Ask A Genius 610: Addendum on Bad Ideas
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/07/11
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A quick addendum to the session on bad ideas.
Rick Rosner: Ok, so the deal is we’ve talked about this before, but the analogy or the principle the people like to apply to like Republican diehards believing stupider and stupider shit and the Republican elected officials getting shittier and shittier is the boiled frog. The idea is that if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly turn up the temperature, the frog won’t notice the change in the temperature. The temperature change will be so gradual that the frog will never see that the water has reached a point, a temperature that will kill it and the frog. People assume this was confirmed by an experiment (?) that you could boil a frog. It’s like turning the water up gradually, and there won’t be an abrupt enough change in water temperature to make the frog nervous enough to jump out of the water. This turns out not to be accurate. And they’ve done the experiment now, and when the water gets hot enough to be unsafe, the frog will say fuck it and will jump out of the pot. So it’s a bad analogy. In another sense, it’s a fine analogy because it illustrates your point, but it doesn’t have. It’s not true in the fact that frogs don’t allow themselves to be boiled—the end.
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