Reasons for scarcity of abstract pattern recognition in modern systems and data (by people)
Brains are an excellent and efficient pattern recognition machine, which can find patterns in seemingly random data as well (with certain conditions, more on this below).
Given this, I found it peculiar that the vast majority of people (around me, but from reading blogs online, seems like a majority of today's population) frequently abstain from indulging or developing deliberate thought patterns which facilitate general pattern recognition. This seems peculiar because:
The above mentioned reason: brains are apparently good at it.
It is beneficial, in terms of almost every aspect of life.
Our education system should teach us to do it, from an early age.
To be very clear, we do do it, in abundance, in our social aspects of life. Our societal structure, our cultures and relationships are intertwined and complex, and yet our brain does a decent job at navigating through the mess by identifying workable models (models ~ general principles), which help us be a part of society (with certain obvious cases of failures).
The fields where we specifically lack this pattern recognition ability are in numbers, or in other words, data. Numerical data provides us with a symbolic representation of reality, something we are not comfortable recognising patterns in.
But it's not just numerical data, it's also economic/financial analysis, STEM fields, computer sciences and the post-industrial societal structure.
A few reasons why this may be the case:
The most obvious reason: these concepts are very new compared to the existence of modern humans. Brains haven't evolved to optimize on recognising patterns on excel sheets and social media.
The lack of culture around honing our skills explicitly for recognising patterns in never-before-seen data. Now I can't vouch for a lack of culture for anything around the world, but as far as I've seen, it's hard to find good articles/ blogs/ essays/papers/ books that take into account general trends related to a concept and explore from that perspective. Not that they aren't there, but they aren't prevalent enough to be considered a part of the "culture".
Not enough direct economic incentive to do so. Honing this by itself means getting into the classic trade off between developing a skill which leads to growth in the future, but not so much now. Add this to the fact that this trade off isn't directly vouched by many people (lack of culture), and hence many young adults are either unaware or do not spend adequate time thinking about the pros and cons. Kind of like opening a business vs getting a job, but there are no direct examples of successful businesses, so you see no pros at all.
It could be the case that we needed to observe enough specific instances of a particular phenomenon for some experts to piece together a general principle, and that the concepts mentioned above have taken their time showing us these specific instances, leading to a slow but steady growth towards the development of a general theory of the said concept. This could mean my assumption that people do not do this is false, or rather misconceived. They are doing it, but due to the recency of the modern age, it's happening at a slow and steady pace, and thus is harder to perceive.
Overall, it seems like I had a lot to say about this, (which wasn't obvious to me when I started writing this :), especially the many examples that came to my mind which I chose not to include in order to continue my flow of thought.
I'll write a follow up post probably to go a little in-depth, but with examples.