Wandering Around the Crossroads

Imagine walking along a path and it suddenly diverges into 4 or 5 directions. It seems that this is the spot I'm in now. My approach is to walk along each one for a few steps and swing back over to another and try it. Talk to a few people going either way along each path and get some info about the options. Of course, each path has a gate on it as well, and I'm not sure of the combo. :)

Okay, that analogy is getting weak. The problem with analogies is that while they help to visualize a situation in simpler terms, or from another perspective, they impose a set of constraints that are unlikely to be analogous to the original situation. One might say - well, you should check the strength of the gate on each path and maybe one of them will break. That one is the rusty gate and you shouldn't go that way because it clearly rains to much down that path.

In reality nothing is as simple as an analogy. In retrospect, seen from a year from now, it will turn out the solution was something like get a large dirigible, and float over the fences, get snagged in the trees and climb down, then wander around to find any path that you come across, and randomly pick a direction and follow that for a while.

And those are my thoughts on analogies for today. It would be interesting to track which analogies get hauled out most often. I'd guess the car analogy and the path analogy are the most common. Funny thing about the car analogy, is that people still use a Cadillac as part of the analogy a lot. My response to that is: "So one of the cars is a huge, rusty, unreliable boat with steering issues, and what was the other car again? Cause if it's anything Japanese, I'll go with that."

And it's true - I had a brand new Cadillac rental a few months ago - with 17k km on it, and it was already covered with small specks of rust penetrating the paint, and it had terrible handling problems in the snow.

So avoid the car analogies - or if you must use one, change the models around a bit, says the Researchinator!