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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

And you're failing to understand that people can understand the analogy, and think that it fails to capture the entire situation, and so extend the analogy to make it obvious (although clearly not to everyone) that the analogy is lacking, and not very convincing.

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> people can understand the analogy, and think that it fails to capture the entire situation, and so extend the analogy to make it obvious (although clearly not to everyone) that the analogy is lacking, and not very convincing.

Of course, that could definitely happen. My point is that I don’t think it did in this case, and that it stretched the analogy so far beyond its major points, that it made it clear to me a pattern that I have seen several times before but could never pinpoint clearly.

I am grateful to that comment for the insight. Understanding how people may distort analogies will force me to create better ones for more productive discussions.

There was no distortion. You seem to want people to only take the desired implication, and not think too much more about it. But if you instead think for a second, you'll see that the analogy was crafted to send a message that is incorrect and limited. Rather than trying to create better analogies to handcuff a reader into your viewpoint, you might instead stop for a moment and see why this analogy wasn't actually as insightful as it might appear at first glance. And maybe even appreciate how my response shed light about that limitation. There are indeed people who get great entertainment out of machines that do heavy lifting, and they don't care how much a person can lift.

> the analogy was crafted to send a message that is (…) limited.

All analogies are limited. That’s the point of an analogy: to focus on a shared element.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...

> There are indeed people who get great entertainment out of machines that do heavy lifting, and they don't care how much a person can lift.

But crucially not the person making the analogy. They didn’t say a lifting machine would be uninteresting to everyone, only that it isn’t worth their (the commenter’s) time. They made an analogy to explain what they themselves think, not to push their point of view as ultimate universal truth.

And my reply was to expand the context to show that there are people who feel otherwise. And yet you insist that my opinion is illegitimate and a "distortion". You've dug your heels in, and refuse to see that you had blinders on.

A deliberate misreading is not the same as engaging with the analogy in good faith and your reply here seems to indicate that you’ve done the former while simultaneously engaging in some name calling.

What name calling?

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