Explain any one particular complex topic using an analogy you found interesting or easily understandable.
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.
Computers are essentially rocks we have tricked into doing math.
Don’t oversimplify though, remember you need to put lightning into it first!
“Teaching sand how to think was a mistake”.
I usually explain wormholes by folding a piece of paper and pushing a pencil through it /s
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.
The vocabulary of a language is like the fur of a beast: sure, it’s highly visible, but what’s inside (the grammar, or the beast itself) matters more.
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.
That’s a broad topic as I use different analogies for different subject matter. What subject(s) are you thinking of?
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.
There were dinosaurs. They died. They became oil. We use that oil to move. It’s an analogy to anything you want if you are very high.
When people ask me about email, I like to tell them it’s just like using the Fediverse.
Driving a car is like reading a book. It’s easy, but retards make it look difficult
