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!]
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)
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.