Yeah, I wish the author had spent a paragraph shoring up the flawed analogy. Here's how I did it in my head: Normally, chains have their links in series, in wh

Yeah, I wish the author had spent a paragraph shoring up the flawed analogy. Here's how I did it in my head: Normally, chains have their links in series, in which case the chain breaks when the weakest link breaks. Now imagine two objects connected directly by many links, i.e. a parallel chain. This is a "strongest link chain" where just one strong link, or a few strong links, can hold the two objects together even if most of the links break.