Metaphors are hard to understand!!🧩

Metaphors are often used as a technique to make things easier to understand.

In my experience, many of them just create an atmosphere of being easy to understand, but aren't actually very clear at all.

Furthermore, there are many cases where using a metaphor actually makes things harder to understand than they were originally.

Of course, this might be because metaphors don't suit my way of thinking, or perhaps I'm just not smart enough.

However, I fundamentally believe that most of the metaphors overflowing in society are difficult to understand.

If the goal is just to provide a sense of satisfaction, I often think, 'Why not just use a formula?'—though that may be because I'm used to them. Unlike metaphors, formulas don't lose information either.

In the first place, using metaphors is an extremely advanced skill.

Much like reading aloud, there is little awareness of this, and I suspect that because people think they can use them easily, they are being abused, leading to a massive number of poor outcomes.

They are often used as a technique to break down abstract concepts into concrete ones.

But because you are connecting the abstract to the concrete by comparing it to something else that is similar,

the quality of the explanation depends heavily on the person's level of understanding.

It takes a great deal of skill to transfer information without losing any of it in the process.

Because physics requires such a high level of understanding, great teachers—like Mr. T and Mr. Sonoda—are exceptionally good at using metaphors.

It is truly god-like.

Almost no information is lost, and furthermore, they are properly compared to things we are familiar with to make them easy to understand.

It is truly amazing that they satisfy both of these conditions.

Usually, one of these conditions is missing:

Either it is rigorous, but the thing being compared is unfamiliar and hard to understand,

or the rigor is sacrificed for the sake of clarity, but information is lost, and it is forced into a comparison with something familiar, making it even harder to understand.

In physics, this is a good example. By doing this, I ended up getting quite lost in a maze.

Because of this nature of metaphors, I try not to use them lightly, even in places where they are common as a teaching method.

This is also related to my experience of struggling quite a bit with metaphors often used in chemistry.

At first glance, they seem familiar and easy to understand, but many chemistry metaphors lose so much information that they are actually harder to understand.

Even when I do use them, I only handle ones that fit my own sense of things quite well.

However, I do use what you might call partial metaphors—metaphors that extend sensations, such as stretching something out or filling in gaps, or giving abstract objects a concrete feel—quite often when explaining abstract content.

I don't know the name for this.

This is because it achieves the goal of breaking things down into concrete terms while only aiming to provide a sense of reality, and it has little impact on the preservation of information, which is where the difficulty of metaphors lies.

By doing this, by giving abstract objects a sense of feeling and by giving them contours, it becomes easier to grasp them as a real experience.

I also aim for figures and graphs to be something that can actually be grasped and moved by hand.

Those who have read my explanations on statistics will likely find that the style of combining formula explanations with partial metaphors makes it feel real.

Metaphors are overused, so those explaining things should be cautious. Many people on the receiving end think, 'I can't understand such a simple thing, I must be stupid,' but often the explanation itself is fundamentally bad.

Since there are many parts that depend on a person's individual senses, there is no need to force yourself to go along with that explanation. It is also effective to try thinking of other explanations yourself.

I thought about this while writing it myself, but perhaps this is why I dislike making 'ease of understanding' the main axis and evaluating things solely based on that.