Mr. Robot's reduction of people to patterns

I started watching the tv show Mr. Robot. I have never done much programming. I guess the closest I have come is working in Excel, which I have done since I was a tween, and maybe some basic coding that they you used to teach youngsters back when computers were much simpler in a way (does anyone remember DOS?).  But I really did enjoy it. I enjoyed the predictability and the knowing that if you pulled this lever you got this result. I even enjoyed trying to pull a lever and getting the wrong result, because it was just a puzzle to solve -- a puzzle that I knew had an answer just waiting for me to discover. It's no surprise I often thought of people that way too, and so does the main character of Mr. Robot.

The anti-social protagonist hacks everyone he knows to find out all about them. It gives him the illusion of knowing people. He says that he is very good at reading people. And he is in a way, in the sense that so many normal people are terribly predictable -- looking for love in all the wrong places, etc. But I have also seen other real life people, particularly with personality disorders, similarly attempt to reduce people to patterns and predictions and it seems ridiculously sysiphean to me -- often by the time you recognize a pattern, the person or situation has changed and your data is stale. Moreover, to my eyes, they are clearly less successful and accurate with it than they believe themselves to be. And so in maintaining those beliefs that (1) people can be easily reduced to knowable patterns and (2) that they have successfully reduced people to those said patterns, those types appear a little delusional to me. (I'm sure that I am the same with my delusions.)

With all of that said, I still think there is something very useful and often powerful about being able to recognize the patterns in the people around us (even if it will never give us as clear a picture of each other as we might fool ourselves into believing).

A reader gives a similar math analogy:

The environment in which I grew up was certainly governed by physical violence. This enviornment, however, had a steadily balanced input from both sides of morality/ethics: at school was the common child's play, at home was my father's emotional instability brought on from too much drink, at the gym was the overzealous, self-righteous police. Through my Grandparents, at home, I received a clearer understanding of an ethical/moral constitution for a Family man. From the gym I was able to glean between the Warrior's code of conduct (almost Nietzschiean in its focus on self-control  and discipline), and the police offered the legal ramifications of societies expectations. Through these I was able to become Nietzsche's Child, Campbell's Self Revolving Wheel, where, in his Discourse of The Three Metamorphoses, I compiled my own codes; allowing me to adapt to whatever the environment I found myself expected. For me, this was a mathematical puzzle; just as language is an algebraic formula wherein the values are interchangeable and the formula remains the same.