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Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's because I just made the egregious mistake of getting drawn into a gun-control debate with a friend and his friends on Facebook, but hyperbolic arguments by analogy feel really silly, cheap, and disingenuous to me right now...

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I find that analogies are a poor argumentation technique overall, even if they are not hyperbolic. It's always possible to find similarities between wildly different and even opposing ideas. The details matter.

I find analogies very good for explaining concepts (to make the details easier to understand), but absolutely horrible for debates. Analogies generally over simplify issues, and hackers are particularly bad at arguing the analogy to an absurd extent instead of arguing the main premise behind it. It happens here all the time.

It seems like this example helps highlight the absurdity of requiring experience in $Language for $Years (or other similar too-constrained metrics) when an Able Programmer can just learn that stuff. The general populace views what we do as magic, but understands being able to drive very well. This effectively says that programming is a general skill, and that a good programmer should be able to learn it if they already know something similar. So, your Visual Studio 2012-only shop can hire people w/ 15 years of embedded C experience, and probably get a pretty solid programmer.

We all seem to consider this as true about being a Good Programmer ("Sure, I can learn $language_that_you_use"), but are frustrated by HR departments who don't realize it.

For hiring Excellent Programmer, it is true. For hiring Average Programmer, experience matters a lot - average programmers become proficient slower than excellent ones, so it is better to hire somebody that has already passed most of the learning curve. OTOH, hiring by tool usually doesn't make any sense unless this tool has really steep learning curve (in which case why use it anyway? yes, I know there are exceptions, but generally it's true).

I take it you mean "hackers are particularly good at arguing the analogy to an absurd extent"

(This being an example of course)

Save the topic of pedantry for another thread my friend ;)

Strictly speaking, it was less pedantry and more... okay, I give up.

Analogies, if constructed carefully, have a limited use in explaining concepts. The more closely the analogized items resemble each-other, the longer you can hold onto the analogy. To really understand something, you can't be using analogies.

This analogy can hold together for half a sentence at most. The concerns involved in hiring a programmer and selecting a customer to rent cars to have almost nothing in common.

And if you want to use an analogy in an argument, you first have to argue that the analogy is valid.

Articles like this contribute nothing to my understanding of hiring.

Analogies aren't an argumentation technique at all. Analogies are only useful for explaining stuff. They are utterly useless for forming an argument, despite what many people would like to think.

Reasoning from analogies is like tying your shoes with laces made of butter.

Delicious?

that'll teach you

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