Thread by @paraschopra

1/ THINKING IN ANALOGIES IS DANGEROUS, a thread.

From your high school classes, do you recall the image of an atom where electrons revolve around the nucleus (just like planets go around the Sun)?

IT WAS WRONG, and here's why.

2/ The analogy of electrons as tiny planets is so common that most people imagine electrons to be like tiny spheres. That’s utterly wrong.

Electrons are not tiny spheres. Instead, they’re like a cloud spread around the nucleus. In fact, even the cloud analogy is wrong

3/ Human intuition never evolved to understand things at this scale, so the most accurate picture of an atom is given by the Schrödinger equation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B…

Note that the equation is not just a mathematical description, it is what an electron _really_ is.

4/ Thinking in analogies is dangerous because they usually contain words that were originally defined in a totally different context.

For example, in the electrons-as-tiny-spheres analogy, it’s impossible to understand what the word ‘sphere’ means at an atomic level.

5/ The same misapplication of words results in confusing philosophical debates (such as on free will, morality, the meaning of life, etc.)

I wrote about this in a post titled philosophy is politics invertedpassion.com/philosophy-is-…

6/ Another popular example of a misleading analogy that bothers me is the idea that evolution is a hill-climbing algorithm on a so-called fitness landscape. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_l…

7/ Many articles on evolution contain a mountainous graphic where higher peaks represent higher fitness and through natural selections, populations evolve from lower points to higher points in the landscape.

8/ The image in previoys tweet is intuitive and elegant, but WRONG.

If you buy into the ‘fitness landscape’ analogy, you start thinking of evolution as finding the fittest organism in a fixed environment. In the real world, the environment is not fixed at all.

9/ If one organism becomes better, that decreases the fitness of others (herbivores become less fit when lions get stronger jaws).

The movement of an organism from point A to point B changes the terrain and it’s impossible to represent that in any manner that’s intuitive

10/ What's the antitode for preventing yourself from fooling analogies for the real thing?

Ironically, it's an analogy: THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_map_i…

11/ Mistaking the map for the territory seems laugable but it happens all the time.

In our day to day thinking, we are programmed to refer to our mind maps for reasoning and hence always assume the map as reality.

12/ Knowing about cognitive biases is much easier than actually avoiding them. Similarly, it’s incredibly hard to be aware of when you’re misusing an abstraction to derive wrong conclusions about reality.

invertedpassion.com/hacks-to-avoid…

13/ It pays to bind yourself to reality, to force yourself to see things as they are rather than as what’s simple. lesswrong.com/posts/WjpA4PCj…

I know @kunalb11 loves analogies, but I'm suspicious of them. Analogies are easy to remember and that seducing nature makes us fall for them

14/ It’s hard to ignore catchphrases such as ‘the survival of the fittest’ or ‘leaders eat last’ or ‘drugs are bad’

Though it’s unfortunate that catchphrases anecessary evil for grabbing attention as nobody wants to read ‘some drugs are really bad, some are OK and some are good’

15/ Because we’re drawn to simplistic explanations, we need to be cognizant of the fact that such SIMPLE EXPLANATIONS HIDE MORE THAN THEY REVEAL.

16/ If left unquestioned, these simple explanations take a life of their own inside our minds are pretty soon we start mistaking reality for these analogies.

And due to confirmation bias, the explanations we use end up becoming stronger and harder to dislodge with time.

17/ Know that ELECTRONS ARE NOT TINY SPHERES wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/201…

18/ FITNESS LANDSCAPES ARE NOT LANDSCAPES (in the sense we understand) scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/…

19/ THE FITTEST DOES NOT ALWAYS SURVIVE (understand what does 'fit' even mean?) scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009…

20/ LEADERS SOMETIMES HAVE TO EAT FIRST (leadership is contextual, my dear friend) hbr.org/2009/02/why-th…

21/ And SOME DRUGS ARE GOOD theguardian.com/society/2012/s…

22/ The engineer in us wants to simplify the world around us and analogies help us do that exactly. But tame that engineer invertedpassion.com/engineers-make…

See the world as it is: full of complexity, with multiple systems interacting with each other in complicated and unpredictable ways.

23/ That's it, folks! Of course, if not via analogies, the question of how do you teach to kids still remains (h/t @sia_steel).

I blog all my tweetstorms on invertedpassion.com <- SUBSCRIBE for email updates.

RT and share this thread to people who LOVE analogies :)