The problem with analogies is that people who disagree tend to just say "X is not Y" instead of "X is different from Y in this context due to Z". I'm not sure whether that is just a social behavior or if saying the second thing is especially hard.

A duck is not a horse due to... it not being a horse. You can macroexpand Z to "not having four legs", etc., but incomparable things will end up being different just based on their very essence.

"Why can't I pull a small wagon with a team of ducks? I can pull a large wagon with a team of horses."

Useful answers: Ducks are not as intelligent as horses and aren't as easy to train. There is not a good way to strap a harness onto a duck for this task. Ducks waddle and this introduces turbulence. Ducks have substantially less pulling power. etc.

Useless answer: A duck is not a horse because a duck is different from a horse.

The person making the analogy knows that it is an analogy; it is not the source of confusion.

It's not especially hard -- the burden of proof just isn't on the listener. Saying "X is not Y" is just saying "I'm not convinced, you must do better with your analogies". With enough context, one can infer as much

Letting someone run a meth lab in your cellar is pretty obviously not the same as "letting" some malware run on your box, for crying out loud

You're saying that it would be easy to address the point directly, but you won't because it is not your responsibility to do so? I'm not in love with that line of reasoning, but, taking it as fact, surely the analogy is not unhelpful (it successfully conveyed to you why the other person's mental model is wrong) and instead your response is (you do not feel obliged to pass that information along).

"I'm not convinced, you must do better with your analogies" is exceedingly unhelpful if you actually know what the issue is. What do you imagine is the correct response to that? Are they supposed to keep guessing at analogies while you say "Nope!" until they read your mind? Just because the important differences are obvious to you doesn't mean that they're obvious to them (and the fact that they used the analogy suggests very strongly that they are not).

"Obviously not the same thing" is generally applicable to all analogies, valid or otherwise.

Choosing not to say what's wrong with the analogy is veiled criticism that the analogy is worse than just "not applicable" -- it's shit.

It expresses repulsion in addition to expressing rejection.

And, yes, they'll have to guess what's wrong... But the argument my veiled criticism is making is that their analogy is so objectively bad that it won't take them more than half a second to figure out what's wrong with it. I refuse to waste my time explaining because I value my time more than that (even if, perhaps ironically, I don't mind explaining to you why I chose not to explain myself to them)

It sounds like we're in agreement about the facts here (though I am not convinced this is a good thing to do).

For the record, it has been a day and I have not figured out what you believe is wrong with the analogy. Everyone else in the thread seems to be going along with it, except for one person who correctly points out that the 'lock the doors' aspect is irrelevant. I'm not really invested in the answer (my aim was just to defend the usefulness of analogies), but that feels like a data point I should pass along.

Making sure someone is not using your cellar to cook meth requires nothing other than working eyes or a sense of smell one can reasonably expect the average person to have

Making sure you do not have malware in your computer requires specific knowledge that the average person likely doesn't have. Sure, you can take precautions, use antivirus, etc. but those are not foolproof and often involve specific tradeoffs like wasting CPU cycles, unlike the methlab in cellar scenario. They also require knowing you should take precautions to not be infected to begin with, which is rarely the case

The wine cellar exists in the physical world for which we evolved to inhabit. Malware does not.

This does require that the resident of the house is aware that they, in this example, have a cellar to check. Of course, if you aren't aware you have a cellar, you won't have stored anything personal or of import in it that could get damaged either.

I can personally attest that having a working sense of smell is not a reliable method for knowing what something novel-to-you is and it can be easy to misattribute. Decomposition of flesh has a very unique smell in my experience, but it was only through that experience that I now know that that smell is flesh decomposition (and not related to nearby farmland work).

It is pretty amazing (and horrifying) to me that there are also some people who discover that someone else has been secretly living in their home with them. I can only imagine how intrusive that would be and the paranoia that would set in after such a discovery, even if they moved to a new house. I wonder if this has become even less prevalent given the use of internal cameras?

I think this actually rather reinforces your point, even if it contradicts the assertion in the leading sentence. How much can you expect people to know their computer has been co-opted, which might be an almost completely alien environment to them, if it is possible to co-opt someone's home (an environment they are intimately familiar with)?

[As an aside, this is my first post here on HN. If anything I have written above is not in line with the desired tone/content of comments, could someone spare the time to point it out and explain what and how it could be improved, so I can adjust? Thank you!]

Thanks. All fair points and a great comment very much in line with the HN guidelines as far as I'm concerned (not that I'm a moderator!): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment got was marked "dead", so I went ahead and vouched for it + upvoted, which I think now has marked it with the proper respect it deserves. You can vouch for comments after you reach a certain karma level (there are various unlocks for various levels of karma, but nothing that changes your experience here, really)

Welcome to HN!

> "Obviously not the same thing" is generally applicable to all analogies, valid or otherwise.

This feels like nitpicking / grasping at straws / being needlessly obtuse but I'll follow the guidelines and quote-unquote "Assume Good Faith" -- fine, rephrase my comment as "obviously not analogous" rather than "obviously not the same as"