[conspire] CABAL in the time of Cholera^W SARS-CoV-2: March event cancelled

[Nick Moffitt]

On 17Mar2020 06:01am (+0000), paulz at ieee.org wrote:
>  Methinks thou dost protest too much.
> The analogy to Y2K is far from perfect, but it shows one possible situation.

The trouble is that I suspect Ruben has a shaky grasp of what analogy actually *is*.

We draw fuzzy parallels between historic events and the present, and suggest a possible mechanism that could repeat.  We do this all the time.

But some people are more interested in a Bolshevik-style history-as-prophecy model, where the past is a roman-a-clef for the present and you simply plug characters into the historical record to divine the future.  Any attempt at analogy is taken literally as a 100% equivalence of the entire story, without critical examination.

One might say, perhaps, that survivorship bias is a problem, and that the approach being taken to some certain problem mirrors that of the Navy's misunderstanding about statistical damage patterns during WW2, and that we could learn from Abraham Wald's insights on survivorship bias.  The analogy-resistant individual will immediately start screaming that you are trying to equate the situation with WW2 and the Holocaust.

No amount of reason will help, here.  It is a strictly political manoeuvre to say "What, you equate yourself with X, now?" when no such thing was said.  The analogy-resistant individual will pound the lectern furiously, absolutely convinced of their moral superiority as justification for continuing the tirade.

It's a cheap escalation tactic used by online trolls the world over, and has been for decades.

I'm rather tired of it.