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by wellpast 1478 days ago
What is the name for the fallacy in which you make an analogy that does not reflect the real-world territory at all, and then draw a conclusion from it?

“Doing” is not at all enough. (Well, it shouldn’t be.)

Peer into any random engineering org and you’ll inevitably find loads of engineers driving around in circles with the wind in their hair, smiling with a sense of how “fast” and productively they’re moving!

1 comments

  It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors 
  and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. 
  Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case 
  of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify 
  it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the 
  analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. 
  This is the situation that is characteristic for the "radical" novelty.

On the cruelty of really teaching computing science Edsger Dijkstra

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...