Analogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong. Just because we can analogize between protein folding and narrative/storytelling doesn't mean that we can derive anything particularly useful about one from the other except maybe to give an intuition about complexity. The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.
Yes — I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies as if it is evidence of intellectual weaknrss, rather than working with and around them or suggesting overlapping analogies that address those limitations. And the hole in the analogy may even be the most valuable thing about it.
The fact of a hole in an analogy is not in itself information. Of course there's a hole.
The video is about congnition specifically, and not necessarily about communicating with analogies.
> I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies…
What you’re describing is exactly why I strongly recommend avoiding analogy when communicating: Don’t tell me what a thing is like, tell me what the thing is. This forces really thinking about how to describe the thing precisely and succinctly. (Edit: The listener will make their own analogy.)
> Analogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong.
Very much agree. Every abstraction loses something and so is wrong in some sense, but some shave off in clever places, and allow new shortcut paths of thought and insight, sometimes to an existing place... but sometimes to a new place that was previously unreachable, or not sufficiently reachable by the necessary type of attention/minds.
> The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.
Respectfully, I actually disagree (as someone trained in biochemistry).
For one example:
proteins = 1D chemical structures, peptides popped onto end one-at-a-time, that in the right chemical environment, fold into a low-energy 3D state that transforms its environment through work
stories = 1D semantic structures, words popped onto end one-at-a-time, that in the right cultural/cognitive environment, fold into a low-energy HD mental model that transforms its environment through work
This has led me to render embeddings of sliding windows of narrative streams (to investigate shapes of broadcast stories), and look for analogs to "active sites" in the way that a story interacts with the cultural medium, measured through dimensional reduction of aggregate valence reactions amongst a viewing audience.
Obviously there's more to the metaphors I use than that, but that's the one I'm leaning on to inform my work with sensemaking and map-making from valence response data. Aggregating crowd-sourced valence reactions to linear narratives gains a lot of insight by reflecting it off how we process and think about linear peptides in protein folding.
I've been developing tools inspired by these metaphors, and my research and prototypes are directly informed by what knowledge of the biological domain inspires me to port into social domain. I'm lucky to have interactions with interested parties associated with federal government, practitioners of democratic reform, and academics investigating platonic space hypotheses. I'm definitely on the edge of an ecosystem, but anything I've done of value has been guided by the metaphors that direct my attention to potential applications and research. Someone could get to my conclusions another way, but the metaphors are my cheat codes to arrive there early :)
And it goes both ways along a good metaphor -- People who develop tools in the biological sciences have told me that my porting their methods into my own distant domain has inspired them to improve their tools to ask better questions of their own biological data. So it's very fruitful work that I wholly credit to travelling both ways across an insightful metaphor. https://i.imgur.com/AeYxx7p.png
> You would conclude that storytelling is higher structures of some base unit
I'd be very surprised to meet someone who learned that lesson by comparing protein folding (suggesting a high level of intelligence and probably education in order to understand) to storytelling, rather than having learned that stories are made up of parts in grade school or as a child just hearing, reading, thinking about, and making stories.
It's a fair question - my concern is 'shallow' analogies. I can best describe this with an anecdote paraphrased from memory from one of Hofstadter's books.
He described a piece of AI research (in the 60s?) where they set up a rule system - like Prolog or similar - with the mapping 'sun <-> nucleus' and 'planet <-> electron'. Then they ran the rule engine and lo! produced an analogy between the solar system and atoms.
Now this is a shallow analogy, as there is only a very weak correspondence between atoms and planetary systems. Electrons do not actually orbit in the same plane, but in more complex 'orbitals', and they are better described as probability clouds anyway.
So while yes there is a _homology_ (I re-read the parent and realised they used homology instead of analogy) between these two systems, it does not tell us much. Is there some mapping between how water molecules scaffold the folding process and storytelling? Does narrative structure tell us anything about local minima in the folding surface? I doubt it.
I do not want to be too harsh here - reasoning through analogy is fun and can be useful, it is just limited in what it can do, especially the further apart the systems are.
I expect because it's overly reductive to the point of falsehood. Two sufficiently complex systems will likely exhibit enough parallels to form a useful analogy, but that does nothing to reflect the ways the systems aren't alike.
Analogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong. Just because we can analogize between protein folding and narrative/storytelling doesn't mean that we can derive anything particularly useful about one from the other except maybe to give an intuition about complexity. The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.
Yes — I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies as if it is evidence of intellectual weaknrss, rather than working with and around them or suggesting overlapping analogies that address those limitations. And the hole in the analogy may even be the most valuable thing about it.
The fact of a hole in an analogy is not in itself information. Of course there's a hole.
The video is about congnition specifically, and not necessarily about communicating with analogies.
> I get unreasonably upset when people nitpick holes in good analogies…
What you’re describing is exactly why I strongly recommend avoiding analogy when communicating: Don’t tell me what a thing is like, tell me what the thing is. This forces really thinking about how to describe the thing precisely and succinctly. (Edit: The listener will make their own analogy.)
1 reply →
> Analogies are like models, some are useful, but they're all wrong.
Very much agree. Every abstraction loses something and so is wrong in some sense, but some shave off in clever places, and allow new shortcut paths of thought and insight, sometimes to an existing place... but sometimes to a new place that was previously unreachable, or not sufficiently reachable by the necessary type of attention/minds.
> The mechanisms and math behind protein folding and an analogy between that and storytelling doesn't necessarily give us any mechanism for or deep understanding into storytelling.
Respectfully, I actually disagree (as someone trained in biochemistry).
For one example:
proteins = 1D chemical structures, peptides popped onto end one-at-a-time, that in the right chemical environment, fold into a low-energy 3D state that transforms its environment through work
stories = 1D semantic structures, words popped onto end one-at-a-time, that in the right cultural/cognitive environment, fold into a low-energy HD mental model that transforms its environment through work
This has led me to render embeddings of sliding windows of narrative streams (to investigate shapes of broadcast stories), and look for analogs to "active sites" in the way that a story interacts with the cultural medium, measured through dimensional reduction of aggregate valence reactions amongst a viewing audience.
Obviously there's more to the metaphors I use than that, but that's the one I'm leaning on to inform my work with sensemaking and map-making from valence response data. Aggregating crowd-sourced valence reactions to linear narratives gains a lot of insight by reflecting it off how we process and think about linear peptides in protein folding.
I've been developing tools inspired by these metaphors, and my research and prototypes are directly informed by what knowledge of the biological domain inspires me to port into social domain. I'm lucky to have interactions with interested parties associated with federal government, practitioners of democratic reform, and academics investigating platonic space hypotheses. I'm definitely on the edge of an ecosystem, but anything I've done of value has been guided by the metaphors that direct my attention to potential applications and research. Someone could get to my conclusions another way, but the metaphors are my cheat codes to arrive there early :)
And it goes both ways along a good metaphor -- People who develop tools in the biological sciences have told me that my porting their methods into my own distant domain has inspired them to improve their tools to ask better questions of their own biological data. So it's very fruitful work that I wholly credit to travelling both ways across an insightful metaphor. https://i.imgur.com/AeYxx7p.png
You would conclude that storytelling is higher structures of some base unit, perhaps a few layers deep when considering features, eg:
narrative -> trope + theme -> memes
> You would conclude that storytelling is higher structures of some base unit
I'd be very surprised to meet someone who learned that lesson by comparing protein folding (suggesting a high level of intelligence and probably education in order to understand) to storytelling, rather than having learned that stories are made up of parts in grade school or as a child just hearing, reading, thinking about, and making stories.
It's a fair question - my concern is 'shallow' analogies. I can best describe this with an anecdote paraphrased from memory from one of Hofstadter's books.
He described a piece of AI research (in the 60s?) where they set up a rule system - like Prolog or similar - with the mapping 'sun <-> nucleus' and 'planet <-> electron'. Then they ran the rule engine and lo! produced an analogy between the solar system and atoms.
Now this is a shallow analogy, as there is only a very weak correspondence between atoms and planetary systems. Electrons do not actually orbit in the same plane, but in more complex 'orbitals', and they are better described as probability clouds anyway.
So while yes there is a _homology_ (I re-read the parent and realised they used homology instead of analogy) between these two systems, it does not tell us much. Is there some mapping between how water molecules scaffold the folding process and storytelling? Does narrative structure tell us anything about local minima in the folding surface? I doubt it.
I do not want to be too harsh here - reasoning through analogy is fun and can be useful, it is just limited in what it can do, especially the further apart the systems are.
I expect because it's overly reductive to the point of falsehood. Two sufficiently complex systems will likely exhibit enough parallels to form a useful analogy, but that does nothing to reflect the ways the systems aren't alike.