I was (without any better argument than my intuition) arguing that the sentence “But it's more accurate to model these systems as semilattices.” sounds weak to

I was (without any better argument than my intuition) arguing that the sentence “But it's more accurate to model these systems as semilattices.” sounds weak to me. I was not making a point on the article, but only on this specific idea. My feeling is that it's not really fruitful to describe "real life" phenomena in terms of abstract algebraic mathematical structures. It's more of a gut feeling than anything else, but I think there are two points that one can make here: * Generally, it's better to first observe a phenomenon, understand it, and try to find a good vocabulary for it, mathematical or otherwise, rather than take an out-of-the-box fancy sounding math concept and try to make it fit your phenomenon. * It seems as soon as you try to describe a phenomenon with an algebraic object, you'll soon get stuck trying to make sense of your functions/axioms: what's the meet? what's the join, is there a bottom element, etc. If you rather work with a more “geometric” notion (graphs, metric spaces,…) you don't have as many things to match, and you can focus on studying your objects. To be clear, I don't have any strong point here, it's mostly gut feeling/rumblings.