How can less be more?

There's a raft of articles where people share their forays into minimalism. Minimalism is mostly a way to show cultural value, like wearing black turtlenecks or making your children take piano lessons. We add maxims like "less is more" to justify these things but "less is more" is such a vacuous justification you can discard it without thought. Yngwie Malmsteen's pithy thoughts on "less is more" (very short): [this video] If you want data, there are a few usability studies on the use of multiple monitors. The general consensus is that bigger monitors are better and two monitors are better than one, three or more monitors might be too many. These studies are easy enough to find on Google so I'm not going to link them here. Data will always beat maxims. On a personal note, I find it easier to work with multiple monitors rather than one larger monitor, possibly due to software support. I'll want two web browsers up, side by side, on one monitor, and then the other monitor can hold editors and terminal windows. There tends to be pretty good software support for dividing a monitor in half, which supports this workflow very well on two monitors, but dividing a monitor in four is a bit rare. Stuff I don't really need like mail, music players, and the like get relegated to other virtual desktops.

A lot of amateur endurance athletes will hear about elite coaches or athletes saying things like "quality over quantity" or "less is more" and not realize that the context of those comments is something like: "I was training 40 hours a week but I realized if I did better if I dropped it to 30 hours a week with more specificity or harder hard days". They then use that to justify not doing more than their comparatively tiny workload, which is psychologically natural since you don't want to do more! But until you get up to the point where more is too much, which is usually more than you imagine, more is usually more. [this video]