It's a bit like saying everything can be modeled. What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models. An awful lot of things are actually nail-like for this particular hammer.
Applying it to relationships and society feels like a slippery slope. People are still people. But there's definitely cases where the analogy is useful, and maybe even spot-on.
I am almost through the book "Attached" by Amire Levine, on 'advise' from HN last week. It talks about the spectrum "fear/insecure - safe - avoiding" in relationships. It is very systematic in its approach and it opened my eyes to this way of looking. It is about the interactions between people on that spectrum inside a relationship.
I look at my past 2 relationships now quite differently. I am mostly safe attached, and tend a bit to avoiding as well. My first relationship was with a fear/insecure someone, which ended with a lot of drama. My second relationship, I wanted to avoid drama, and ended up with someone who was avoiding. That pushed me more in the direction of fear/insecure, but since I am more on the side of avoiding than fear/insecure, there wasn't enough glue to make it last. Now I am with someone who is mostly safe, but has some fear/insecure tendencies. We do manage quite well I think :)
I tend to look at it like this; people are individual and always unique. When you bring together 2 unique persons, you end up with a unique relationship. But there are still systems that you can discover there.
Agreed - good examples. I've never been into the arts much, but I loved a class I took on Shakespeare once, because I found there was a lot of value in those stories for forming these models of relationships. You could identify similar patterns and identify with certain characters and it was very useful for helping articulate otherwise abstract thoughts and feelings. Not only for communication, but for my own thinking as well.
> What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models.
One of my favorite comments from not too long ago was from an Ask HN on biology: The sooner you get used to believing that "I can't prove anything, but we have a pile of mostly not contradictory evidence that suggests that most of the time this idea is a pretty good heuristic and our error bars are reasonable", the better you'll do and the saner you'll remain ... And if you like, I can provide a basically endless stream of papers of the form "we thought X did Y and we knew what X was; it turns out that X actually does Q, it also turns out we don't know why X does anything at all, but when we do X we sometimes get Y so we've been confused for the past 50 years"
The whole thread is a gold mine of how defined "systems" fail to model biology at a useful level. At some point, a system gets so complex that it's indistinguishable from chaos. Then your toolbox just has instinct, wisdom, whatever you want to call it. But you can't ascribe it to explicit rules, you have to start firing from the hip without exactly knowing why.
That's reductio ad absurdum if I've ever heard it. People often follow behavioral patterns, or respond somewhat predictably to various events. That is all.
that sentiment is exactly how many people have gotten convicted for murder. Because it was believed there was a specific way one should react to ones SO getting murdered, and it was wrong.
In all seriousness, though — what alternative do you propose? When nothing seems to violate the laws of physics, we can make sense of things using our understanding of those laws.
Alternative could be, sometimes things don't form a system, because 'system' could imply more order and predictability than there really is.
Sometimes stuff just happen, and if you try to look for the system behind, you would see patterns that are not really there.
I would say this is what leads to magical thinking, right?
And I even like magical thinking, all those little nudges where I take a wrong turn, but then meet an interesting person and thing to myself "turns out I was supposed to be here", despite the my second thoughts being buzzkill about "that is not how world works!"
This very much screams "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" to me.