[FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games

[Steve Smith]

Frank (et al.) -


> I have *never* heard or read "strawman" to mean anything other than a
> specious argument meant to show the absurdity of a position.  A kind
> of reductio ad absurdum.

It is very likely that my experience was with an ideosyncratic adoption
within a small circle (LANL High Performance Computing Community circa
1985-1995) and/or perhaps the DOE peers/program-managers we interacted
with daily.  It was just part of the air we breathed as we negotiated
various projects and programs.  I thought it was both apt, and truly
universal.   Maybe explains many misunderstandings I held after I left
that domain/era!

I would claim (and maybe this was your intent) that your (Frank)
apprehension contradicts Glen's partially...  as I think HE puts
"Strawman" up as something contrived to be weak so as to be easy to
knock down and used as a proxy for your adversary's *real* position.   I
think my apprehension has your element of /reductio ad absurdum/ in it,
in that said "Strawman Argument" is contrived to be so absurd that
nobody in the conversation would take as anything *but* a placeholder to
form a real construction to replace it with.  Or as I said, having only
the barest hint of the shape of the evolving argument to be a bit of an
armature for a more proper construction.

In either case, I claim it is no coincidence that the use of "straw" vs
"steel" appeals to the metaphorical source domain of "robustness of
materials and construction",  if we switched the two terms, we could
possibly learn to do the crossover decoding as well as Glen apparently
can/does, but whyever would we choose that mapping?   And with that I
will suggest to this crowd that many of my propositions here are neither
"straw" nor "steel", but rather "silly putty".   Glen may insist that my
invoking explicitly a "character of materials and construction" as a
source domain is wrong at best and empty at worst, but I think many here
can take away a *rich* if not precise apprehension of what we might all
mean when we compare, for example arguments "variously of straw, steel,
and silly putty".

I am a blatant metaphorist as I've declared many times here, but I agree
with the less extreme parts of Glen's observations which is that
metaphors get misused/misapplied all the time.   In my absurdist but not
empty (IMO) example above, the smell of silly putty (most of us over 50
probably know it well, the way it can be used to lift and transfer
newsprint, the way it "snaps" when pulled apart quickly, etc.   may well
be *excess meaning*, but the way it can be formed into just about
anything, can be done very informally with just the tools at hand (your
hands) and if left unbothered will eventually "slump" back into a rough
puddle with only the barest memory of the shape imposed on it by the
blind puttysmith.

A good example that I *think* spans Glen's position and my own is that
of "standard" hue ramps used to encode scientific data...    in the
colloquial "heatmap" of popular Viz...  the practice is to treat *red*
as hot and *blue* as cold.   It maps onto our everyday experience of the
color of flame and the color of ice, or the quality of light in the
equatorial regions vs the quality of light in the (ant)arctic regions.  
red hot, blue cold.   yet, my synaesthesia example followed the model of
blackbody radiation.   Red is lower energy than Blue and most physicists
have no problem "seeing" blue as hot and red as cool...  in my
*strawman* of Glen's position, any palette would do... "just give me the
legend and I'll decode it"...   which (IMO) is why many infographics
(for example those found in USAToday) are almost unreadable, albeit
"easy on the eyes"...   a nice pastel palette running from a toffee-pink
through an adobe brown to a seafoam green might be very pleasant and
non-confrontational the eyes, but be *very* hard to make sense of.

The Asian inversion of our Western convention of Red==Stop/Danger/Death
and Green==Go/Good/Life is another example of two conflicting but
equally internally consistent source domains for a metaphor.

- Steve


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