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Is this phenomenon uniquely pronounced among hackers/computer types in your experience? In a sense, it kind of sounds like your comment could be summarized as "people often try to apply already-available concepts and reasoning to new problems areas". But it's uniquely funny when hackers do it.

On the flip side, how many philosophy, sociology and critical theory types reach for concepts from biology and physics? And how well do you think they grasp and employ those concept compared to specialists in those fields?

I think any specialist who believes their specialty will necessarily magically generalize is presuming too much.

FWIW, as a formerly deeply-invested philosophy/critical theory type for over a decade... I have to say I had to begrudgingly admit that math/hard science are unequivocally more rigorous than the soft ones. Each is suited to it's purpose, but it doesn't help to pretend that Zizek is as rigorous as Knuth.

I think that philosophy offers much more general mental models and abstractions than computer science, which isn't to say they're better or worse, but applicable differently. To that end, I also feel as though many of the concepts hackers use to describe the world are actually more concrete instances of the ones philosophers might use. There's also a difference between analogy (what I have seen philosophers use more often) and trying to fit the world to the model (what I have seen hackers do more often). I also think it's one thing for a philosopher to talk about quantum mechanics (perhaps not understanding mathematical intricacies or even the ideas themselves) and another thing for a physicist to do the same with a philosophical concept. I think the physicist will have more success than the philosopher, just because the philosophical case can be made more abstractly in most circumstances.

My issue is not the application of the concept, but the apparent lack of consideration for if the concept is valid for the domain to begin with, and secondly if so, to what extent it models the world or ought to model the world. Are the levels of abstraction matched? Is it better to think about this with dialectical logic? Do the concepts use represent any particular ideologies? What sort of instrumental reason do they employ? The complete disregard for these is what makes them "funny" to me. When I saw the mention of lossy compression, I (maybe unjustifiably) cracked a smile. It's not just a mismatch in ways of thinking, it's a total mismatch in the content of the concepts.

So I would say it is more pronounced among hackers, and I feel that there is a strong current (perhaps also due to the very industry-orientedness of the field) to eschew what philosophy has to offer. This isn't only in explaining the world, but also questions of how the world should be (several other commenters over the years here have noted the general want to ignore issues of ethics in computer science). Maybe I just think it's funny because I see it very often and I only see it on Hacker News and Reddit, usually leading with "This <complex real-world sociological phenomenon> can be thought of as a...", which is a trend I've seen in some branches of philosophy itself which tries to excise the "mystical" content of "bygone" theories using new techniques, which significantly weakens the original idea's applicability in favor of putting it into a dogmatic (perhaps ideology-laden) analytical framework.

And on the last point on rigor, I agree, though I do want to salvage some dignity in my view of the world when I say that rigor as formalised through equations has its uses in some views of the world, and descriptions of ideology, power, the state, metaphysics etc. have their uses in other parts. There's also a difference between an argument (which I think must be rigorous) and a critique (to which I don't consider the concept of rigor to apply to in many cases, if we want to retain the normative force of them).

The phenomenon of people pulling in and trying to explain problems from outside their specialty occurs in every discipline and is a part of normal scientific work. Usually the overwhelming majority of these attempts fail, but they are useful nonetheless because in failing they help to define the limits of the specialty. Ironically, you're complaint that they do this witout considering "if the concept is valid for the domain" is unanswerable until an attempt is made and its claims critiqued.

That aside, you raised good questions. I think would be useful if you turned your list of critical questions into a template for criticising instances of analogous reasoning anywhere. It would help greatly in evaluating these attempts.

Why is it funny that people understand things in terms of their experience? The original comment about "lossy compression" essentially stated that humans don't have perfect thinking/memory/processing of probabilities. Do you disagree? Does it matter whether or not the wording of this idea uses computer science terms?

Sure, technical people might try to apply methods from technical disciplines to social ones. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. As a rule, however, I don't think anyone assumes mathematics will completely replace social studies. We might use statistics to better understand social studies, but the social context is still distinctive from pure math, and always will be.

Some of the best hackers are the ones who DO borrow ideas from other disciplines. And all other disciplines can often benefit from applying increasingly complex statistical methods, aided by computer and data scientists.

Critical theory certainly is less rigorous when it is used to dismiss a work rather than engage it seriously on its own terms.

Are you saying that categorising things into categories familiar to devs might be lossy?

The universe is logic and life is engineering.

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.