You sound like you would really enjoy the book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have failed.
I wonder if a lot of this comes back to the enlightenment/science-y way of looking at the world that imagines that the way to understand stuff is to break it into subproblems, solve those, and build back up from there. It relies on a fundamental assumption that there are separate things instead of a big continuous process of happening. I recently read about a study where participants were asked to pick the best car for a set of needs, and were given 4 variables per car in one case, and 16 variables per car in another. Then, each group was either distracted while pondering, or allowed to think through it directly/consciously. The conscious thought group did better than distracted group did when there were 4 variables, but worse when there were more. Intuition is great at the missable details.
I wonder if a lot of this comes back to the enlightenment/science-y way of looking at the world that imagines that the way to understand stuff is to break it into subproblems, solve those, and build back up from there. It relies on a fundamental assumption that there are separate things instead of a big continuous process of happening. I recently read about a study where participants were asked to pick the best car for a set of needs, and were given 4 variables per car in one case, and 16 variables per car in another. Then, each group was either distracted while pondering, or allowed to think through it directly/consciously. The conscious thought group did better than distracted group did when there were 4 variables, but worse when there were more. Intuition is great at the missable details.