A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.
I honestly think a "no analogies" rule for commenting would do more to facilitate good discussion than the existing "no jokes" rule. Analogies are almost never useful. Even the ancient Greeks realized this.
"You're painting analogies with an awfully broad brush."
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"Painting with a broad brush" probably began as an analogy, but once enough people use it, it becomes an idiom. If understanding is shared between speaker/writer and listener/reader, idioms are a useful shorthand for sharing some commonly understood argument.
So useful, in fact, that people often forget what the original analogy was. For example, the verb "rewind." How many people using it think of reel-to-reels, cassettes, or videotapes?
"Painting with a broad brush" is not an idiom, since it's meaning is deducible from its content, not only its contex. It's a metaphor (literally false as written, but calls to mind an analogy with truth -- both the comment and broad brushes apply the same thing to many targets without any careful differentiation)
Great link, thank you, I will use these words with more rigor in future. I think that “metaphor” is a much better word for the thing that is used to illustrate or add emotional oomph to an idea rather than to argue its merits.
Analogies can sometimes be a useful supplement to make an argument easier to digest, they just shouldn't be used as a substitute for a coherent argument. The latter tends to lead to what you're describing here:
>A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.
And demonstrably false: what are numbers and arithmetic if not metaphors for acts performed on actual objects? “Get three apples, give away two, share what’s left with your sister” is encoded in the arithmetic analogy (3-2)/2.
Analogies... are more pernicious than you think.
Indeed, if one wishes to be extremely extreme, one might go as far as to argue that all language is ‘analogy’, insofar as it assigns symbolic monikers to real-world objects. Furthermore, phonetic encodings (alphabets) are a further level of analogy, as they posit that (for example) the “in” in “indeed” is “similar enough” to the “in” in “insofar” to be denoted with identical symbols. Those symbols are, themselves... you guessed it... analogies, metaphors, and other various kinds of abstractions.
I honestly think a "no analogies" rule for commenting would do more to facilitate good discussion than the existing "no jokes" rule. Analogies are almost never useful. Even the ancient Greeks realized this.