>This may be one reason why legal systems have historically been rather forgiving of men who go on rampages after too much wifely nagging or losing their jobs. Since when? Please show me an example of this..
Misleading metaphors
61–65 of 65 posts
Re: Misleading metaphors
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide an example of a policy decision that is (1) correct using sovereign debt analysis but (2) incorrect when using household debt analysis?
This Reuters blog post points to one: refusing to invest in public universities. This leads private debt to grow, while austerity offers no offset for students who must take out large loans to enroll. There are many others really. It's a pervasive metaphor (sovereign debt = household debt) that leads to fundamental confusions about how governments, individual citizens and private industry, and imports/exports, intera…
It seems a better analogy would be business debt rather than household debt.
Business debt is used for productivity and not just consumption. However, in both the case of business debt and sovereign debt, the return on the extra capital would have to exceed the interest rate on the debt.
I disagree with your analysis of public universities, however. The cost of university has grown substantially over the last 50 years with no real change in education quality. That implies there is some underlying reason for that cost disease. Besides, if everyone in the US goes to university, and the government pays for university education, there really isn't a change in who pays for tuition -- people either pay for it with a loan or they pay for it with taxes. At least if they pay for it with a loan they aren't forced to pay for someone else's education without receiving any benefit from it.
Re: Misleading metaphors
#63Not spot on the same issue perhaps, but these sorts of effects are an important reason I cringe at the uptake of newspeak like "alternative facts" by regular media and writers. If you not only let your adversary pick the framing but actively contribute to it, you're placing yourself at a potentially severe disadvantage for no good reason.
This is an excellent point. Sometimes, I think certain things just shouldn't get coverage, like a particularly silly / obviously wrong thing Trump tweets.
Re: Misleading metaphors
#64Metaphors and analogies are not tools for critical thinking. When you use a metaphor or an analogy to link two ideas together, you are simply combining things that have no logical connection. It's essentially a quirk of human thought that this type of analogical "reasoning" even exists.
Critical, from critic:
1580s, "one who passes judgment," from Middle French critique (14c.), from Latin criticus "a judge, literary critic," from Greek kritikos "able to make judgments," from krinein "to separate, decide" (from PIE root krei- "to sieve," thus "discriminate, distinguish"). Meaning "one who judges merits of books, plays, etc." is from c. 1600. The English word always had overtones of "censurer, faultfinder."*
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=critic&allowed_in_f...
That is, you literally cannot use the term "critical thinking" without employing metaphor.
Re: Misleading metaphors
#65Are misleading metaphors the issue, or is it just that lots of the stories we tell are misleading? Strange article, it seems to negate itself at the end by pointing out that "declaring war" on things that aren't war is never true and only sometimes helpful. > “Calories in, calories out” is more than a banal restatement of the Law of Conservation of Energy: it is a metaphor casting the metabolism as akin to a current…
Calories in/out is true. As in it is an accurate statement. The problem is that common examinations of diet focus on this math rather than what motivates humans to eat. It is like saying 'the problem with traffic is too many cars.' It is an axiom that does nothing to examine the causes. Admonishing everyone to 'drive less' will do very little unless several other systems are changed.
The idea that the only way to lose weight is to reduce calorie intake to below calorie burn is not true in any practical sense.
And it's not just a matter of willpower.
If you add up the calories in the food you eat, then subtract the calories you burn through exercise, respiration, beating heart, etc., you cannot compute weight gain or loss.
That's because the body doesn't use 100% of calories in food. Some calories are never absorbed and are excreted as waste. And if you eat a big meal and then you don't exercise immediately to offset it, the excess calories are not automatically converted to fat.
And different bodies have different metabolisms, which is nearly impossible to quantify in any practical way. In fact, cutting back on calorie intake can actually cause some bodies to add fat.
So the whole idea of applying a simplistic equation to a complex and dynamic process like this probably does more harm than good.