[jacobolus]

One man’s superficial parallel is another’s thought-provoking analogy. I think a lot of what Venkat says loses substance – or even falls apart – under scrutiny, but I keep reading, because another lot of it hits on some key insights.

This is a style of writing that should be valued more for the questions it raises than for the ones it answers. As another example, take Marshall McLuhan; much if not most of what McLuhan says in e.g. Understanding Media is somewhere between flimflam and complete bullshit... but the mode of thought starts the wheels turning, and some otherwise solid seeming cultural assumptions are questioned at their core... and at the end I’m really glad I spent the time reading it.

[jonnathanson]

Perhaps. But the danger of clean, attractive, reductionist metaphors and analogies is that the general public -- including decisionmakers in the business world -- tend to reify the analogies, and treat them like immutable laws of physics.

Witness, for instance, the rise and fall (and rise again?) of "The Long Tail." As a concept, the long tail certainly applies to some businesses. But not to all, and not nearly as successfully as the concept's author once claimed. But the business world was frenzied with long-tail fever for years on end. "Long tail" became the buzz-phrase of the day, even in companies for whom the concept made no sense whatsoever. People with no understanding of the underlying principles could, nevertheless, grasp the surface-layer metaphor -- and, in so doing, assume that they understood the whole thing. That's a dangerous mindset.

So there's a sort of Faustian bargain in all of this. Appending a nice metaphor on top of a concept increases the likelihood that the concept will be disseminated, talked about, and taken up. But, at the same time, it invites intellectual laziness and fads of half-baked thought.

[jacobolus]

I totally agree. The problem here is not the creation of these metaphors though, but their elaboration and reception. And the bigger problem is that we already carry around so many obsolete or suboptimal cultural concepts without subjecting them to scrutiny despite changed social circumstances or improved technology. I think continuously trying to both (a) collect granular data by immersing ourselves in its context so we can sniff out bad aggregate explanations and (b) come up with new metaphors for what we see is essential – the former keeps us honest, and the latter extends our mental reach.

As you say, the problem is just grasping the surface metaphor without examining the details. For myself, I like having the surface metaphors as a way of storing and communicating ideas, because once I’ve established that someone has a deep understanding of a concept, I can talk about it at a high level with a high data transmission rate.

[bestes]

These clean and crisp ideas are dangerous if you just repeat them (news stories, cocktail parties, management retreats), but not if you use them as a way to evaluate your other ideas, plans and so on. I do agree completly with how annoying these things get, like your long tail example, when repeated so often.