News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes. Parent comment

Re:Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for... by lotsofpulp on Thursday September 24, 2020 @01:48PM (#24581316)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for... by chefandy on Thursday September 24, 2020 @02:03PM (#24581511)
All language constructs can be abused. The problem is lying, not the rhetorical mechanism.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for... by lotsofpulp on Thursday September 24, 2020 @02:18PM (#24581706)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for... by mattnewton on Thursday September 24, 2020 @03:50PM (#24582794)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]