Analogies (as a skill)

2006.06.26 - Ted Neward's Blog - The Vietnam of Computer Science
- He gives a fairly extended explanation of the Vietnam War. In the comments he says this is to allow non-US citizens to understand the article, and to inform US citizens that the US government understood the war was a quagmire before it got heavily involved.
2017.03.22 - TYT - Peter Hitchens Interview w/ Michael Tracey
- He explains what has happened to Russia over the past 30 years (since the breakup of the Soviet Union) by detailing what it would look like for the US to have gone through a similar transformation.
2017.08.08 - The Atlantic - The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo
- Perhaps the author’s approach would lead to less gender diversity at the company if it were adopted. To shorthand his position as “anti-diversity” before the fact is still misleading.
  Journalists grasp this nuance on lots of other issues.
  Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of more jobs for working-class Americans. In service of that end, he has proposed canceling free-trade agreements, building a wall to keep out immigrants, and eliminating lots of environmental regulations. Critics who avow that they favor more jobs for the working class, but oppose achieving more jobs through those specific means, are not described as “anti-job,” especially when they suggest specific alternatives for job-creation. Even if their alternatives would result in fewer jobs than the Trump administration’s plans, that still wouldn’t make a writeup of their proposal “an anti-job memo.”
  To object to a means of achieving x is not to be anti-x.
  The failure to apply that same logic to the author of the memo is straightforwardly frustrating for those who agree with many of the views that the memo expressed.
- The key to this reasoning, though, is that the journalists in question must not have any other good reason for having labeled it "anti-diversity".