It ignores the lived experience of business, science, technology, art, and culture. It devalues adaptability and resilience, experience and experimentation. It gives rhetorical aid and comfort to the enemies of creativity, enterprise, and progress. Encountering the unplanned, incremental, dispersed, and unpredictable way important innovations really occur, it encourages panic and rejection. To understand that, we need a different concept of progress.
Astronomers find the atmosphere a pesky thing.
It interferes with starlight, turning what should be a clean, sharp point into a wriggling blur, zipping around like an amoeba on their computer screens. But cleverness can substitute for space travel. Way back in 1953, a Mount Wilson astronomer named Horace Babcock envisioned how sharp images might be gathered by measuring those ever-changing atmospheric distortions and correcting for them in real time. Technology finally caught up with Babcock's vision, and in 1995 the observatory realized his dream. Edwin Hubble's old instrument now sees as sharply, if not as far, as his orbiting namesake.