To stretch an analogy stacking blocks seems like you can add the heights, except the weight of the stack deforms them, so addition is misleading.
We've got a bit of a dialectic:
Thesis -- The map is not the territory.
Antithesis -- There's nothing so practical as a good theory.
Synthesis -- Use a subway map when catching the train, use a topographical map when doing flood planning, etc.
Taking it back to programming, all abstractions are leaky in some way. A good software engineer uses the right abstraction for the task, knowing that it might be wrong for a different task.
IMO, if a topic sounds overtly complex and focuses on a legion arbitrary seeming minutiae and, most crucially, you can't find the empiric or mathematical root cause for this complexity it's likely the direction of study is more or less bogus and based on academic eminence rather than evidence.
Now, sure the boundarys around a field gets fuzzy and sculpture and architecture are both influenced by the human visual system so there is overlap. But, that's not a shared theme that's D.C. and Baltimore being next to each other and sharing a few suburbs at one end, but not all suburbs.
This is the very tension between Platonism with its emphasis on unity and Aristotelianism which sees complex diversity everywhere. How can we get these two systems to work together? How can we have both unity and diversity?
And now you know where the word "university" comes from.
(Who says all those history and philosophy classes were a waste of time? Besides me, I mean.)
I've always seen things as having a 'level of abstraction'. At one level of abstraction things can have unity, but as you 'zoom in' and change the level of abstraction you'll see the differences and have diversity.
From a distance stars and snowflakes all look the same, but not on closer inspection. Similarly in a foreign country, at first people will all seem the same, but as you spend more time there you level of abstraction changes and you start to see greater diversity.
Since you can zoom in/out infinitely there's no correct level of abstraction to start from or accept as a default, therefore things have great unity and diversity, simultaneously.
While I studied engineering, it was common to get in spats with lefty liberal-arts types, who always brought everything around to talk of class, rich vs. poor, and so on. I mainly read The Economist, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and so on, so I thought this perspective was reductionist and overly simplistic, when reality was much more complex, a mostly net-beneficial process where foul-play was a relatively minor factor.
After graduation, when I started working, I had time to read more history and philosophy, learned more about my own domain of expertise, learned how the professional world worked, and also caught up with much more current events. Turns out I now feel like those critics were more-or-less right all along.
I still have issues with the way some issues were introduced to me originally, but ultimately I was just very reluctant to accept that there was basically a full-on class war I was blissfully ignorant of.
It seems that the more humans learn about any topic: our own agricultural history, biology, psychology, mathematics, etc we begin to reach conclusions similar to the above. Wow, this is much more complex than we thought it was. I find this in my own life as I explore socio-political topics also - it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary?