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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

What I learned from past experiences is to never use analogies. They are almost always a source of distraction, people start to argue about the analogy itself instead of the topic at hand, which is almost always completely counter productive.

Also it often only makes sense in the mind of the author...

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> They are almost always a source of distraction, people start to argue about the analogy itself instead of the topic at hand, which is almost always completely counter productive.

My experience is that this is very true among a certain group of people, particularly literal-minded software enngineer types. But it is much less true in the general population where a single good analogy can accomplish more than pages of prose.

See: further down this thread where literal-minded software engineers all try to "fix" this analogy but can't agree on how.

My experience is analogies are erroneously as supporting arguments to jump from premise to conclusion of an unrelated topic. I saw them a lot at my family's various religious/cult gatherings when I was a kid. The preacher would state something and then "prove" it with an analogy.

Analogies don't accomplish anything in basically all of the uses I've seen. People want them to serve as proof, but it's a lazy way of getting out of showing the validity of a conclusion.

That's assuming a level of critical thinking that exists on HN and a few other forums but isn't really common to the general public.

Most people go into a new topic or new issue area with a basically neutral stance. They aren't looking to disprove the argument, nor do they even view it as an argument. Rather, they're thinking "OK, show me how this is relevant - tie it into my life and how it affects me, then I'll make up my mind based on my feelings afterwards" (in a far more subconscious way - basically nobody actually goes through these thoughts consciously). Analogies are your chance to do that. Get the right one and people associate your issue with something they already hold a positive position on. Get the wrong one and they just ignore you.

Or bad actors can use analogies to mislead people. Or a neutral actor erroneously uses them and the result is still misinformed people. My opinion is analogies do more harm than good, at best wasting people's time, and at worst, resulting in people coming to the wrong conclusions.

All language constructs can be abused. The problem is lying, not the rhetorical mechanism.

People should be educated the rhetorical mechanism they are using doesn't do what they think it does, though. It's part of developing critical thinking skills. It would help people not get taken advantage of, too.

In this case the problem is constructing poor models and using them to understand the world; it doesn't have to be used to intentionally mislead, people often can use analogies to explain things to themselves and get it wrong.

It's not without it's uses as a technique but you have to make sure the model the analogy constructs is, well, actually analogous to the situation you are modeling.

I'd like to try to change your mind on analogies, and even without analogies (although I _will_ use an example)!

Analogies are an attempt to generalize an argument. Say we are trying to prove that "It will rain" is a valid conclusion from "If it is cloudy it will rain and it is cloudy". We can generalize this to "A -> B" & "B" -> "B", which you will recognize as an application of modus ponens from formal logic. Analogies try to use this power on fuzzier topics.

A normative principle like "We should build a new post office" are so abstract that they cannot be tackled head on (try defining "should" in the comments section and having no one point out a flaw to see why this is difficult). Because of this, we try to make comparison to other, seemingly similar, cases in an attempt to draw out the underlying logical structure. Because of this, I think they are a powerful and useful argumentative strategy.

I agree that analogies are useful to illustrate (in some scenarios), but I would not use them to support my argument (outside of a discrete math course).

If I were to argue that Apple's app store policies were harmful, then I would do just that. I would define terms, define the parties involved, show the harm and to which parties, maybe provide some examples, show which laws it violates, and maybe suggest solutions.

But I don't see why involving Cheerios at a brick and mortar retail store would help clear anything up.

I think the main point against analogies is when they are used as proof for the situation they are being compared to.

I'm not versed in formal logic, but I believe it would be:

"A -> B", and I want to prove that "C -> D"

So I make the analogy that "A is similar to C, and B to D in some ways" thus then C -> D"

A lot of people will take this as a valid proof. But it has yet to be proven that A and C, and B and D are actually interchangeable.

Edit: To refer this back to the original argument, saying that the AppStore is like a brick and mortar store, and Cheerios is like Epic games is a nice analogy, but it can't possibly prove anything because they are just not the same thing.

What they may do though, is potentially align the reader's point of view with the writer's, but not necessarily towards the _right_ point of view, assuming there is one.

> a single good analogy can accomplish more than pages of prose

I think that's where the danger lies. In the end we are not explaining much, just passing a vision of the issue in terms of good/bad/meh depending on the analogy we choose.

That's also how we convince people a lot of stuff is just "against freedom", or "big <xxxx> acting selfishly" etc.

As you say it accomplishes something, people take a position very quickly. But is it a good thing ? I'm torn.

I think what you're noting is that analogies are powerful tools. They can create a deep visceral association between A nd B that strongly affects how someone feels about B based on their existing feelings about A.

Like any powerful tool, it can be misused. But it can also do great good when used well. We live in a world surrounded by fiendishly complex systems with layers of abstractions and deep chains of emergent phenomena. Our primate brains aren't geared to process the consequences of our actions in a space that far removed from the forests where we evolved.

Analogies are one of the best tools I know to let us do that. But we do have to be careful about which analogies we choose to believe.

"It's like two bald men fighting over a comb"

> What I learned from past experiences is to never use analogies. They are almost always a source of distraction, people start to argue about the analogy itself instead of the topic at hand, which is almost always completely counter productive.

As other's have mentioned, perhaps this is only for literal minded thinkers. In Pre-suasion by Robert Cialdini metaphors are identified as the most effective persuasion device. Essentially, take something the audience understands well and use it explain something else.

An anecdote Cialdini provides is from a person who had many years of being the top life insurance salesman in the country. He used a metaphor of "when you check out, your life insurance checks in". The metaphor brought up feelings of abandonment and support in a way that people quickly understood and bought into.

That's exactly the problem with analogies. It fools people by falsely parading as a valid argument.

Edit: The use of a life insurance salesman as an example is hilariously appropriate given the scam that whole life insurance is and how many people are fooled into buying it.

Im curious, how is life insurance a scam? Yes investing the money is probably better, but insurance is a hedge against the risk of not having saved enough because of an early death. I'm not familiar with the life insurance industry though, so I'm maybe missing something!

Insurance is for minimizing losses you can't afford. Term life insurance is good if you have dependents and their life would be negatively impacted by the loss of your income. There is very little profit and commission in term life insurance, so life insurance salesmen will push whole life.

Whole life insurance is rarely necessary, and extremely expensive compared to the alternatives. See links below.

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/what-you-need-to-know-abou...

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/debunking-the-myths-of-who...

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=57154

Also it's used as a part of a strategy to hide money from taxes in a term policy, where you can later "borrow" against your premiums to pull your money out later in a lower tax situation. That seems to be the main purpose of large life insurance policies I have seen among wealthy people.

That applies to so few people though. Most people who buy it are just wasting money. In my experience, immigrants with few assets who don't know better are targeted by immigrants of their own race (since they're presumed to be more trustworthy).

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/appropriate-uses-of-perman...

Every journalistic or popular science or economics book I’ve read recently seems to go to great lengths to come up with helpful analogies (sometimes dragging on for pages.) But there is a fundamental contradiction in that the topic of the book is supposedly interesting or remarkable because something about it is novel, otherwise the book wouldn’t need to exist. The analogy can give readers a fake feeling of following along, but whenever I study the topic in detail I find the analogy based understanding was incorrect.

Analogies can be powerful if told well. It just so happens that they're hard to tell well.

Source: Cheerios

What does it mean for an analogy to be powerful? I typically see analogies used to support an argument, which analogies don't do. Hence you see the conversation break down into whether or not the analogy is accurate or not.

Analogies illustrate a concept. They don't establish reasoning or causation or proof.

> Analogies illustrate a concept

Effectively illustrating the right concept is, in my opinion, the hardest part of communication. Analogies are powerful because they're intuitive illustrations.

> I typically see analogies used to support an argument, which analogies don't do

Yes and no. Analogies communicate concepts, and concepts support arguments. Analogies neither support arguments nor fail to support arguments; the concepts they communicate do that.

They're hard to use because they can be distracting: if you choose the wrong analogy, you may illustrate an irrelevant concept, rather than the one you mean to. That's why people argue: you mean to illustrate [concept A], but what pops into the receiver's mind is [concept A] AND [concept B]. So now you're not on the same page about what was just said.

Look at the cheerios example: how may related-but-not-the-same examples have popped up in the comments? It's a bad analogy: it needs to be much more narrow and specific.

This distracting off-topic sub-thread about distracting analogies is wonderfully ironic.

They can certainly work as a proof, it's just one of the conditions on it being proof usually fail. Argument by metaphor says that A and B are isomorphic to one another and that since they are isomorphic, we can apply proofs from A to B (maybe with some modification). The problems come from either establishing the isomorphism or in mapping properties/predicates from one to the other.

argument by analogy is something like A -> B, C is similar to A in all ways that matter, thus (A -> B) -> (C -> D). analogies are powerful when the other person already agrees that (A -> B) and doesn't notice any important differences between A and C. if you use an analogy where the other person doesn't agree that A -> B in the first place, you'll never get anywhere. if they are really stubborn, they will come up with an endless list of reasons why A isn't quite like C, but at least you have a chance of refuting these.

analogies are not very good in arguments where the other person is resisting the conclusion you want to draw. they can be great when you are trying to teach/explain something to someone who trusts you though.

> C is similar to A in all ways that matter

I have never seen this be determine-able in real life scenarios

>analogies are not very good in arguments where the other person is resisting the conclusion you want to draw. they can be great when you are trying to teach/explain something to someone who trusts you though.

This is a great statement to show why analogies are bad and how they are abused.

I wouldn't agree that analogies are bad, per se. as a sibling to my original comment pointed out, an analogy is essentially an informal isomorphism. this is a perfectly valid way of proving things in math, and it can often lead guide you to valid conclusions in mathematically grounded fields like physics.

>> C is similar to A in all ways that matter

> I have never seen this be determine-able in real life scenarios

this much I can agree on. when discussing human issues, analogies should be understood to be solely a rhetorical device, useful for persuading people, but not so much for getting to the truth of the matter.

I think they can be helpful for achieving that initial critical mass of understanding around a topic ("a is to b as x is to y... oh okay, I better understand the relationship between a and b"), but yeah, if you don't unwind the analogy afterward, then it can be a false understanding.

I found this kind of thing a struggle in engineering math courses, where you'd often move equations into transformed spaces (frequency domain, whatever), perform operations on them, and then un-transform them to pop out a result. It's like, yes, the transform is obviously an immensely powerful abstraction, but I didn't really trust what was going on in there unless I did at least a few of the exercises from first principles as well, in order to prove to myself that doing operations in the transformed space was "safe".

I only find them useful for topics I do not understand because they are very complex and abstract. For example the explanation of linking voltage/current/watts to pipes with flowing water made sense to me because electrons moving through a conductor is too abstract but saying "Voltage is like water pressure, it makes the electricity move faster" makes sense.

I hate the water / electricity analogies because they don't make sense.

Voltage is not like water pressure. If you have a high water pressure, water will inexorably be pushed through the pipe to relieve the pressure. That's so regardless of whether the pipe is 1 inch or 1 yard in diameter.

Voltage on the other hand means nothing without current. A high voltage on its own - like static electricity - will not move many electrons through the conductor.

A high water pressure in a container will also not move. High pressure water moves to low pressure areas just like high voltage moves to low voltage when a path exists.

A larger pipe will push more water at a lower pressure like a low resistance wire will move more energy at a lower voltage.

> Voltage on the other hand means nothing without current

How do you propose you have voltage in a conductive medium (pipe) without current?

To me, it's not a bad analogy (nevermind you that electrons flow the opposite direction of current) - and I am well-versed in physics.

Hofstadter would like to have a word with you.

Seriously though, there's good evidence that literally everything the human brain does is use analogies. The classic example being if I asked whether something is "in" your field of view. Without even thinking, you know how to conceptualize something that only exist in your mind as a physical container.

Analogies being bad? I think it depends where. Here on HN? Yeah, despite it's affinity for the straight and narrow threads go often the rails often enough. Sure, the discourse is civil. But it's still off on a pointless tangent.

I agree. Analogies are never perfect, and people always pick apart the bits of the analogy that aren't actually relevant.

Analogies are like regular expressions...

Agreed. Analogies are like trying to draw attention to traffic signage by decorating them with scantily-clad people.

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