Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas
I thought the moral compass metaphor has mostly left current political discourse but it just cropped up - this time pointing from left to right - as David Plouffe accused Mitt Romney of not having one . As I keep repeating, George Lakoff once said “Metaphors can kill.” And Moral Compass has certainly done its…
Read more →The online media are drawn to any "scientific" claims about the internet's influence on our nature as humans like flies to a pile of excrement. Sadly, in this metaphor, only the flies are figurative. The latest heap of manure to instigate an annoying buzzing cloud of commentary from Wired to the BBC, is an article…
Read more →I have forgotten a lot of things in my life. Names, faces, numbers, words, facts, events, quotes. Just like for anyone, forgetting is as much a part of my life as remembering. Memories short and long come and go. But only twice in my life have I seen a good memory die under suspicious circumstances…
Read more →Niall Ferguson wrote in The Guardian some time ago about how awful history education has become with these "new-fangled" 40-year-old methods like focusing on "history skills" that leads to kids leaving school knowing "unconnected fragments of Western history: Henry VIII and Hitler, with a small dose of Martin Luther King, Jr." but not who was…
Read more →In my thinking about things human, I often like to draw on the domain of second language learning as the source of analogies. The problem is that relatively few people in the English speaking world have experience with language learning to such an extent that they can actually map things onto it. In fact, in…
Read more →I have a distinct feeling of writing about this somewhere but can't find it, so here's the rant redux. The images on which our thinking and reasoning are based can sometimes exert a powerful force. There are many mechanisms we use to counter that force but sometimes it is very difficult. It seems particularly difficult…
Read more →This is a post that has been germinating for a long time. But it was most immediately inspired by Marshall Poe's article claiming that " The Internet Changes Nothing ". And as it turns out, I mostly agree. OK, this may sound a bit paradoxical. Twelve years ago, when I submitted my first column to…
Read more →I've been on a China kick lately ( reading and listening about its history and global position) and a crime public policy kick ( reading and listening to Mark Kleiman). I was struck when I heard Mark say in an interview that the US has more people in jail in absolute terms than China. So…
Read more →Maybe I should be watching more TV but I honestly had no idea what Kate Middleton looked like. There must have been times I would have heard references to her and thought she was some kind of actress or model. And frankly, I still don't care. But I do care about her dress. I am…
Read more →Over on the Language Log , Victor Mair puts to rest that all English expressions have to be tensed and thus prevent timeless poetry. He shares his translation of a 13th century Chinese poet thus: Autumn Thoughts by Ma Zhiyuan Withered wisteria, old tree, darkling crows – Little bridge over flowing water by someone's house…
Read more →Preamble I am an old atheist and a new agnostic. I don't believe in God in the old-fashioned Russellian way - if I don't believe in Krishna, Zeus, water sprites or the little teapot orbiting the Sun, I don't believe in God and the associated supernatual phenomena (monotheism my foot!). However, I am agnostic about…
Read more →About 10 years ago, I was looking through a book on populations changes in the Czech lands. It consisted of pretty much just tables of data with little commentary. But I was shocked when I came across the life expectancy charts. But not shocked at how short people's lives had been but how long. The…
Read more →A very common metaphor in the political discourse on war is that of doves (peaceniks) and hawks (war-mongers). It has been around at least since the cold war. But it stops at "doves=peaceful" and "hawks=aggressive". It completely ignores other properties of the animals, e.g. the fact that "hawks hunt and kill doves". I did a…
Read more →We spend a lot of time worrying about the content to which we expose the young generation both individually and collectively. However, I am exceedingly coming to the conclusion that it makes absolutely no difference (at least as far as morality and lawfulness is concerned). Well sure, we know things like that children of Christians…
Read more →I always thought this little bit by Demetri Martin highlights a crucial deficiency in any distinctive feature analysis. Demetri Martin: "I was at a party, and I saw a guy with a leather jacket, and I thought, 'That's cool'. Then I saw a guy with a leather vest and I thought, 'That's not cool'. It…
Read more →Show me the money! Or so the saying goes. Implying that talk is cheap and facts are the only thing that matters. But there is another thing we are being asked to do with money and that is put it where our mouth is. So evidence is not quite enough. We have to also be…
Read more →Some years ago in a book review , I made an off-the-cuff comment that thriller writers tend to be quite right-wing in their outlook whereas science fiction authors are much more progressive and leftist. This is obviously an undue generalisation (as most of such comments tend to be) but it felt intuitively right. Even then…
Read more →Note: This was intended to be a brief note. Instead it developed into a monster post that took me two weeks of stolen moments to write. It's very light on non-blog references but they exist. Nevertheless, it is still easy to find a number of oversimplifications, conflations, and other imperfections below. The general thrust of…
Read more →I have a number of pet peeves about how people use language. I am genuinely annoyed by the use of apostrophes before plural of numerals or acronyms like 50's or ABC's. But because I understand how language works, I keep my mouth shut. The usage has obviously moved on. I don't think, ABC's is wrong…
Read more →Acclaimed academics have policy agendas just like anybody else. And often they let them interfere with a straightforward critical analysis of their output. The monumental capacity for blindness of highly intelligent people is sometimes staggering. Metaphors and analogies (same thing for metaphor hacking) make thinkers particularly prone to mis-projection blindness . Edward Glaeser , a…
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