I don’t know who this guy is and how he got in my feed but this is spot-on. In 90% of cases, what seems like a smart analogy is simply the workings of a lazy brain. The beauty of learning is precisely that there is an enormous variety of scenarios, experiences, events, and people. Some analogies work but it should never be our first instinct to jump to something we already know to understand something new.
6 responses to “Nothing Is Like Something Else”
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When I was in grad school I made the mistake of going to the student counselling office. I was lucky enough to be assigned to the head of the center, a distinguished looking black man with a PhD in psychology (who I later found out left the position to become the president of a small college). Anyway, all this apparently highly qualified counselor had to offer me was analogies. I forget what the analogies were (it’s been 15 years) but they were so simplistic. “Just like you can’t trap air in your fist….<some pithy lesson>”. Shit like that. One session, a dozen analogies. Seriously low IQ stuff.
I never went back.
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Dealing with people like these is seriously painful. There’s always this one book they read and now everything needs to be referred back to this one single book. In more extreme cases, it’s some B-list movie that is like their Bible.
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“analogies … “Just like you can’t trap air in your fist…”
That’s not an analogy, that’s an aphorism. As serious discourse, aphorisms suck, but they are a very useful tool of verbal self-defense whenever:
-you need to respond to something but don’t know what to say
-you want to de-escalate a verbal confrontation by distracting the aggressor
-you want to explain why you’re doing something (but don’t want to be sincere)
“You can’t make a tree grow by watering the leaves.”
“You can’t tell which way the train went by looking at the tracks.”
As long as they are not too familiar to the person you’re addressing and seem to be saying something wise and non-confrontational they are very useful.
I’ll have to remember “You can’t hold air in your hand.”
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I went to the career counseling office once as an undergrad.
They kind of stared at me like I had three heads or something, what are you even doing here do you have an appointment? I was like, I thought I could come and talk to somebody about, you know, jobs after college, and what courses I’d need to take to get them?
(blank stares)
To this day I have no idea what that office was for, or how it was supposed to work. Was it only for grad students? Did you need a referral? Is “careers” some secret knowledge that white-collar parents pass on to their children after an initiation rite involving salad forks, but blue-collar kids are not allowed to know about? Secret handshake stuff? IDK. Mysteries of the uni-verse.
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Relating things to something you already know is one of main ways anybody learns anything. A big problem with analogies is when people relate things they know nothing about without considering the differences.
For example, people like to call Israel an apartheid state. Israel was created as a Jewish state in a region with preexisting cities.
In SA, all cities were founded by settlers and much of the conflict was about how to incorporate the rural population into urban society with conflicting demands for labor and political rights.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_law
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“what seems like a smart analogy is simply the workings of a lazy brain”
Analogy and metaphor are the best ways of introducing new ideas to people – relating something new to something known.
Human beings are not set up to process infinite variety.
Of course, very often that’s just the first step and differences need to be understood as well (good metaphors depend on people understanding the differences as well as similarities). Real understanding often involves discarding the analogy/metaphor at some stage but without its initial use getting to that stage would be far hards.
It is true (especially now with people getting stupider) that far too often people treat the use of analogy and metaphor as the final rather than the first step.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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