Jim Fallows notes that that thing about how if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly raise it to a boil the frog won't jump out happens to be false, which is too bad because it's a useful analogy for explaining a range of real-world phenomena. He's considering offering a prize to whoever can come up with the best replacement analogy, so have at it.
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The Inconvenient Truth
01 Oct 2007 12:22 am
Comments (18)
i personally am delighted to be free from this analogy: i never came across an instance of it where it wasn't deployed lazily - tell-tale sign: the use of the word 'proverbial' before the word 'frog'. what did it ever add? wasn't it always used kind of as a direct simile? if so, could it ever have been said to add insight? or was it simply the slightly bizarre imagery that appealed: a frog stock still in a water-filled pan (wha'?) NOT jumping out as his eyes and innards boiled?
my guess is that this thing happened in reverse, i.e., that the general phenomenon of witless self-destructive inurement was observed, and that someone invented the frog metaphor to describe it in a flight of fancy. then the metaphor, because visual in its bizarre fashion, superseded the original phenomenon which was otherwise difficult to wrestle into pithiness ('witless self-destructive inurement' anyone?).
go phils.
Maybe the frog won't jump out of a pot of water if you gradually make it colder until it freezes? More frog-based research please!
What about the Michael Jackson effect, where you keep altering your face slightly, unable to recognize that you've turned yourself into a monster? Or an anorexic still trying to get thinner?
Anyway, I've always felt the better metaphor for global warming is the town-under-the-dam one. Research shows that people living downstream from dams report increasing levels of anxiety about the possibility of a dam break as you get closer to the dam, up until you get to the town right under the dam, which reports no anxiety at all. There's simply nothing they could do to avoid a catastrophe if it were to happen, so they react by inventing reasons to believe it won't happen. This seems similar to the reasons why South Koreans seem less worried about North Korean nukes than Japanese or Americans are.
How about using the canary in the coal mine some more ? Replacing air with methane is insidious. Just minding your business mining coal, bit dizzy some head ache then your dead. Also methane is a greenhouse gas (C02 is anything but insidious makes you feel a need to breath even if you have plenty of oxygen in your blood).
Or how about a frog in a microwave oven ?
I'd be a hell of a lot more impressed by this summary of undisputed science, if it had involved a bit more rigorous testing. A high school science project would be graded F for the level of scientific rigor I found when I followed that trail of links to the "undisputed science" that lay at it's end.
Wile E. Coyote doesn't realize he's gone over the cliff until he's about 10 feet out.
Although, he does usually have the foresight to pre-pen some witty commentary onto a little signcard.
How about 300 million people suffering through 4 years of incompetent, reckless and dangerous leadership (the water slowly warms, approaching full boil). Despite painful heat they reelect that leadership (they stay in the roiling water) only to discover too late they're stuck in the pot for another 4 years of searing hell.
This is a bit off the subject, but coincidentally I'm reading a good book on time management called, "Eat That Frog!" by Brian Tracy. It's actually quite good.
Some quotes:
1) "It has been said for many years that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long."
2) "Your 'frog' is your biggest, most important task, the one you are the most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it now. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment."
3) "If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first."
4) "If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long."
If you put a snowball in a cold pot and slowly raise the temperature it will sit there and melt until IT'S ALL WATER!!!!!! OMGZ!!!
I'm not sure there is a good analogy here, becase the phenomenon itself is not real-- people do notice an accumulation of gradual changes once the accumulation is sufficiently large. However if the changes take place very, very slowly, over generations not just years, then the effect may exist because no single generation notices a major change and people just assume they are living in "normal" times without much going on, even if they hear tales of a "golden age" in their grandparents' day.
Who cares whether the story is actually true or not? Unless the story is being told in a cookbook titled Cooking With Frogs, the truth or falsehood of the underlying analogy is completely irrelevant. The story's purpose to convince us to take action about global warming, not teach us about amphibian behavior!
Wile E. Coyote doesn't realize he's gone over the cliff until he's about 10 feet out
But that's the opposite problem -- Wile E. doesn't realize what's happened because it's happened so suddenly.
Wile E. Coyote doesn't realize he's gone over the cliff until he's about 10 feet out and nothing happens to Wiley until he realizes he's over the cliff! Lesson: don't realize anything and it won't happen. Not only is it the opposite problem, its the opposite lesson.
Who cares whether the story is actually true or not?
How would it convince anyone to take action if it's not true? "Take it easy. We can always just dick around and then save our ass at the last second. You know, like a frog hopping out of slowly heated water."
I would recommend Niemoeller's "first they came" poem. It is grounded in true history, not false biology.
If you put Megan Mcardle in a pot of her own stupid, and slowly increase the stupidity, she wouldn't get any more stupid.
I've been trying to think up something for longer than I care to admit, and I'm coming up with bupkis. Frankly, I have to question the premise that gradual habituation unto death is really that much of a real world phenomenon.
The reason that the frog analogy is so powerful is that we assume that frog dies despite having, at all times, (a) the means to escape and (b) the information and cognitive function to theoretically recognize its predicament. In nature, the animal pretty much always survives when (a) and (b) obtain simultaneously. A prey animal can be lured, tricked, drugged or trapped (by spiders, carnivorous plants, sea anemones w/ the assistance of clownfish, what have you), but the presence of an active, deceptive predator drains the analogy of its central theme--habituation as suicide. But suicide, it seems, is a purely human phenomenon. (Lemming mass suicides are, like the acquiescence of the boiled frog, a common myth.)
So, I think the replacement analogy will have to one from human history, and therefore it will inevitably be a bit more ooky and ambiguous than the tale of the frog on the bunsen burner. Maybe the least chilling example of this is people building their family homes in landslide/earthquake/hurricane zones. But I have to concede that there is not an equally powerful replacement.
I'm still interested what you call doing two things at once without killing any birds- with one stone or not.
Comments closed October 15, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Well, lobsters don't jump out of a pot of water, whether slowly heated or already boiling.
...at least, not when I keep the lid on.
Posted by McKingford | October 1, 2007 12:37 AM