Metaphors: Use with Care

Ed Yang wrote this article about how metaphors shape our thoughts and decisions; and hence should be used with care. Why we use metaphors is obvious:

“Good metaphors can make a complex and obtuse world seem exciting and accessible.”

What’s the flip side? Yang points to some study done at Stanford on what kind of measures people advocate as a response to increasing crime. The finding was that the metaphors used to describe crime had a big impact on the responses. Thus people who heard these metaphors:

“One common frame portrays crime as a disease, one that plagues cities, infects communities, and spreads in epidemics or waves.”

preferred “curative” measures like creating jobs.

Whereas those heard a different metaphor:

“Another depicts crime as a predator – criminals prey upon their victims, and they need to be hunted or caught.”

preferred measures like increased policing and tougher jail sentences.

The trouble with metaphors starts when you (mis)apply aspects of the metaphor that do not apply to the topic at hand. Because then metaphors:

“can change the way we try to solve big problems like crime. They can shift the sources that we turn to for information. They can polarise our opinions to a far greater extent than, say, our political leanings. And most of all, they do it under our noses.”

And so Yang concludes that it is critical “to pick the right metaphors”.

And that is where I disagree with him. After all, a metaphor is just an analogy, something with several parallels with the topic at hand. But no metaphor is the same as the topic itself (if it were the same, wouldn’t it be the topic itself?!). The right solution is for the person using the metaphor to explicitly call out the dissimilarities, areas where the characteristics of the metaphor don’t apply to the original topic.

I’ve seen Brian Greene do exactly that in his book, The Fabric of the Cosmos. Like when he talked of the expanding balloon with coins stuck on it as a metaphor for the expansion of the universe, he immediately calls out the points where the analogy breaks down. And when he describes the Higgs field, he uses molasses as a metaphor. And then calls out the characteristics of molasses that don’t apply to the Higgs field.

What Greene does can be done by others too. Sure, it takes a lot of effort to think through the analogy/metaphor, identify where it can mislead and then call those points out explicitly. But just because it’s hard to do is no excuse when you are trying to explain something.