It warrants to be careful with analogies though, because no matter how clever or graphic or seemingly appropriate they might seem, the point of analogies is simply to make our human mind understand complex processes better - they don't necessarily provide any new information about those processes or what would work to affect those processes and what would not. Empirical evidence is what is interesting and applicable in practice. Analogies can be used after that evidence is already collected, to put in a biology book to make students sweat less. But trying to use analogies to make up new information is over-intellectualizing - rarely a wise thing to do.
> But trying to use analogies to make up new information is over-intellectualizing - rarely a wise thing to do.
Is it? It seems like analogies can often point into the right direction to look at.
Of course analogies are not sufficient and you do need to do the actual empirical work, but it also seems a bit unwise to discard their ability to detect similarities. The only reason you can make a good analogy is because there is an underlying shared abstraction .
