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Analogies
The world is full of patterns, and noticing differences between patterns and similarities between patterns is one of the great engines of discovery. And the patterns may be incomplete and inaccurate in many ways, but they’re a metaphor that can guide our thinking. Plumbing to explain electrical current. We can use analogies with orbiting planets around the sun to explain atoms and electrons. If I had any tips, people wouldn’t become famous for coming up with brilliant analogies. It’s a very creative process, and there’s a lot of luck involved. And I don’t think there are any surefire recipes or algorithms for coming up with good analogies. I don’t have any rules of thumb for how to come up with analogies or to criticize them. When I think about it, I realize I do an evolutionary process. I cherry pick, and indulge myself in a lot of semi-idle thinking. The stuff that works, I keep. And the stuff that doesn’t work, goes extinct.
Wielding Your Tool Wisely
Analogies are both powerful and dangerous, and they’re dangerous because they’re powerful. An analogy is dangerous when you take it too seriously. When you think that everything in the analogy has a counterpart, sometimes that’s just not true.
We always have to be on guard for the disanalogies that come along for the ride when we start getting excited about one analogy or another. That’s one of the downers of critical thinking, scientific thinking, philosophical thinking is coming up with a really cool idea and then seeing all the ways in which it’s not so cool because of the disanalogies. And then you have to acknowledge them all, and this can get very boring. So sometimes you just wing it. You let the analogy out there and say, it’s just an analogy, but take it seriously.
I think the way to test your analogies is to try them out on others and see if they object. I have lots of really smart friends that will talk with you and will object if they don’t think you’re right. And you just have to learn that your mistakes are fun. I think the importance of making mistakes, and I mean making them in public, is very good. You make the mistakes and let other people point out that they’re mistakes, then everybody’s happy. They pointed out that you made a mistake, and you say, “Thank you for pointing it out.”