Hacker News Reader

Comment by tryauuum | Hacker News Reader

I hate all analogies with physical world, because the person tends to pick up the most emotional one. It's emotional because they picked the thing that makes my lungs bleed. C, with all its flaws, doesn't damage my physical health.

You call it a logical analogy, how an analogy can be logical?

EDIT: and I hate analogies because, since they suck, someone will try to come up with a better analogy. And now we have a thread where people compare C to asbestos, then they compare C to a fire in kitchen. Not a kind of thread I would like to be in.

View on HN

How can you hate all analogies with the physical would? How do you propose somebody learns something completely abstract without any physical counterpart whatsoever? How do intend to teach people something as simple as numbers without using your fingers or some other quantity of items in the world?

Vast quantities of language is built on analogy. Streaming, the internet, the World Wide Web, Starship. The word “cycle” comes from the Latin for “circle”. The list goes on.

I struggle to even comprehend how someone can hold this opinion. Have you ever tried instructing anyone in anything?

> Vast quantities of language is built on analogy. Streaming, the internet, the World Wide Web, Starship.

These are metaphors, not analogies. [1]

The GP is cautioning against argument by analogy, not the use of metaphorical language. Conceptual traps engendered by argument from analogy have been raised for thousands of years, indeed probably ever since formal discussion of language and reasoning have been recorded.

[1] https://prowritingaid.com/analogy-vs-metaphor

Yes but the metaphorical name has obviously come about through a simile or analogy. Like a ship but in space going to stars. We can understand a cycle through looking at how we draw a circle etc. The words themselves are metaphors but when you explain them to a child for the first time you do it through similies and analogies. They’re intrinsically linked.

And I’m firmly in the camp that it is fine to use analogy in debate. Rarely do people claim when they make a comparison that it is a one to one mapping. Just that there are possible insights to be gleaned from the comparison which could potentially mean that we may be able to solve problems in one domain using similar solutions to the existing domain.

Take this quote for example:

> I hate all analogies with physical world, because the person tends to pick up the most emotional one. It's emotional because they picked the thing that makes my lungs bleed. C, with all its flaws, doesn't damage my physical health.

Obviously interpretation is subjective but this seems a huge misinterpretation of what OP was saying. To me, OP is clearly arguing that C code is damaging to the long term health of computer programs the same way asbestos exposure is damaging to long term human health and that we should consider replacing or retiring C code with modern alternatives like Rust the same way asbestos has been replaced with modern building materials. Saying that you don’t like the argument because bad C programs are nowhere near as damaging to physical health as asbestos seems like a bad faith interpretation of what OP was trying to say. I also think the criticiser may feel differently if he was hooked up to a life support machine that was known to have buggy c code but that’s by the by.

Hacker News seems to have gone really hellbent on this pedantic ‘this is fallacy x’, this is fallacy y’ stuff recently as if every comment is some kind of formal scientific paper. It’s really weird and I’m sure it never used to be like this. It’s sucks the joy and fun out of everything, I don’t know why people can’t just express interesting viewpoints here anymore like a normal conversation without the fallacy police showing up,

I'd rather prefer people saying "C has a long history of damaging security" and that's it, no asbestos here. Is a personal preference of mine. Less chances to misinterpret something.

At least it's not a "comparing Linux kernel to a car" situation I've also seen.

I’ve never compared the Linux kernel to a car but I wouldn’t necessarily throw it out as a useful analogy for two reasons:

- 1: sometimes we have to learn simplified but faulty models in order to understand the more complex and more accurate models

- 2: Everyone sees the world in different ways. It is often through combining these different viewpoints (or analogies) that we arrive at something closer to the objective truth. This is eloquently illustrated in the [Blind men and an elephant parable](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant). The moral of the parable isn’t that we should throw away all analogy because it can be misinterpreted. The moral is, as Wikipedia puts it:

> The parable has been used to illustrate a range of truths and fallacies; broadly, the parable implies that one's subjective experience can be true, but that such experience is inherently limited by its failure to account for other truths or a totality of truth. At various times the parable has provided insight into the relativism, opaqueness or inexpressible nature of truth, the behaviour of experts in fields of contradicting theories, the need for deeper understanding, and respect for different perspectives on the same object of observation.

Analogies might not help you understand a perspective on a topic but they do help many, many people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com