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Analogies
ANALOGIES....Matt Yglesias warns us about the use of analogies, especially historical analogies:
I did a post the other day that used an anecdote from my real life to illustrate a point about the concept of self-defense. Since the point was relevant to the debate over the fighting in Gaza, I tried to explicitly say that I didn't want the story to be read as an analogy since I don't believe in trying to conduct arguments by analogy. Well along comes Michael Moynihan to point out that the facts in my story don't precisely parallel the situation in Gaza.
This, though, is why I don't believe in analogies. If you make an argument that hinges on an analogy then people fire back by pointing out some respect in which the situation you described isn't precisely analogous to the thing you're arguing about. It then becomes a contest to specify the analogy so as to exactly mirror the situation you're debating. In which case you may as well just debate the situation. Long story short — these analogy fights are stupid.
This is all true, and anyone who's ever used an analogy in a blog post knows exactly what Matt is talking about. The nitpicking is especially annoying since imprecision is inherent in the form itself: after all, if all the facts matched up precisely, it wouldn't be an analogy. It would be a xerox copy.
Speaking generally, though1, there's another side to this. The point of an analogy isn't precision (we have long, little-read white papers to fill that niche), it's to help people understand a situation better by relating it to something they already know and have some opinion about. So the question is: did Matt's analogy succeed at that purpose? If it did, then it probably made some converts to the cause regardless of whether it was perfectly apposite. The people who pick analogies apart know this perfectly well, of course, and that's why they try to pick them apart. They're hoping to irritate their opponents enough that they cave in and stop using an effective rhetorical tool.
But that's obviously no reason to stop using them. If an analogy is bad or ineffective, then sure: toss it out. But if it's good, keep using it regardless. When the other guys are reduced to cavilling over trifles, you're probably on the right track.
1Which is to say, I'm not defending the specific analogy in question. Just making a broad point about the usefulness of analogies regardless of whether or not they get attacked.
In practice, the main difference between a "false analogy" and a responsible one is whether the differences between the two situations are important or not for that particular discussion. Given the number of factors involved in historical events, it's just extremely difficult to get a broad audience to *agree* on that kind of judgment of importance (especially if some of the audience has a vested interest in doing otherwise).
Part of the problem is that the blogosphere and commenters is way overrepresented by pundits and lawyers, and lawyers and pundits are apparently trained to nitpick at these things, while intentionally missing or distracting us from the forest.
It's sort of like when you use a metaphor, and people take it too literally. But not exactly the same thing, of course.
Way back when posting comments was a new thing, it didn't seem to be as bad as it is now in terms of abusive comments, anonymous morons who TYPE MINDLESS CRAP in all caps and mispell wurds that most chimps can handle.
It's like trying to have a serious debate in a drunk tank. Oh wait, that was an analogy.
A true observation as the comments, (although the comment re Pundits supra [versus laywers which makes sense] is obscure to me).
Personally I think the only solution is to note immediate weakness and aggressively abuse the idiot nitpickers.
I'm not sure it would be fair to say it would be like a xerox copy. First off, Xerox is a band name, but more importantly as any student copying from a library book has learned, photocoping is rarely a precise representation of an original document. The process often introduces flaws and is inherently reductive of the original document. Indeed, I'd think they people complaining about analogies are complaining about precisely these kinds of reductions in quality being the flaw in the system. I just don't think your comparison of a xerox copy holds up to scrutiny.
(Sorry, someone had to do it)
I think Matt is closer to the truth on this one. Reasoning by analogy is a weak way to frame an argument. It's not a logical fallacy, but it's pretty close. It's one thing if the situation is very complex, and the analogy is for illustrative purposes (explaining a reserve bank, or a CDO, or CDSs or whatever) then it makes sense. But no one would accept an argument made from the understanding of the analogy without an understanding of the underlying issue.
So if you wouldn't accept an argument based solely upon someone's understanding of the analogy who had no knowledge of the underlying issues, why would the analogy suddenly be worthwhile when they do have an understanding of the issues?
Analogies are fine as the rhetorical devices of politicians but people seriously discussing issues should avoid them. When someone tries to use one in a discussion with me I hear them out but generally try to get them to reframe their argument.
Mark R: I think you're missing my point. It's true that analogies aren't useful for knowledgable audiences because they don't need the simplification in order to understand what's going on. And reasoning by analogy is indeed tricky.
But analogies are useful as narrative devices to help an audience that isn't already knowledgable. In other words, most audiences. It's a rhetorical tool, not an analytic one.
Do we all recognize who else hated analogies?
Yeah, Mike Godwin.
Analogies can be used to clarify and support as well as to obfuscate and distract. But they also form a nice easy cheap gotcha game. Your analogy is wrong, therefore you are a heap of human pus, a foul human excresence, while I am better than you. And that's the game that is played all too often.
i remember when i read matt's piece i thought of my first car, a second hand volkswagon.
it got me where i wanted to go, but not very efficiently, and it often broke down.
but of course, matt's piece doesn't use gasoline and wasn't manufactured in germany, so i guess i'm totally wrong about everything.
Shorter Matt: I will use an analogy to prove my point, but I don't believe in analogies, so don't try to disprove my point by attacking my analogy.
Very clever. But the title of Moynihan's response ("Ceci n'est pas une Analogy") is cleverer still.
Agree with Matt on the substance of his post, but Moynihan has every right to re-cast the analogy in his terms. Criticizing an analogy is not necessarily nitpicking pedantry; it can be a useful tool to clarify the differences between two points of view. Moynihan's criticism was on the substance of Matt's argument.
I don't think you need to add 'trifle' to 'cavil.' It's already in there, if thefreedictionary.com can be trusted.
Analogies aren't a bad form of argument, rather they're pretty crucial when one moves away from deductive arguments. Any serious discussion of Israel's operations in Gaza will need to rely on more than just deductive reasoning, thus involving analogy.
Nitpicking is crucial to the use of analogies. As someone else already pointed out, the validity of an analogy depends on the relation between the analogy and the phenomena it explains. Nitpicking serves to illustrate significant factors which may explain the inference in analogy that do not apply to the initial situation.
For someone who makes a living explaining things to people, calling analogy fights stupid is about as stupid as characterizing them as fights in the first place. Nitpicking over the details of an analogy in a public forum is not a fight to be won by one side, but a process of criticism that allows a third party to better understand what's being discussed in the first place. Since bloggers are probably at an extreme where the involved participants in no way represent the knowledge base of people reading the blogs, analogy 'fights' could more constructively be construed as a service to the larger audience.
I like analogies. A good analogy is precise, memorable and clarifying, and a bad analogy exposes crappy thinking. Maybe Americans would have thought twice about invading Iraq if someone had actually considered Bushco's analogy that this was like WW2, Iraq was Germany, Hussein was Hitler, GWB was Churchill, not Chamberlain, etc. That was so stupid and patently wrong.
...and Nate Silver used a very good analogy today, in a post smacking down Greg Mankiw for bad economic reasoning:
"This is not a trivial detail. It's as if Mankiw had said...
"A new study has shown that cholesterol can actually reduce your risk of a heart attack! So stop for a Triple Whopper Value Meal on your way home -- and don't forget to supersize it!""
So a good analogy amuses as well.
A common use of analogy is to argue for consistency: you espouse position X in this situation, yet position Y in an analogous one. Consistency demands that you either adopt position X or Y for both.
The usual response is that the situations, while similar overall, are different in some smaller regard that makes it consistent to espouse X in one and Y in the other. While that may seem like cheating, moral judgments are incredibly context-dependent, as any crime show demonstrates week and and week out.
So unfortunately, these little quibbles really do matter. It might feel frustrating that the argument almost turns into a mirror of just discussing the original situation, but there's no way around it if you're actually trying to *convince* someone of something by way of analogy.
Consider an analogy: in science, we are often finding analogous models: spin glasses for magnetism, or computation for DNA replication, or whatever. A lot of times these analogies are useful, but eventually, they always break up on the details: not just quibbles, but quibbles that break our ability to predict system X with imported model Y. The goal is not a perfect analogy that we can just import into a new system to do the work, but nor can we just say it is the nature of analogy to be imperfect; we have to push the analogy as far as it goes, attack its failures to see which ones matter, and then move on when it breaks apart, taking what we can. As Douglas Hofstadter argues, the disanalogies are as important as the analogies.
Kevin's right.
I am unfortunately not familiar enough with Matt's work to know if this is typical of him, but his reasoning against the use of analogies strikes me as the kind of liberal surrender that has been plaguing us for decades.
When challenged by wingnut freakazoids, no matter how weakly, even the brightest liberals tend to retreat, as if anything less than a perfect argument is not worth making.
As if the repugs ever have anything that even warrants the name "argument."
The next time somebody nit-picks your analogy, Matt, tell 'em to fuck off and die.
Get up off the Victorian fainting couch and be a man.
Abandoning analogies is to abandon similes and metaphors.
Matt: "I tried to explicitly say that I didn't want the story to be read as an analogy"
Kevin: "...did Matt's analogy succeed at that purpose?"
===============
That's pretty funny.
Thanks for the response Kevin and I definitely think that analogies are great rhetorical devices, they can be persuasive, they can be funny, and they can change people's minds. They can also help people re-contextualize information that helps them better understand something that might have otherwise remained completely foreign to them. But arguing with analogies I can't stand, and JD exposes exactly why.
Because you think x about y, and y equals z, you should think x about z. Well, the problem is that y never actually equals z, so instead of having an argument on the merits you have an argument on why y equals z, which is just a waste of time.
Like I said, for a passive audience that you're attempting to persuade (ala a politician) it's a great tool, but for an interactive audience (blogs, conversations, etc.) it's distracting from the actual argument.
This just shows how seamless
This just shows how seamless the foreign policy transition would be for a Palin administration: Our agents on the ground are already the envy of other States.