Searching the keys where the light shines

As the old joke goes: a drunk person on his knees in front of the pub. Another guest comes out and asks  what he is doing, I am searching for my keys. So the friendly guest helps him. But they don't find the keys, so he asks the drunk, Are you sure, you lost the keys here? — No, around the corner, but there is no light.

Ross Ashby (1948)

In 1970 Ross Ashby publishes the book Introduction into Cybernetics. One key insight in this book is:

»Science stands today on something of a divide. For two centuries it has been exploring systems that are either intrinsically simple or that are capable of being analysed into simple components. The fact that such a dogma as " vary the factors one at a time" could be accepted for a century, shows that scientists were largely concerned in investigating such systems as allowed this method; for this method is often fundamentally impossible in the complex systems.«

In brevity, to circle back to the joke: we search our car keys where the light is, not where we lost them. 

Science did the same thing in the past. Search and explain the simple (as in not complex) problems. In the mid of the 20th century cybernetics tried to turn this approach towards the complex; Also sciences like biology move (in part) from a descriptive to a complexity-science, for instance ecology. But from the late 1970s/80s on, cybernetics ran out of fashion and was sort of replaced by complexity science. 

And yet, it looks to me, we are still at the beginning. There are fields in science, where there is a focus on systemic behaviour, ecology, climate science, (small) parts of medicine come to mind. But I believe, that scientific practice is largely even worse today. As generalist you can hardly make a career in science these days, so people focuse on ever narrower fields of »expertise« or sets of methods, not even interested in trying to understand complex phenomena — the world — at large. It is more rewarding (in a career perspective) to work for instance on some obscure mathematical framework that cannot be applied in any reasonable sense to our world, but has a dedicated scientific community.

Searching where you know what you will find (because you outlined it in the grant proposal for the years to come) with the methods your institution is known for. Curiosity killed the cat scientist..

Is this science or rather a joke?