My Pet, Server Cow

Episode: 75 Published: 9/26/2023

On the Efficacy of Analogy: Or Why Ned Shouldn��t Spend Three Hours Alone With His Thoughts

Did I go for a three hour trail run this past weekend? Did I also forget to pack my earbuds? Are you about to reap the whirlwind? The answers to these questions all happen to be yes, so get in loser, we��re going on a philosophical adventure. Orange Julius optional.

The realm of information technology is littered with analogies and models. And that��s in large part because the actual implementation of tech involves a lot of foreign concepts and ideas to the lay-person, so to ease them into the hellscape of modern IT, we use cozy analogies like a warm electric blanket, and models to pretend there��s some kind of structure in the churning morass of technobabble.

Analogies are incredibly useful for understanding unfamiliar things, but they do have limitations. There is generally no perfect analogy, and once you apply stress, you��ll see where the cracks and faults lie, just like a circuit board that operates under inhospitable conditions. Connections are faulty, logic stops flowing from one contact to another, and I dunno some third thing about how capacitors are catalysts for change. Oh wait, did I just stretch an analogy about analogies using a circuit board analogy that failed under stress? Goddammit I��m good.

So, I thought we could look at two classic models and analogies in IT and discuss a little about where they succeed, where they fail, and examine why sometimes you just have to come to things on their own terms.