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As Scott Adams says, "Analogies are for fighting." If you try to counter a statement with an analogy you almost always simply get a fight.
by ldiracdelta 4y ago
As Scott Adams says, "Analogies are for fighting." If you try to counter a statement with an analogy you almost always simply get a fight.
- MonaroVXR 4y agoNever thought about that, where do you get this from? But it kinda rings true for me in life.
- ldiracdelta 4y agoI heard it from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. In addition to writing that comic he is a very interesting thinker. He is also a trained hypnotist.
- slkdk32 4y ago
- eyelidlessness 4y agoQuoting absolutes expressed by highly opinionated people is also for fighting. Not saying you shouldn’t, but maybe there’s some nuance missing. Not even saying the particular analogy was devoid of conflict, it has plenty of room for disagreement. But it didn’t feel to me like it was inviting any which wasn’t already present.
- ldiracdelta 4y agoI would classify Scott Adam's statement as a trueism -- true for most people, under most circumstances, for most times. Unfortunately, couching a trueism in its most precise linguistic form with associated probabilities and error margins is a path to simply being ignored. Once a thread switches to rhetoric, dialectic responses are like pissing in the wind, forgive the analogy :-)
- eyelidlessness 4y agoWell I’ll give you this: quoting Scott Adams then correctly using and understanding the word dialectic is definitely not on my HN comment threads bingo card.
- onion2k 4y agoSurely it's the countering bit that shows you want to get in to a fight more than the analogy. Analogies are just a way of illustrating a point.
- ldiracdelta 4y agoI do wish that people would engage in dialectic conversation when they encounter an analogy, rather than rhetoric. Unfortunately, I find Scott Adam's words ring true.