge together in a single mind and linking them into a coherent whole, and a genius who produced many of these bits of knowledge by himself is in a much better position to do this than somebody who has to learn everything from external sources, struggling against the inadequacy of memory for learned material althewhile. So the “minor” contributions are lost to time simply because they’re not sufficiently important to be studied widely.