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What's shocking is how badly people understand the purpose of an analogy. It's to communicate an idea to another person in a way that can also convey subtletie

• M_Grey 10y ago
  Well you said it... it's not a misunderstanding, it's a podium.
  • deleted 10y ago
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• xkxx 10y ago
  > What's shocking is how badly people understand the purpose of an analogy. The purpose of an analogy is to simplify something that's too hard to understand for the person you try to convey your idea to. Sometimes analogies are appropriate, e.g. when you teach something. When you want to convince somebody whose opinion is very different from yours, analogies aren't appropriate. They sound condescending: "because you are not smart enough to understand the real rationale behind my opinion, here is an oversimplified argument based on analogies I made just for you". The question is, did Torvalds have any real argument back then? Maybe he fell back to using analogies for the lack of any real argument. > In this case, he was trying to convey the idea that the risk is so small and so remote that it really isn't worth spending a lot of time on. To convey the idea that the risk is very small, one needs to have a proof. Real proofs shouldn't involve analogies. They should use facts and logic.
  • hulahoof 10y ago
    Sometimes facts and logic can be extremely verbose - I feel many analogies are in place not to be condescending, but because the author has faith in the reader that they can make the connection between the analogy and the problem. And to be quite honest abstracting ideas is core to problem solving, and I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that anyone misunderstood what Linus was getting at there.
    • xkxx 10y ago
      > abstracting ideas is core to problem solving Sure. But don't confuse abstractions with analogies. Here is a good proof about both the integers and rational numbers. Every integer and rational is a real number (abstraction). When you add any 2 real numbers, you get the same result regardless of their order (fact). So it must be true that, when you add any 2 integers, you get the same result regardless of their order (correct conclusion #1). It also must be true that, when you add any 2 rationals, you get the same result too (correct conclusion #2). Here is a bad proof about the integers and rational numbers. Both the integers and rationals are very similar: you can add them, subtract them and so on (analogy). Between every 2 rational numbers there is another rational number (fact). So it must be true that between every 2 integers there is another integer (wrong conclusion).
  • watwut 10y ago
    Yet other times, people use analogies to gloss over important facts, to sort of hide them from listener. The logical conclusion taken from analogy will be different then what would be reasonable if all facts would be taken into account. Great when your arguments are weaker, but you still wanna convince.
    • barneycarroll 10y ago
      Other times, people introduce seemingly impertinent colour into an analogy in order to engage the target audience's imagination and reasoning better. They may even tailor the duration of their analogy in order to match that of other analogies which have previously hit home with the intended target. And the target may trust this, and potentially end up believing a great many falsehoods, because of a lack of critical reasoning in the contextualisation and import of the analogy.
• throwayguestman 10y ago
  > Which means the analogy was successful. Sure, if he's saying he is powerless against higher powers. But if he's trying to make a quantitative assertion, a qualitative analogy is not the right tool.
• deleted 10y ago
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