[A_Duck]

>> if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it

This is a great heuristic for life. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics does not apply to human behaviour and simple answers to social problems are almost always oversimplified.

If people use your system then get comfortable with many levels of adjustments and tweaks. y=mx+c isn't gonna cut it.

This cognitive bias often manifests as a desire to do a greenfield refactor of an old system, ignoring the value of all the tweaks and shims added over the years to accomodate the real world.

[HPsquared]

Reductionism is a hazard, but overcomplication can also be an unhealthy sign. Epicycles come to mind.

[A_Duck]

Perfect example.

For minds trained on physics and chemistry where mathematics is unreasonably effective, epicycles are a 'code smell' to be eliminated — there must be a simpler expression of the system.

This instinct has to be discarded when working with messy complex human beings.

[HPsquared]

There are a lot of faulty heuristics indeed, reductionism is only one. Sometimes human behaviour can be explained better, that is more reliably and with less "over-fitting", by a simple model with the right perspective and vocabulary, than a really complicated explanation that is missing a key insight.