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

[Frank Wimberly]

I'm just saying I'm not familiar with the LANL usage.  "Wrong" has nothing
to do with it.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:27 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Frank, Steve,
>
>
>
> Aren’t we arguing about whether “Steve Was Wrong” when he understood
> “strawman” to refer to a “stick figure” or other constructive schema,
> rather than a guilefully conceived version of an argument designed to show
> its weaknesses.   Is there any way to show a metaphor is “wrong” other than
> the exercise of power?
>
>
>
> OK, friammers.  All those who think Steve Was Wrong raise your hands.
>
>
>
> n
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Thursday, May 28, 2020 9:32 AM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Metaphor [POSSIBLE DISTRACTON FROM]: privacy games
>
>
>
> 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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