What is oversimplification?

Oversimplification is a concept in personal epistemology: Forcing integration where it does not exist or oversimplifying to achieve coherence.

Example: You read books on stoicism, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics. Each framework makes sense on its own. So you construct a grand unified theory: 'Humans are rational agents who just need to control their emotions.' This feels coherent, but it's a Procrustean integration — you've lopped off everything that didn't fit. Stoicism's nuance about appropriate emotions is gone. Evolutionary psychology's insight about adaptive irrationality is gone. Behavioral economics' evidence that heuristics are often optimal is gone. You achieved coherence by destroying the information that made each schema valuable.

This concept is part of Phase 20 (Schema Integration) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema integration.