side-side note: all people frame and discuss things that are in terms of things familiar to them. At least to some degree. Metaphor is a fundamental part of the

side-side note: all people frame and discuss things that are in terms of things familiar to them. At least to some degree. Metaphor is a fundamental part of the operating system of our cognition. We are forever mapping useful concepts from one domain to another. Indeed human languages are filled with rich and sometimes subtle metaphors. Heck, you at some point have likely used the building metaphor "you've hit the nail on the head" to communicate to someone that they have explained something in a way that you think is "on the money" to circularly explain one metaphor using another. Not only is it useful to attempt to map powerful concepts from math and computer science onto the social and other sciences, but it useful to map powerful concepts from the social and other sciences onto computer science! In the search for meaningful and useful abstractions you might just hit upon something useful among the junk, but it is a necessary part of the search. Making assumptions is useful and sometimes it leads you astray. There are good analogies, analogies that are ok but something feels off, there are bad analogies. As the domains get further apart and the cost to acquire accurate models in the domain increases the search cost to answer the question of whether the mapping applies or not also increases. I would argue the search cost is infinite. Or at least it's near infinite. In practical terms the search cost is too high for most people as it relates to most things. Our time and other resources we would use to compute the applicability of any mapping is finite and so there is an economics to it. Metaphor/analogy is a shortcut trading off a lower search cost for useful abstractions with a greater possibility the models are inaccurate and/or lower resolution models. Guess and check is often a reasonable strategy. Sometimes it's the only one. All people are engaged in hubris to some degree as their confidence in their conclusions is almost never proportional to the completeness of their models. I find it likely that there are a vast multitude of domains that contain useful concepts necessary to understanding the world as a whole and that anyone in any domain in possession of one of those concepts should feel like it is not "the key" but a "a key" to understanding the world as a whole really doesn't surprise me. It's likely that it actually is a key to understanding the world as a whole. The search cost for any one person to be in possession of all the keys at once is greater than anyone can afford. So to find it amusing that one group of people try to economize their understanding of the world by leveraging the tools in their possession in lieu of gaining a prohibitively expensively deep understanding of all domains of knowledge is to fail to realize how impossibly expensive an accurate view of the world is to attain. The hubris is in thinking it's possible to compute whether something is applicable or not working from a desperately incomplete set of models and expending very few resources in the computation.