[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.