Makes me think of one of the Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design:
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
It's all fine in context, but things go wrong if you only look at that high-level view and then step back down to low-level: you may think you've done something useful, but you mostly just threw away the high-frequency components, i.e. the important bits of the signal. Your view gets blurred and unrefined (literally, in case of dropping the high frequencies of an image).
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
It's all fine in context, but things go wrong if you only look at that high-level view and then step back down to low-level: you may think you've done something useful, but you mostly just threw away the high-frequency components, i.e. the important bits of the signal. Your view gets blurred and unrefined (literally, in case of dropping the high frequencies of an image).