I don't want to make fun of this guy but it seems like his main insight is that you can use math to represent processes in the world. That's...what all of science and engineering do?
He is closer to Aristotle than modern scientists and engineers. That is create formulas to represent the world without checking how the world works at all.
He does write at the Introduction of one of his books [1] about it:
"While this approach will fail to satisfy those few dedicated person who want to delve into the innards of the program, I think it will satisfy the needs of the greater number of people who wish to understand the concepts behind the game.
Finally, I apologize to all those readers more knowledgeable about geopolitical matters than myself, who may wince at the necessary simplifications. I am first and foremost a game designer, not a political scientist. Simplification to achieve clarity is the essence of my work; clarity can be extracted from a muddy reality only by denying some of reality’s richness."
For example, in this post [0] he argues that a pinecone was cushioned by the snow and that's why it didn't bounce off the rail. But he fails to notice that there's the same amount of snow on the rail and on top of the pinecone. Instead of his hypothesis, what I think probably happened was that the pinecone bounced on the deck and then up to the rail, where it was before the snow started falling. It's not a matter of looking at objects vs processes like he claims, it's a matter of looking at what objects (in this case, the snow on top of the pinecone) can tell us about processes.
