When Analogies Fail

This article is a bit like a graduate student's deconstruction of the feminist themes in Breaking Bad. At first glace it sounds tedious and misguided, but the more you dig into it the more you realize the author is just desperate to please his department heads so that he can get his degree and find employment at another institution where he can finally force other people to pull their hair out trying to invent new and unique forms of utter bullshit to please his whims.

The distinction between analogies-as-tools of understanding vs. analogies-as-entertainment is fascinating, and not something that I'd ever consciously thought about before. However, I have certainly seen the separation between the "aha" moment of being able to perceive a system in terms of another I am more familiar with vs. complaining about a codebase by comparing it to sitting with a bony ass on a hard bench.

It also reminded me of another recent hacker news submission [0] that talked about the importance of spacial intelligence in predicting which children will be math prodigies. I think being able to create physical metaphors for abstract concepts, whether consciously or unconsciously, makes total sense as an indicator of intelligence because we have existed in a physical world for far longer than we've been thinking abstract thoughts. Our brains are hard-wired for these sorts of analogies because understanding physical space intuitively was crucial for survival.

The pop culture type of analogy which the author was less fond of are enjoyable not of the epiphanic nature of deep insight, but for the buzz of novelty. It becomes easy to lock into a mental groove when thinking about politics or airplanes or dating or whatever, and the comedy comes from exposing a superficially logical connection to something on an entirely different track.

I do think there's a spectrum, though. Really good comedians can both enlighten /and/ entertain.

[0] http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-fro...

This is simply a criticism of audiences for wanting to be entertained rather than enlightened. The author claims that the internet is the cause.

The downvote puzzles me. Do you not think this is a fair summary of the article?

An analogy is like comparing two things that are alike in some way, when it is clear they are not alike in other ways.