I tell my students that going to a challenging class and not participating is like going to the gym and watching people work out. It is not only fairly useless to your goal of improving yourself, it creeps out everyone else and makes it feel like an unsafe place to try new things and make mistakes.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression around 2013, but definitely suffered from it as early as 2007. At first I was very embarrassed and ashamed of it, especially when I first started taking antidepressants. I didn’t want to take medicine / be in therapy for the rest of my life. It didn’t help that my parents were under the impression that I could eventually get over it – saying things like “you don’t want to be in therapy forever do you?” “You want to eventually not have to take antidepressants, right?” After a few years, I stopped trying to “cure” myself and began to accept that it’s going to be a part of my life (and that’s okay). Even my parents slowly started to realize that it will always be present. In fact, I started to become a little grateful for my depression, because I think it gives me a unique perspective on the world and life in general. I’m pretty open about my diagnosis now. I’ve had a few people tell me they’re taken aback by how honest I am about my struggles. I tell them that, for me, living with depression is like being grass. Too much happy, yellow sunshine will make you dry, dead, and brown, and too much gloomy, blue rain will make you gray and root-rotted. You need a healthy balance of both to be lush and green (my favorite color).
I get the analogy but don’t agree with the reasoning. Or maybe it depends on the circumstance. But for foreign languages I would suggest it’s the other way round: The fur (grammar/prononciation) might look (sound) nice, but it’s the vocabulary that bring the actual meaning to whatever you say.
The circumstances when I use this analogy are mostly language evolution, borrowings, and their overall impact on a language. I’ll use two English example sentences to demonstrate this:
I adore their potatoes with jerky, amigo.
*Apple me eats two.
Which one of those sentences is recognisably English? It’s the first one because, while it’s full of borrowings*, it still abides to the morphological and syntactical rules of the language. In the meantime, the second sentence is rubbish, even if it uses well-established native vocab - because it doesn’t abide to English syntax and morphology.
Or, by the analogy: the first sentence might’ve changed the fur of the beast, but the beast inside is still the same. The second one plopped that beast’s fur over something else, but the beast isn’t there any more.
(The “pronunciation” / phonology is a third can of worms. It doesn’t work well with the fur vs. beast analogy.)
*“adore” from French, “their” from Old Norse, “potato” from Taino, “jerky” from Quechua, “amigo” from Spanish. Only “I” and “with” are native.
Nice example for borrowings! I was thinking about this in the context of learning a new language.
Imho schools put way too much emphasis on the grammar vs the vocabulary. At least that’s what I experienced in three different countries, where you would learn 4 different past tenses but not be able to use any of it because you’re missing the vocabulary.
Being able to say “Where restaurant/hospital/train station?” is much more helpful than being able to just say “Where is the restaurant?”. So I guess my argument applies to learning new languages, where I think vocabulary is the more decisive factor but I agree that in it’s essence a languages grammar counts more.
For language learning I agree with you 100% - vocab is generally more useful than grammar. And I also wish that schools put more emphasis on vocab - or at least demanded it more from the students, as vocab learning often boils down to memorisation.
“Framerules” in Super Mario Bros. speedrunning on NES is probably the most memed analogy for a (very slightly) more complicated concept I know of.
The game can only send you to a new level every 21 frames (about .3 seconds), so there are tons of levels where timesaves don’t lead to any benefit, because you have to save a full .3 seconds in order to see any benefit.
In the community, this has been explained with the same analogy so many times that “Imagine there’s a bus” has become a well-known meme.
So, imagine there’s a bus that only leaves the station every .3 seconds (21 frames). Because the bus only leaves at the times on its schedule, arriving early for the bus doesn’t get you to your destination any faster, because you still have to wait for the time the bus will leave. For this reason, any new time saves in SMB1 must reach a new “framerule” (get there early enough to catch the previous bus) for there to be any real timesave.
When I have to explain how email works, I walk them through the process of drafting a letter, placing a stamp on it, dropping, it in a mailbox, etc. The stamp and the address contain the “routing information if you will.” I call the SMTP server, the postal service. I refer to the IMAP server as like the mailbox.
IPs and Ports are like street address and room number.
LLMs ie chatGPT are like a Galton Board. Your sentence is the bucket of balls at the top, each ball is a word or ‘token’, and the LLM is the arrangement of pegs on the board. Training the model is like moving the pegs around until the pattern you get at the bottom is desirable.
I think my question was not clear. The very intention of the question is to tell **any **complex topic you’ve encountered that you’ve found a surprisingly understandable analogy of. there is no constraint of any subject.
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