[Industrialblog,
March 16, 2005]
A thousand times yes
Via Erin O'Connor, we have the following discussion of analogies in the New York Times. Relevant quote:
A thousand times yes. Very little corrupts reasoning quicker than a faulty analogy, and frankly, most people don't reason by analogy well. At all. Even intelligent, educated people who should know better. On any location of the political spectrum.
Reasoning by analogy is difficult to do and easy to refute. That's because things are usually like other things in a specific way, and it's important to clarify the limitations of your comparisons. The reason they corrupt is analogies are often fun and clever and if we've thought of them ourselves, we can become proud of them. Then we hold to them no matter what. Analogies are like traps for our minds, and worse, they descend into grandstanding pretty quickly.
It's important to examine reasoning by analogy in detail. Case law is a great way to study this — courts look at the fact pattern of the precedent with the fact pattern of the instant case and make point-by-point comparisons to see if they're analogous, and thus may be resolved the same way. When I use analogies, I try to show the limits clearly to say that I'm say things are similar in this way. But for the most part I am a debunker of reasoning by analogy because I think it's the least-verifiable and easiest-to-manipulate form of reasoning.
Erin O'Connor thinks Mr. Cohen overstates his point, and regarding the SAT portion of the discussion, I'd agree.
But around the blogosphere I see so many faulty analogies — especially in political discussions — that I sometimes despair. Sometimes I even think the government should require a license to reason by analogy. We could have analogy court, where people have to offer a point-by-point defense of why their comparison was valid.
Someone compare the Holocaust to the estate tax? Okay, let's look at the salient elements of the estate tax, and let's look at the salient elements of the Holocaust. Does estate tax law involve death camps, rounding up of specific ethnicities, and shipping them off to be worked to death? Uh, no. Okay, $50 fine for bad analogy. Write check payable to IndustrialBlog Publications. (Yeah, I'd get to run Analogy Court. At least in my jurisdiction.
When Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, was on the NPR program "Fresh Air" a while back, he casually made a comparison that left the host, Terry Gross, sputtering in disbelief. "Excuse me," she said. "Did you just ... compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?" Yes, he did.
We are living in the age of the false, and often shameless, analogy. A slick advertising campaign compares the politicians working to dismantle Social Security to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a new documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Kenneth Lay compares attacks on his company to the terrorist attacks on the United States.
Intentionally misleading comparisons are becoming the dominant mode of public discourse. The ability to tell true analogies from false ones has never been more important. But to make room for the new essay portion of the SAT that was rolled out this weekend with much fanfare, the College Board has unceremoniously dropped the test's analogy questions, saying blandly that analogical reasoning will still be assessed "in the short and long reading passages."
A thousand times yes. Very little corrupts reasoning quicker than a faulty analogy, and frankly, most people don't reason by analogy well. At all. Even intelligent, educated people who should know better. On any location of the political spectrum.
Reasoning by analogy is difficult to do and easy to refute. That's because things are usually like other things in a specific way, and it's important to clarify the limitations of your comparisons. The reason they corrupt is analogies are often fun and clever and if we've thought of them ourselves, we can become proud of them. Then we hold to them no matter what. Analogies are like traps for our minds, and worse, they descend into grandstanding pretty quickly.
It's important to examine reasoning by analogy in detail. Case law is a great way to study this — courts look at the fact pattern of the precedent with the fact pattern of the instant case and make point-by-point comparisons to see if they're analogous, and thus may be resolved the same way. When I use analogies, I try to show the limits clearly to say that I'm say things are similar in this way. But for the most part I am a debunker of reasoning by analogy because I think it's the least-verifiable and easiest-to-manipulate form of reasoning.
Erin O'Connor thinks Mr. Cohen overstates his point, and regarding the SAT portion of the discussion, I'd agree.
But around the blogosphere I see so many faulty analogies — especially in political discussions — that I sometimes despair. Sometimes I even think the government should require a license to reason by analogy. We could have analogy court, where people have to offer a point-by-point defense of why their comparison was valid.
Someone compare the Holocaust to the estate tax? Okay, let's look at the salient elements of the estate tax, and let's look at the salient elements of the Holocaust. Does estate tax law involve death camps, rounding up of specific ethnicities, and shipping them off to be worked to death? Uh, no. Okay, $50 fine for bad analogy. Write check payable to IndustrialBlog Publications. (Yeah, I'd get to run Analogy Court. At least in my jurisdiction.
"Godwin's law (also Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies) is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress......Many people have extended Godwin's law to imply that the invoking of the Nazis as a debating tactic (in any argument not directly related to World War II or the Holocaust) automatically loses the argument, simply because the nature of these events is such that any comparison to any event less serious than genocide or extinction is invalid and in poor taste."
Foul: unproved assertion with a carefully omitted quotation.
"A slick advertising campaign compares the politicians working to dismantle Social Security to Franklin D. Roosevelt."
Illegal confusion of means and ends. Even a system of pure private accounts would not be dismantling social security, it would only be changing the means to the same end (forced retirement savings).
For someone complaining about the quality of reasoning, Erin O'Conner isn't doing well herself.
But you are right that people often reason by analogy very badly. Then again, they also often criticize each other's analogies unfairly. If you say, "trying to get the democrats to actually think about a policy rather than knee-jerk oppose the republicans is like bugs bunny trying to open a door with one foot firmly planted on it" and some idiot will respond, "The democrats aren't made out of wood, and they don't have hinges. How could you say that they do?"
While many analogies are bad, an awful lot of things in this world share a characteristic or two.