Proof by analogy is fraud" - Bjarne Stroustrup
Yes; page 692 of TC++PL. A good analogy is an excellent way of illustrating an idea, but far too often such analogies are not accompanied by solid reasoning, data, etc
Analogies are seldom perfect but they are often useful. They help to illustrate a point. The world is not a programming language and most things can’t be ascertained by mathematical proofs.
But all that is irrelevant because what I posted above wasn’t an analogy. It was… A thought experiment? A purposefully exaggerated example? Anyway, not an analogy. Analogies compare two different things via a third thing they have in common, but here I used examples which are directly related to the subject matter. The point was to make it clear, via extreme but realistic examples, that correlation does not imply causation.
