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Comment by nendroid | Hacker News Reader

Careful. Analogies are a common form of deception. Used often in religious speeches, political speeches, blog posts and more.

The speaker offers zero substantial information yet manipulates the audience into feeling the speech was "good" through the use of analogies. There is sort of a catharsis when the person listening to the speech connects the dots between two unrelated concepts, and this subtle emotion is used as a form of manipulation often deliberately when the speaker is incredibly intelligent and often accidentally as is what I believe is the case here.

It's easiest to see the deliberate case in religious speeches or sermons if you're not religious yourself. Often you will find that religious principles or sayings have no proof and you will often find that the analogy is deceptively used in place of evidence or proof where no proof exists.

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1. Do you disregard any form of analogy?

I sometimes find tremendous insight in a piece of literature that is analogous to real life difficulties. Provided that, that piece of writing, also offers some sort of a solution to the "problem".

Those problems I'm referring to are for example confidence, psyche (esp. C.G.Jung), getting over traumas etc.

Obviously, my formentioned cases are not extensive and everyone finds something else that they struggle with where a piece of literature might help.

2. Thank you for your insights. If your answer to question 1. is no, I'd like to know what kind of analogies you think are valuable and why?

1. No, I don't disregard analogies, I'm just able to recognize and isolate analogies from a topic or a point. For learning, I agree an analogy is very useful.

Analogies are tools for illustration, not for proving a point. To use a tool to illustrate a concept that is already well known (learning for example) is often pointless.

In terms of utility, much of the utility of analogies is similar to the utility of art, music or humor. You can enjoy humor, but humor itself doesn't offer any greater insight or a topic.

2. Analogies are useful for illustrating things that cannot be imagined by the human mind. The extrusion of a 3 dimensional cube into a 4 dimensional cube cannot be pictured by your minds eye. You can only visualize the analogy: The extrusion of a 2 dimensional square plane to a 3 dimensional cube. The entire field and existence of higher dimensional geometry is inferred from analogies.

Note that these are only good for things that are not known by you. Much of literature and speeches use analogies for things that are well known. For a list of examples where analogies are mostly useless see here:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/analogy

Now, the quotes were annoying to read hahaha

Thank you for answering my questions and expanding more on the topic. You actually didn't have much convincing to do because it seemed so fundamentally true that it was hard to come up with an argument against it. I still believe analogies have more value than being mere approximations to an unimaginable world (numbers, states, etc). But like with all beliefs, I don't have any evidence to support my beliefs and rely on my intuition and experience.

Thank you for taking your time to answer.

> I still believe analogies have more value than being mere approximations to an unimaginable world

I didn't say this. Although my example is actually impossible to understand without an analogy, I am saying an analogy can help you understand something you currently don't understand.... it does not need to be impossible to understand without an analogy.

The quotes in my link are actually mostly things and concepts you completely understand. Nothing new is learned... the analogy is deception.

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