Why Rachel from “Tower of God” is a ridiculously underrated character

This article contains spoilers, mostly for the end of the first season of the Tower of God webcomic and anime both.

Tower of God starts with the protagonist Bam chasing after his only friend Rachel, whom he would do anything for. Among the fans, on the other hand, Rachel has become the most hated character. One need not ask why, but I think this opinion is misguided. While hardly likeable after the climax of Season 1, Rachel is easily one of the most interesting characters in the huge cast of ToG.

Fans are eagerly waiting for the second season of the Tower of God anime — you can tell by the number of articles you can find on Google that claim to talk about its release date, even though nobody has a clue about it. The original comic has existed since 2010, though, and it has a huge archive, with the latest comic of this writing being numbered 572, which is about seven times as much as the just under 80 comics that comprise the first season of the comic that corresponds to the first season of the anime.

This archive comes with comments under the comics, and if there’s one thing I’ve picked up from unsystematically glancing at these, it’s that the least favourite thing of the fans of the comic seems to be Rachel. Whenever she appears, the top comments are wishing she didn’t, or that she was dead, or even poems expressing those same sentiments.

Please DO NOT put your webcomic on some random social media site (do this instead)

I was just foiled from reading yet another webcomic that I wanted to try — simply by the fact that I couldn’t be bothered to contend with the interface. I did spend a while trying.

This one seemed okay. It had its own website name and everything. Of course, going to the front page, I ended up seeing some random comic without context — I assume the latest one. Okay, fine, I just need to navigate to the first one and continue from there.

And if that’s not easy and clear to do, we can just imagine how many people you’re going to lose already, who might have read your entire archive and become fans instead.

So, since there’s nothing else, I look up some drop-down menu called archive, and try to do the only thing that is available, to find the earliest date available.

Which takes me to a strip that looks just as random and out of context as the first one I saw. Is it the first one? Doesn’t look like it. The site doesn’t tell me, anyway. Meanwhile, the site is recommending me another post I might like, which is I guess that latest strip I saw when coming to the website. What if I want to go to the next strip, if this present does turn out to be the one I should start from? Well, back to the menu, I guess, and better remember your place there.

And there’s some unremovable pop-up that tells me to get started using tumblr. Wait, is this hosted on tumblr even though the website has its own name?

Well, what I can tell you is that it’s just like my experience every time previously when I’ve tried to read a webcomic that’s just posted on some social media platform. They are just not designed for that. And in spite of my already being frustrated from before, it’s not like I bail immediately — but it won’t take me long to get too frustrated.

I’m obviously not talking to you from the point of view of someone who knows all the ins and outs of all the different social media sites. That’s kind of the point; you can’t expect that from your potential readers. And I do know about reading webcomics. I have followed a number of webcomics for quite a long time, such as Sluggy Freelance, Bruno the Bandit, xkcd, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, The Order of the Stick, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Axe Cop, Darths and Droids, Kill Six Billion Demons, Tower of God…

Guess what the one thing is that all of these have (or had) in common? “Previous comic” and “next comic” buttons. Often, there is also an archive that really works. These can be a bit unwieldy even in real webcomic interfaces, like with Sluggy Freelance’s archive of over twenty years being divided into books that are divided into chapters that are not divided into stories in the modern archive even though they used to be and, well, I’m just glad there’s a fan-made dialogue search. Even then, they are still miles above the nonsense where you can’t tell how to find the first comic and whether you have found it. Indeed, it’s common to also have “first comic” and “last comic” buttons.

Just please have those, okay? I mean, you want people to be able and willing to read your comic, right? The little things can have a big effect when people might do something but aren’t terribly committed to it.

When I started publishing a fan webcomic of my own, I knew I wanted it to have a real website and not a social media site. I’m going to jump straight to the spoilers: I use and recommend ComicFury.com. It’s free and gives you all the functionality about buttons and archives automatically, as well as a number of other things you might want like individual comic titles, mouseover texts, author comments, visitor statistics, and a search function. (I think I discovered new useful functions on my own comic page that I wasn’t aware of while I was writing this.) The only “catch”, compared perhaps to other sites that might not be free, is that you’re not getting any promotion from them, other than being minimally showcased on the site along with every other comic.

I’m sure you can Google up other similar options, which is how I found and chose this one. I’m going to stick to talking about what I know here, the main message being obviously that social media sites are terrible for hosting webcomics (and there’s at least one much better option right at your fingertips).

This is not to say you might not also want to post your comics on social media for exposure. For somebody following a comic in real time, it may even be convenient to follow it that way. My own comic is based on the parody–psychological/surreal/existential horror–deconstruction–metafiction visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club!, and the platform for that fandom is on Reddit. I advertised my comic there from the start, but I could tell in more than one way (statistics, comments) that I got more readers when I started posting every comic strip directly there as well.

If you go to my Reddit user page, and have the knowledge to choose to view posts instead of overview, then if you scroll down and around for a couple of minutes, you can (probably) find the first comic in my series, which is clearly labelled as such because I chose to title it like that (just guess if everybody does). And then, particularly if you open it in a new tab, you can find the next one on the list too. Of course, you have to look past the clutter of other posts I have made all through this.

But to heck with all that. I always make a comment under the post linking to my archive (the version showing individual posts instead of chapters) on its own website, and I also habitually answer people’s questions about where to find the rest when they haven’t spotted that.

And I’ve got several comments to the effect “I just binged through your entire comic!”

(You could consider my story of visiting that webcomic a semi-fictional one based on multiple experiences, because while all that happened, it subsequently turned out that the comic that inspired this this time actually has a proper interface, though not so much when viewed on mobile like I first did, and I missed some things that were actually there — because on mobile, I had to scroll down while waiting for them to load, while later strips were displayed first. Still, that was my experience as a reader coming there for the first time, and it did make me give up until I looked into it again to write this. Whether this actually had to do with tumblr or social media hosting I don’t even know (I have no idea what was going on there), but it was similar to earlier experiences that definitely had to do with comics being hosted on social media. And there’s another lesson here: make sure whatever you use works on different devices.)

You know what, I’m just going to post all the comics on Reddit | Less Bittersweet webcomic blog

Originally published on the blog for my fan webcomic Less Bittersweet.

It seems like that will catch a lot more people’s attention, and I love to share this with as many people as I can. I’ll be posting roughly one strip per day, reserving the right to arbitrarily not post on any given day.

Is this how Othering (innocently) starts? | The Latest

This was “originally” published on The Latest. Also, it’s almost identical to what I just published here, but I’m copying it here for the record, as in keeping a record of what I’ve had published elsewhere.

I’m part of a group on Facebook where a lot of people clearly identify as book lovers. (It’s not the one whose name is shown in the picture below.) They keep sharing memes where the joke is always something like “I have a lot of books.” I think it got old a long time ago, but my purpose here is not to complain about that. (I will complain about something else, though.)

So guess what meme, in different variations, I’ve seen shared in the group several times.

To the credit of the general mass of people in the group, they seem to be getting faster and faster in pointing out that Marie Kondo didn’t even say this. It’s just another example of things being dumbed down harmfully because of memetics.

So, about Othering. It’s a concept I’ve come across and read about a bunch of times. I understand it a bit, but I’m no expert. This source defines it like this:

Othering is a phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are defined and labeled as not fitting in within the norms of a social group. It is an effect that influences how people perceive and treat those who are viewed as being part of the in-group versus those who are seen as being part of the out-group.

Othering also involves attributing negative characteristics to people or groups that differentiate them from the perceived normative social group.

It is an “us vs. them” way of thinking about human connections and relationships. This process essentially involves looking at others and saying “they are not like me” or “they are not one of us.”

Othering is a way of negating another person’s individual humanity and, consequently, those that are have been othered are seen as less worthy of dignity and respect.

What’s not so much mentioned here is that Othering is also related to defining who I am and who we are by defining someone else who is not like that.

This is an example of how that starts: “I like books. I like to affirm it as part of my identity and belonging to the group that like books. Oh, look, here’s a meme about how someone doesn’t like having a lot of books, and how she’s wrong. I’ll post it for others to see… not checking for accuracy or anything, because that’s not the point, my identity is.”

Only it does become the point when this leads to people looking down on Marie Kondo and mocking her. Not only is the inaccuracy a point, but attacking the person would be a bad thing even if she really did say something you disagree with.

Is this how Othering (innocently) starts?

I’m part of a group on Facebook where a lot of people clearly identify as book lovers. They keep sharing memes where the joke is always something like “I have a lot of books.” I think it got old a long time ago, but my purpose here is not to complain about that. (It’s to complain about something else.)

So guess what meme (in different variations) I’ve seen shared in the group several times?

To the credit of the general mass of people in the group, they seem to be getting faster and faster to point out that Marie Kondo didn’t even say this. It’s just another example of things being dumbed down harmfully because of memetics.

So, about Othering. It’s a concept I’ve come across and read about a bunch of times. I about understand it, but I’m no expert. This random good-looking source defines it like this:

Othering is a phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are defined and labeled as not fitting in within the norms of a social group. It is an effect that influences how people perceive and treat those who are viewed as being part of the in-group versus those who are seen as being part of the out-group.

Othering also involves attributing negative characteristics to people or groups that differentiate them from the perceived normative social group.

It is an “us vs. them” way of thinking about human connections and relationships. This process essentially involves looking at others and saying “they are not like me” or “they are not one of us.”

Othering is a way of negating another person’s individual humanity and, consequently, those that are have been othered are seen as less worthy of dignity and respect.

What’s not so much mentioned here is that, I think, Othering is also related to defining who I am and who we are by defining someone else who is not like that.

So maybe this is an example of how that starts? “I like books. I like to affirm it as part of my identity and belonging to the group that I like books. Oh, look, here’s a meme about how someone doesn’t like having a lot of books, and how she’s wrong. I’ll post it for others to see… not checking for accuracy or anything, because that’s not the point, my identity is.”

Only it kind of does become the point when this leads to people looking down on Marie Kondo and mocking her. Not only is the accuracy a point, but attacking the person would be a bad thing even if she really did say something you disagree with.

Review/introduction: Tower of God

Another Facebook posting of mine that was long enough to warrant being reposted here. This was in response to a conversation with a theme of stars in arts and the like.

Tower of God is a Korean webcomic by “SIU” (Lee Jong-hui), with a Japanese animated adaptation, where the stars drive the plot, even though they’re never seen outside of dreams until, maybe, the ending that still seems to be a long way away. Though a lot of it is your typical anime style stuff (I can’t really tell the difference between Japanese and Korean style here), the premise is utterly fascinating and the world-building compares to Tolkien – something I would not say lightly.

It starts in a mysterious dark place with a boy named the Twenty-Fifth Bam running after a girl named Rachel. She’s his only friend and everything he has; he woke up amnesiac trapped in a cave, and she was the one who freed him. But now she’s going to leave him because her one wish is to escape the darkness and see the real sky and the stars. To do this, she’s going to climb the inexplicable megastructure known as the Tower, with over a hundred continent-sized floors. It’s said that those who reach the top of the Tower can gain whatever they desire. All Rachel wants is to reach the open sky and see the stars.

She enters the Tower – and Bam follows her. Once inside, he undertakes the quest to climb the Tower in her foosteps. He doesn’t know it’s a journey that normally takes hundreds of years even for those very few who make it – but it’s clear he would do it anyway, because losing her is what he fears more than death.

So Bam starts to climb the Tower, entering a world of endless exotic locations, magic and fast-paced battles, deep history and characters, getting tangled in webs of complicated intrigue as a tide begins to rise that will shake the entire Tower, finding new friends and purpose in life, and finally finding out who he himself is and why he was trapped in the darkness.

The series is currently on hiatus due to the author’s health problems. I REALLY hope he finishes it. It’s like when Stephen King might not have finished The Dark Tower, although SIU clearly knows where he’s going with this, so it’s going to be much better in that respect.

And I hope he gets outside a city to see what the stars are like without light pollution so he can draw that at the end.

All Sitting in a Big Room

This post originally appeared on The Latest.

Having your friends all on Facebook sometimes has a strange effect.

In a conversation, someone has pointed out to me that different people seem to use Facebook differently, and their expectations sometimes collide. So, I don’t expect everyone’s experiences will be like mine. But I’m probably not the only one to have noticed a certain strange effect.

Suppose you have an old friend. Suppose also you are not both on social media where you can easily keep in touch. And you haven’t talked or written to your friend in a while. You might feel like getting back in touch with them at some point.

Now suppose you and your friend are both on Facebook, where you could easily keep in touch. And you still haven’t talked or written to your friend in a while. But it’s not a problem. You could, you easily could. In fact, you “see” them several times per week or more. Because they’re active on Facebook.

Being on Facebook sometimes feels like sitting in a big room with all your friends seated around it. And ignoring most of them. Hey, maybe they’ll share something you like, so you “like” it. Maybe you’ll even start a short conversation. But that’s all.

I haven’t forgotten that different people do things differently. I’m pretty sure I used to be more active on Facebook, and I see people having more real conversations there. And, with some people, I still converse on Facebook messenger now and then.

So this isn’t any universal generalization. But it is something that can happen. I have all these old friends, and I don’t really have any contact with them because it’s so easy to have contact with them that I don’t actually get around to making the effort to have any real contact. They’re just a click away… and they stay behind that click.

This is especially pointed for me because I used to have a lot more of my social life online, even before Facebook. I used to be too shy to make many friends in person, and I stumbled upon a discussion board that happened to be stocked with great people and made friends. Now, most of us have moved to Facebook instead, and… I kind of have some contact with them. A little. Because now that I’m better at talking to people I actually meet, it comes much more naturally with them.

Well, things work in whatever way they work. For a change, this thing about Facebook isn’t some huge problem. All it takes is the will to actually make the effort. Facebook isn’t really making it impossible, just dangling the possibility in front of my nose.

Someday, when I’m less exhausted by millions of things in life, I’m going to make the effort to get really back in touch with old friends again.

Everything Cures Cancer

This post originally appeared on The Latest.

It seems like every evidence-free treatment is marketed as curing cancer. You don’t need to think too hard about “Where’s the harm?” with this one.

If you believe everything people say, cancer is the most easily treatable disease on the planet. Whenever people are offering cures free from the burden of having to provide actual scientific proof, they’ll advertise their thing as curing cancer.

I’ve been gathering such claims and anecdotes for a while, when I happened to come across them, and the list just goes on and on. Many of these stories also reveal the danger of believing in unproven, ineffective treatments.

–Actress Susan Strasberg praised psychic healer Nicolai Levashov for healing her cancer. Of course, later she died of cancer. A friend of hers thought it was all a miracle anyway. Levashov also advised the parents of thirteen-year-old brain cancer survivor Isabelle Prichard not to do anything about the new unidentified mass growing inside her skull, because he said it was new brain cells, not a new tumor. I haven’t found a follow-up on that, but I’m not too hopeful.

-Mari Lopez claimed her own cancer had been healed through veganism and prayer, and marketed the same methods to others… until she died of cancer. Of course, her fellow believer Liz Johnson was ready with the explanation that she only died because she’d started using conventional treatments and deviated from veganism in the end.

–Steve Jobs died regretting that he’d tried to treat his cancer with alternative medicine for so long – his being a type of cancer that might have actually been curable in the early stages.

-Cancer was also one of the many, many things that Linus Pauling, genius double Noble prize winner turned true believer in vitamins against all evidence, claimed that vitamins can cure. Both he and his wife later died of cancer.

-Both rhinos and sharks are threatened by being hunted to make completely fake cancer cures out of their horns and cartilage.

–Brittany Auerbach has over 100,000 followers on YouTube and sells (or sold) health services for a price. She also says, in so many words, that cancer is a good thing: it’s a warning that your body is too acidic, and all you need to do is get it more alkaline again. (To my understanding, this makes no sense whatsoever.)

-The list of things that are claimed by someone to cure cancer still goes on and on. Here are some more.

Cancer is one of the examples that shows that unscientific “alternative” treatments aren’t just harmless. It seems that it’s typically in their nature to claim an overall explanation of how the human health works. This might not be too harmful if you get imaginary relief from a harmless treatment, and that’s all you needed.

But when you claim to have a full theory of disease and the body–mind, how would you not also know how to cure cancer, or other serious diseases needing something more than a placebo?

And if you’re selling false hopes to the desperate with no accountability, how could you resist offering a treatment to cancer?

All Sitting in a Big Room

This post originally appeared on The Latest.

Having your friends all on Facebook sometimes has a strange effect.

In a conversation, someone has pointed out to me that different people seem to use Facebook differently, and their expectations sometimes collide. So, I don’t expect everyone’s experiences will be like mine. But I’m probably not the only one to have noticed a certain strange effect.

Suppose you have an old friend. Suppose also you are not both on social media where you can easily keep in touch. And you haven’t talked or written to your friend in a while. You might feel like getting back in touch with them at some point.

Now suppose you and your friend are both on Facebook, where you could easily keep in touch. And you still haven’t talked or written to your friend in a while. But it’s not a problem. You could, you easily could. In fact, you “see” them several times per week or more. Because they’re active on Facebook.

Being on Facebook sometimes feels like sitting in a big room with all your friends seated around it. And ignoring most of them. Hey, maybe they’ll share something you like, so you “like” it. Maybe you’ll even start a short conversation. But that’s all.

I haven’t forgotten that different people do things differently. I’m pretty sure I used to be more active on Facebook, and I see people having more real conversations there. And, with some people, I still converse on Facebook messenger now and then.

So this isn’t any universal generalization. But it is something that can happen. I have all these old friends, and I don’t really have any contact with them because it’s so easy to have contact with them that I don’t actually get around to making the effort to have any real contact. They’re just a click away… and they stay behind that click.

This is especially pointed for me because I used to have a lot more of my social life online, even before Facebook. I used to be too shy to make many friends in person, and I stumbled upon a discussion board that happened to be stocked with great people and made friends. Now, most of us have moved to Facebook instead, and… I kind of have some contact with them. A little. Because now that I’m better at talking to people I actually meet, it comes much more naturally with them.

Well, things work in whatever way they work. For a change, this thing about Facebook isn’t some huge problem. All it takes is the will to actually make the effort. Facebook isn’t really making it impossible, just dangling the possibility in front of my nose.

Someday, when I’m less exhausted by millions of things in life, I’m going to make the effort to get really back in touch with old friends again.

 

Writing for The Latest

I’ll now be writing weekly opinion pieces for The Latest. I’ll post them here as well, including the three first ones from when I was on a “trial period”, but I recommend checking out the website itself too.

Site: https://thelatest.com/

My profile: https://thelatest.com/profile/1593

Wealthy Affiliate – A thinking person’s scam?

I’ve been planning to start a more popular blog and see if I could get more readership — maybe even revenue from advertising. (I don’t like that it’s advertisements, but that seems to be the way to get money from views, and earning money from writing would be a dream come true.) Recently, I came across a website called Wealthy Affiliate that’s supposed to help with that kind of thing. There’s a free membership, but I was never so naïve as to think you’re not supposed to upgrade to the paid version. Still, you can at least try it for free.

At first, it seemed that reviews of the website were all positive — and credible. But now I’ve looked into it more and don’t think I will want to try it. So I can’t do a proper review as someone who’s tried out the site. You’ll find a million reviews like that online if you look, like I did. I also don’t have a definite opinion as to whether it’s a “scam” or legit or something in between. What I want to tell you is to point out some… rather interesting things I noticed about those reviews.

After all, if it’s a website about marketing your website, it ought to be pretty good at marketing itself, right? So how much can you trust what you read about it?

If you’re here to read the kind of stuff I usually write, you can read this as an exercise in critical thinking.

World of Warcraft notes: Pira- er, Combat Rogue changes in Legion

Image source: Me.

Today, we’ll take a look at the revamped Combat Rogue, now being changed to Outlaw. Combat Rogues didn’t really have a clear theme before, so we took the opportunity to give them a much clearer one. Which is, uh, some kind of swordmaster or brawler we guess. We definitely weren’t thinking of some other cliché when we made this.

• Outlaw rogues are the unscrupulous scoundrels of Azeroth. Operating outside the law, they bend the rules and distort the truth to get what they need, and also they like to sail the seven seas with their outlaw maties plundering treasure and going “arrr” a lot, but don’t read too much into that. The archetype has been inspired by such classic works as the outlaw-themed book Treasure Island and the more recent Outlaws of the Caribbean movies.
• To further emphasize the “swordmaster” theme we’re going for here, we’re giving Outlaws the ability Pistol Shot. They still don’t use guns as weapons, mind you, but every swordmaster has to be ready to pull out a hidden blunderbuss, right?
• One of the new talents is Cannonball Barrage, which causes an invisible ghost ship crewed by invisible ghost outlaws to fire cannonballs at your enemies. This also totally goes with the swordmaster… um… yeah, anyways.
• We looked for more p- outlaw related concepts and found “parley“, so that’s an ability now too.
• The ability Blade Flurry is renamed “Dead Man’s Chest” for no particular reason. Its function remains the same, though its icon is changed to a Jolly Roger.
• Outlaw Rogues get a permanent buff that affects their speech in a way similar to drunkenness, except that instead of going “hic” occasionally, they randomly spout “ARRRRR”. The buff cannot be dispelled, ever.
• After the pre-patch launches, every Outlaw Rogue will immediately begin a new obligatory questline where they have been shanghaied by the outlaws of Booty Bay and wake up on an outlaw ship. Your organs have also been harvested, so you get a permanent appearance change as you now have a peg leg, an eye patch, and a hook in place of a hand (you get a choice of left or right). During the questline, you’ll also gain a cool and unique new pet: a talkative parrot that follows you constantly and cannot be dismissed.

…Well, maybe not quite all of that, but that’s about how it feels.

(See here for more accurate information about the Outlaw Rogue if you like.)

“The Machine” and the big problem with the continuity of consciousness

Existential Comics is a webcomic about philosophy — mostly about parodying philosophers and philosophical ideas for inside joke laughs, sometimes making profound observations. Perhaps the most profound comic is the first one, “The Machine”. I recommend that you take a few minutes to read it right now. Either way, I’m going to use it to illustrate an important question that it brings up.

The comic begins with the invention of teleporters that can be used to flawlessly teleport even people. However, some people think being teleported means death, and not without reason.

If the teleporter takes you from one place to another instantly, without your passing in between, then what it really does is in at least some sense to destroy the original you and create a new one in the next place. If you don’t think so, what do you say to the two examples of thought experiments at the end of the panel above? But then, doesn’t this mean that when you teleport, you die and a clone is created in your place, one that thinks it’s you but isn’t because you’re forever dead?

Can free will solve the problem of evil?

I recently read a good post on the problem of evil by another blogger. There was one thing I disagreed about, however, and I thought it deserved a reply long enough to be its own article.

As for what the problem of evil (or theodicy) is, I’ll just quote the mentioned article:

One of the many variations of the problem goes as follows: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” This is often contributed to the philosopher Epicurus, summarized by the theologian Lactantius. However the actual authorship remains debated.

The point remains, if God is an omnipotent being, then how does evil exist without God himself being at least in some form evil?

Well, I would put it as “god must not be perfectly good” rather than “god must be evil” if evil exists, but never mind that now. What I’m actually taking issue with is the discussion of one alternative solution to the problem:

The second issue is that many people claim free will, or more simply any human action at all, creates this evil. This is a sort of pessimistic view, but still a valid one. It claims that as humans have the ability to choose their actions, the result of those actions create the very evil itself, not god. I always found this argument to be curious just based on the fact that it uses free will to justify both evil and God. The discussion of God and free will has had an odd history, and for many people the Doctrine of Predestination pops up in their heads, but nevertheless it is a valid argument. To me it seems in many ways the existence of free will negates the omnipotence of God, and therefore changes the entire essence of God for so many defending it.

The question that sorely needs answering now is: What is free will? What are the options for what it could logically be — and do those allow god to avoid the responsibility for human evil?

All the things you shouldn’t post on Facebook

So, these are the kinds of things that you apparently can’t post on Facebook:

• About how you’re having fun or things are going great, because that’s just fake and bragging.
• Complaining about how badly things are going for you, because that’s just annoying.
• Ordinary things like what you had for dinner, or when you went to the gym, or what your child or pet did etc., because who cares?
• Serious or political topics, because it’s supposed to be about socialising and telling your friends what you’ve been doing.
• Dumb jokes and memes because those are too shallow.
• Links to in-depth articles, because who has the patience to read that?
• Any kind of photograph you took, because it will go under either “fake”, “bragging” or “uninteresting”, probably all three. Even if it was an interesting situation, you shouldn’t have been taking photographs because that officially means you weren’t really enjoying it.
• Any given opinion, because someone will disagree, so they’ll find it annoying.
• Your own blog posts because people won’t read them.
• Complaints about the kinds of things people post on Facebook.

Would you jump off an analogy?

I think this strip is witty enough, in a changing the topic kind of way, but anyone taking this seriously as a counterargument would be missing the point [edited to add: see postscript], and I’ll use that to illustrate another point.

Let’s assume “all my friends” are going to a party. It doesn’t make much difference. What I think the offscreen strawman should be saying in in the last panel would be:

• “So literally every single person you know is going to this party? If not, why are you equivocating? Can’t your argument hold without your changing meanings of expressions in the middle of it but pretending we’re still talking about the same thing?”
• “Are you going to this party because you’re thinking that some harm is going to befall everyone who doesn’t? Is that how you derive ‘I should go’ from ‘All my friends are going’? If not, what has what you just said have to do with this issue? Are you trying to change the subject?”
• “Do you, in fact, understand how analogies work? That they stand or fall by the parts that are relevantly similar to the thing they’re an analogy of, not the rest of it?”

That last is the point I want to make. An analogy is illustrating a thing, let’s say thing A (going to a party because all your friends are going), by comparing it to thing B (jumping off a bridge because all your friends did so), by saying both have properties x, y, and z (doing something regardless of what the thing itself is like because your friends did). Of course, both things will have some further properties that they do not share (people jumping off a bridge would have to have a good reason to do so). If you’re looking at those features, though, guess what? You’re not understanding the analogy, or you’re willingly arguing back with sophisms that have nothing to do with the original point.

You can, of course, argue against an analogy by saying it does not hold. There isn’t a very good example of that for the “jumping off a bridge” argument, because if it’s used properly, it’s making the true point that it’s a stupid argument, more like revealing your own psychological weaknesses than giving a reason, that you should do something (at least if that something is not totally harmless) just because everyone’s doing it. (Calvin’s mom in Calvin and Hobbes uses a more effective analogy, although specifically in relation to smoking cigars: “Flatulence could be all the rage, but it would still be disgusting.”) I suppose a possible argument against this analogy could be “Jumping off a bridge would be harmful, this is neutral, so I can do this for no good reason.” But that would only work if it was neutral. You’d still be left with having said you want to do something for a bad reason. If that’s not your reason, then why are you using it as an argument? Why don’t you just say what better reasons you have to go? (If you actually meant “I want to be there because all my friends will be there and it’s going to be really fun to see them all,” then replying using the bridge analogy would be nonsense in the first place. But then the problem would not be with the analogy but with people not understanding it.)

When you come across an analogy, look at the relevant parts. The only thing you can do otherwise is confuse the issue. Even “winning” an argument like that would really be nothing but cheating. Missing the point of analogies and then being smug about it strikes me as annoyingly stupid, as being smug about being right when you’re wrong always does. I’m not sure how often people actually do that seriously, but there’s another and more important reason to understand how analogies work: that you don’t accept genuinely bad analogies and false equivalences, and that you can argue against them properly when you see them.

PS. On later reflection, I was partly wrong here. There is a way in which the strip’s treatment of the analogy could be meaningful. You could see an analogy between the judgement of “all my friends” about the bridge and the party or whatever, if it was about trusting their judgement whether to go. In that case, though, I’m not sure what exactly the situation could be. This doesn’t affect the point of the post, it just makes the example less apt.

xkcd Misconceptions Day 2014: Darwin’s quote on the eye

No Finnish version available.

This is the hundredth post on this weblog. Yay. Too bad I didn’t have anything more grand or celebratory.

I almost forgot, but I’m just barely in time (in my own time zone) for xkcd Misconceptions Day, inspired by this comic:

From http://xkcd.com/843/

Here’s the link to the Wikipedia page for you to read at your leisure.

And below, you will find today’s semi-common misconception…

xkcd Misconceptions Day 2013: The Definition of Insanity

No Finnish version available. I didn’t make one last year, so now I get to say it’s tradition.

It’s the first Tuesday in February again, so I’m continuing with the “tradition” established last year, inspired by the following webcomic strip:

From http://xkcd.com/843/

So, first, here’s a link to the Wikipedia page in question.

And next, here’s a random misconception I want to dispel. Not such a big one this year, but annoying nonetheless.

xkcd Misconceptions Day 2012

No Finnish version, sorry; this was written on a lazy day.

I was inspired by this comic:

From http://xkcd.com/843/