My experience is analogies are erroneously as supporting arguments to jump from premise to conclusion of an unrelated topic. I saw them a lot at my family's various religious/cult gatherings when I was a kid. The preacher would state something and then "prove" it with an analogy.

Analogies don't accomplish anything in basically all of the uses I've seen. People want them to serve as proof, but it's a lazy way of getting out of showing the validity of a conclusion.

That's assuming a level of critical thinking that exists on HN and a few other forums but isn't really common to the general public.

Most people go into a new topic or new issue area with a basically neutral stance. They aren't looking to disprove the argument, nor do they even view it as an argument. Rather, they're thinking "OK, show me how this is relevant - tie it into my life and how it affects me, then I'll make up my mind based on my feelings afterwards" (in a far more subconscious way - basically nobody actually goes through these thoughts consciously). Analogies are your chance to do that. Get the right one and people associate your issue with something they already hold a positive position on. Get the wrong one and they just ignore you.

Or bad actors can use analogies to mislead people. Or a neutral actor erroneously uses them and the result is still misinformed people. My opinion is analogies do more harm than good, at best wasting people's time, and at worst, resulting in people coming to the wrong conclusions.

All language constructs can be abused. The problem is lying, not the rhetorical mechanism.

People should be educated the rhetorical mechanism they are using doesn't do what they think it does, though. It's part of developing critical thinking skills. It would help people not get taken advantage of, too.

In this case the problem is constructing poor models and using them to understand the world; it doesn't have to be used to intentionally mislead, people often can use analogies to explain things to themselves and get it wrong.

It's not without it's uses as a technique but you have to make sure the model the analogy constructs is, well, actually analogous to the situation you are modeling.

I'd like to try to change your mind on analogies, and even without analogies (although I _will_ use an example)!

Analogies are an attempt to generalize an argument. Say we are trying to prove that "It will rain" is a valid conclusion from "If it is cloudy it will rain and it is cloudy". We can generalize this to "A -> B" & "B" -> "B", which you will recognize as an application of modus ponens from formal logic. Analogies try to use this power on fuzzier topics.

A normative principle like "We should build a new post office" are so abstract that they cannot be tackled head on (try defining "should" in the comments section and having no one point out a flaw to see why this is difficult). Because of this, we try to make comparison to other, seemingly similar, cases in an attempt to draw out the underlying logical structure. Because of this, I think they are a powerful and useful argumentative strategy.

I agree that analogies are useful to illustrate (in some scenarios), but I would not use them to support my argument (outside of a discrete math course).

If I were to argue that Apple's app store policies were harmful, then I would do just that. I would define terms, define the parties involved, show the harm and to which parties, maybe provide some examples, show which laws it violates, and maybe suggest solutions.

But I don't see why involving Cheerios at a brick and mortar retail store would help clear anything up.

I think the main point against analogies is when they are used as proof for the situation they are being compared to.

I'm not versed in formal logic, but I believe it would be:

"A -> B", and I want to prove that "C -> D"

So I make the analogy that "A is similar to C, and B to D in some ways" thus then C -> D"

A lot of people will take this as a valid proof. But it has yet to be proven that A and C, and B and D are actually interchangeable.

Edit: To refer this back to the original argument, saying that the AppStore is like a brick and mortar store, and Cheerios is like Epic games is a nice analogy, but it can't possibly prove anything because they are just not the same thing.

What they may do though, is potentially align the reader's point of view with the writer's, but not necessarily towards the _right_ point of view, assuming there is one.

See: further down this thread where literal-minded software engineers all try to "fix" this analogy but can't agree on how.

> a single good analogy can accomplish more than pages of prose

I think that's where the danger lies. In the end we are not explaining much, just passing a vision of the issue in terms of good/bad/meh depending on the analogy we choose.

That's also how we convince people a lot of stuff is just "against freedom", or "big <xxxx> acting selfishly" etc.

As you say it accomplishes something, people take a position very quickly. But is it a good thing ? I'm torn.

I think what you're noting is that analogies are powerful tools. They can create a deep visceral association between A nd B that strongly affects how someone feels about B based on their existing feelings about A.

Like any powerful tool, it can be misused. But it can also do great good when used well. We live in a world surrounded by fiendishly complex systems with layers of abstractions and deep chains of emergent phenomena. Our primate brains aren't geared to process the consequences of our actions in a space that far removed from the forests where we evolved.

Analogies are one of the best tools I know to let us do that. But we do have to be careful about which analogies we choose to believe.

"It's like two bald men fighting over a comb"