[WIP] Analogy is the key

[NOTE: This post is a work in progress! If you have thoughts or questions, reply and let me know what you think. If you'd like to follow along as I update it, check out my new, public changelog: JY Tries.]

The Short Version

Analogy is my favorite concept.

A couple years ago, I read an article by Douglas Hoffstadter that claimed that all human cognition is based on analogy. All of our thinking and processing is a chain of association and comparison.

More recently, I’ve gotten fixated on the communication-simplicity paradox or riddle (there are a couple of names for it), which is kind of like map-is-not-the-territory: when you simplify something, it becomes less and less representative of the original thing. “What is simple is always false. What is not is unusable.”

So, I think the solution to this puzzle is analogy: it’s a way to convey tons of meaning and significance through a shared point of reference. All true communication is a bringing together and that actually happens through shared experience—analogy is a short-hand that says “It’s like this thing that we’ve both experienced.”

This is why the best marketing hinges on analogy - quickly introducing a product in a new light by referencing something the audience already knows. That’s the whole point of “Uber for X” and other comparisons. But a really good one can be a totally new paradigm shift.

And, finally, most of my favorite writing hinges on analogy. I read Tender Is The Night a couple years ago and it struck me that all the best passages were brilliant analogies. “He looked at her like ______.” “The sun set like ____.” It’s all a combination of de-familiarizing something very normal, while also referencing a different point of familiarity to help the reader make the emotional/experiential connection.

The full version

“What is simple is always false. What is not is unusable.” — Paul Valéry

All communication struggles with this trade-off: Should it be simple, or should it be complete?

The more details you add, the more complex and long-winded the explanation. People may not pay attention, may not finish it, may not put the pieces together correctly. But if you remove the details, you risk being reductive or missing the nuance for how the thing actually works.

This idea has also been called Borini’s Paradox:

“As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable. Alternatively, as a model grows more realistic, it also becomes just as difficult to understand as the real-world processes it represents.”

It's also been explained as 'The map is not the territory' (or Borges' map problem): in order for a map to be perfectly accurate, it would need to be the size of the thing that it's representing.

So, what do we do? We want things to be deep enough to be accurate and compressed enough to be received. But how can that be possible? How do we untie this knot, unlock this barrier?

Analogy.

Analogy is the key

Most people think of analogies as that thing you learned to pass standardized tests, with a lot of colons.

Hot:Fire::Cold:Ice.

Cat:Meow::Dog:Bark.

But the point of an analogy is that it's a means of comparison. It's showing the connection between two objects or concepts, and applying that connection to something else.

And the reason they work is because they tap into your existing knowledge and experience.

Analogy is a way to convey tons of meaning and significance through a shared point of reference. The original meaning of 'communicate' is 'to share, to make common'—it's a bringing together that actually happens through shared experience. Analogy is a short-hand that says, “It’s like this thing that we’ve both experienced.”

This is the shortcut that allows us to communicate both accurately and concisely.

Analogy and mental models

Most true innovation comes from cross-pollinated ideas. In other words, it's taking a system or principle that applies in one place, and applying it somewhere else.

Charlie Munger popularized the idea of 'mental models' as a way to learn core ideas and frameworks, so they can be applied in other scenarios.

"If you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries. You don’t have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it’s not that hard to do."
— Charlie Munger

This kind of cross-functional, multi-disciplinary thinking is powered by analogy. If you understand how something works in one field, you can apply it in other fields.

Stories are analogies

Stories are fundamental to human identity, relationships, and communication—and they do all of that work via analogy. Every story is a way of sharing an experience—whether fictional or non-fictional—that becomes a shared point of reference. The stories initially resonate with us because of what connects with what we already know. And then they continue to be useful because they form a point of reference for each of us, or even as a broader cultural reference.

How this relates to thinking

But analogy doesn't just relate to how we communicate—it's also the basis for how we think.

About 20 years ago, Douglas Hofstadter published Analogy as the Core of Cognition, which explains that making analogies is at the heart of the human experience:

"One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty- bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view."

When we're thinking about something or learning something, we are (often without even realizing it) comparing it to something we already know. Even in his explanation, Hofstadter uses it—analogy is to our thinking what blue is to the sky. It's everything.

How this relates to learning

Analogy helps us bridge the familiar to the unfamiliar. When you're learning a new concept, it can't exist in a vaccuum—you have to tie it back to what you already know. With analogy being a shortcut, you'll learn most effectively when can connect the dots between new frameworks and the frameworks you already understand.

How this relates to science

Given it's importance to thinking and learning, generally, it shouldn't be a surprise that the entire field of science is powered by analogy.

As Joseph Priestley, a pioneer in chemistry and electricity, put it:

"analogy is our best guide in all philosophical investigations; and all discoveries, which were not made by mere accident, have been made by the help of it."
(1769/1966: 14) [via Analogy in Stanford Philosophy encyclopedia]

What does he mean? Analogy is essential both to developing new hypotheses ("Perhaps if this is true for this molecule, it may be true for that molecule.") and in eventually communicating scientific findings to others ("Mitochondria is powerhouse of cell.")

How this relates to writing

There are two types of writing—functional and expressive—and they both depend on analogy.

For functional writing, you're trying to communicate something both effectively and efficiently—back to the simple vs. complete paradox from the top. Analogy can do all this work for you. By finding the right comparison, you can incept your concept into your recipient's brain. With just a few words, you can convey something complex and nuanced.

For expressive writing, look at some of the powerful writing you've ever read and you'll notice that it's absolutely brimming with metaphors and similes that express experiences and emotions in a unique way. For me, the most recent experience of this was reading Tender Is The Night and being overwhelmed by the prose: “He looked at her like ______.” “The sun set like ____.” It’s all a combination of de-familiarizing something very normal, while also referencing a different point of familiarity to help the reader make the emotional/experiential connection.

In both cases, though, one of the eternal principles of good writing is "Show, don't tell." What this actually means is: 'Give me an analogy.' Telling is explaining something in a long-winded, descriptive format that tries to list out all of the attributes or necessary details. Showing is presenting a story or related emotion that allows the reader to understand the point instantly.

How this relates to marketing

For the launch of a new product or company, finding the right analogy can make all the difference. In a crowded market and everyone fighting for attention, how do you cut through the noise? Compare your product to something they already know.

If you've ever heard the trend of describing companies as "Uber for [X category]" or an AI tool framed as "[Category]GPT," you've seen analogies at work.

Which is why understanding your audience is so important. In order for you to efficiently communicate your idea to them, you have to understand what they understand. You have to know the shared point of reference to communicate what's valuable about what you offer.

Making sense of it all

Analogies are how we make sense of the world and make things make sense for each other. This is a surprisingly hard problem. To compress the full complexity of your ideas into words and then hand those words to someone else, for them to unpack back into meaning that makes sense to them... is a lot.

Hofstadter describes this process as dehydrating and rehydrating our ideas:

“The usual goal of communication is, of course, to set up “the same thought” in the receiver’s brain as is currently taking place in the sender’s brain. The mode by which such replication is attempted is essentially a drastic compression of the complex symbolic dance occurring in the sender’s brain into a temporal chain of sounds or a string of visual signs, which are then absorbed by the receiver’s brain, where, by something like the reverse of said compression — a process that I will here term “just adding water” — a new symbolic dance is launched in the second brain. The human brain at one end drains the water out to produce “powdered food for thought,” and the one at the other end adds the water back, to produce full-fledged food for thought.”

You could also describe this process as encoding and decoding human experiences through words. Or, as he later describes, “uprooting ideas from one garden and replanting them in a garden never even imagined before, where they flourish beautifully.”

The point is that transmitting ideas from brain to brain is a minor miracle, and the “water” that makes this process possible is analogy—which is the shortcut via a shared point of reference built around mutual experience. That sense of “Oh, I get it, it’s like that other thing I’ve experienced, too” is what rehydrates dried-out words and brings someone else’s perspective to life.

Whether you're learning or communicating, doing science or marketing, now you know the mechanism that makes it all possible.

So the next time you want to understand something or help someone else understand, ask yourself: What is this like? What's the right analogy?