[joe_the_user]

You would have sentences like "a reflex agent reacts without thinking" and then an example of that might be "a human who puts their hand on a stove yanks it away without thinking about it" and this is rational because the decision problem doesn't call for correct cognition - it calls for minimization of response time such that the hand isn't burned.

We have to be specific about what we're discussing. The human reflex to pull away from a hot stove serves the human, the human gets a benefit from the reflex in the context of a world that has hot stoves but doesn't have, say, traps intended to harm people when they manifest the hot-stove reaction.

Some broad optimization algorithm, if it trained or designed actors, might add a heat reflex to the actors, in the hot-stove-world-context and these actors might also benefit from this. The action of the optimization algorithm would qualify as rational. A person who trained their reflexes could similarly be considered rational. However, the reflex itself is not "rational" or "good" but simply a method or tool.

Which is to say you seem to be implicitly stuck on a fallacious argument "since reflexes are 'good', any reflex reaction is 'good' and 'rational'". And that is certainly not the case. Especially, the modern world we both live in often presents people with communication intended to leverage their reflexes to benefit of the communicator and often against the interests of those targeted. Much of it is advertising and some of it is "social engineering". The social engineering example is something like a message from a Facebook friend saying "is this you? with a link", where if you click the link, it will hack your browser and use it to send more such links as well as other harmful-to-you actions.

It seems like your arguments suffer from failing to make "fine" distinctions between categories like "good", "rational", and "useful-in-a-situation". They are valid things but aren't the same. Analogies can be useful but they aren't automatically rational or good. You begin with me saying "this isn't inherently good or rational though it can be useful-in-a-situation and you think I'm saying analogies aren't good, are bad, which I'm not saying either".

[JoshCole]

You seem to have thought I was talking about the utilities of `f` but I wasn't. I not only see the distinction you are talking about, but I'm making still further distinctions. To make it easier to avoid confusion, I'm just going to write some code to explain the distinction rather than trying to use just language to do so.

    # Analogy is basically saying things are similar.  For example, a good analogy to a function is that same function, but cached.
    analogy = memoized(f)

    # This is a good analogy because of the strong congruence
    [f(x) for x in domain(f)] == [analogy(x) for x in domain(f)]

    # But the thing that makes us want to use the analogy is that there are differences
    benchmark(f, somePropertyToMeasure) != benchmark(analogy, somePropertyToMeasure)

    # For example, in the use of caches in particular, we often resort them to for the time advantage of doing so 
    benchmark(f, timeMetric) > benchmark(analogy, timeMetric)

    # The danger of an analogy breaking down comes when the analogy doesn't actually hold
    bad_analogy = memoized(impure_f)

    # Because the congruence doesn't hold
    [impure_f(x) for x in domain(impure_f)] != [bad_analogy(x) for x in domain(impure_f)]

    # All of this matters to the discussion of anthropomorphism because
    isinstance(Analogy, anthropomorphism)
    isinstance(Analogy, analogy)

Okay, now that you see the structure I'm looking at, lets go back to your comment. You said "because reflex considerations" and I took you to be talking about speed. Imagine you were watching someone be interviewed about caches. They get tossed the question: "when cache lookups are done what is the typical danger" and they hit the question back with "because they are fast". If you then commented that it isn't true, because typically when we use caches we do it because of the performance benefit of doing so that would be a valid point. Now, since caches are analogies and since anthropomorphism is an analogy, they are going to have similar properties. So the reasonableness of this logic with respect to caches says something about the reasonableness of this logic with respect to anthropomorphism.

Hopefully you can see why I think my reasoning is not weird now and hopefully you agree with me? I've tried to be more specific to avoid confusion, but I'm assuming you are familiar with programming terms like memoization and mathematical terms like domain.