[fshbbdssbbgdd]

People of all ages suffer from confirmation bias. Analogies can be useful because they allow someone to appreciate the logic of an argument while temporarily dissociating from strongly-held opinions. After the framing moves back to the question under debate, the logic might stick. At least all parties might understand everyone’s perspective better after a few analogies are exchanged.

[Talanes]

The analogies in this thread are mostly only furthering confirmation bias.

Because any physical analogy is such a poor representation of how a website actually works, everyone just cherry-picks the analogy that demonstrates the logic they believe should apply, and then tries to constrain the argument to that logic via analogy.

[sodality2]

Not if everyone constantly shifts the analogy so their argument still works ;)

[bee_rider]

Indeed -- it is like if arguments were things to transport, and analogies were cars... wait, no, they are railroad cars.

So the argument is a heist occurring on a train, so we've got the thing that we're trying to heist (which would be our point) and then we're shifting it from one car to another. And some of the analogies here are clearly like passenger coaches, but others are more like those... coal transporting car, whatever they are called... and at some point we move to the inappropriate railroad car and drop the point in the coal which obscures it.

Anyway, the point is that at some point you really just hope that some conventional train robbers will show up and derail the whole thing because it has gotten too convoluted to follow.