I find “large numbers of low-impact discoveries” to be the most compelling, though I’d also add:
Variance becomes lower as people put more effort into finding discoveries (intuitively, each person has some chance of finding a discovery, all of which are approximately independent from each other).
There can be high-impact discoveries, but those are found earlier (partly because people are looking for them, and partly because there are more ways to stumble upon high-impact discoveries).
I find “large numbers of low-impact discoveries” to be the most compelling, though I’d also add:
Variance becomes lower as people put more effort into finding discoveries (intuitively, each person has some chance of finding a discovery, all of which are approximately independent from each other).
There can be high-impact discoveries, but those are found earlier (partly because people are looking for them, and partly because there are more ways to stumble upon high-impact discoveries).