Drollest boiled-frog-inspired imagery so far

"The one I've always used for this kind of thing is the male pattern baldness combover. Makes sense at first, but when do you decide that today is the day you now look like an idiot."

Airplane noise, senior-citizen driving: replacements for frogs

"The cat litter box is a good substitute and there are plenty of similar examples if one considers sounds. A succinct example of this is from the movie the Blues Brothers. After Elwood picks up Jake from prison, they go to Jake's apartment in Chicago. Right after an El train rattles by, Jake asks Ellwood, "How often do the trains come by?". Jake responds, "So often, you don't even notice."

"A similar situation occurred with my grandmother. She and her husband bought a house near LAX in the 50s, when I'm sure the occasional airplane flying over was a pleasant distraction. At the time of her death in the 90s, LAX had 4 runways and their house was bombarded by the noise from constant aircraft that seemed to be flying just a few feet overhead. Anyone walking into her house would have wondered why the TV was so loud, until the next takeoff or landing occurred.

"Two more frog equivalences. Ever work on another person's computer and find that it operates brutally slowly? No one ever seems to notice that almost day-by-day loss of performance themselves. Easy to understand, but I can't think of a catchy shorthand.

"So finally, my nomination for the replacement, an old person driving. They never notice the degradation in their driving skills until some unsuspecting passenger or pedestrian has a (hopefully only) near death experience."

Once and for all with the frogs

"Out of towners often ask me how it is that folks in Chicago and Illinois put up with all the hanky and panky that goes on in our political snakepits.

"I tell them about my cat litter box.

"Currently I have two cats--once I had nine. In any case, I used to think I kept their potty clean and odor free. Then, every so often someone would come to the door, sniff the air and whisper in confidence, "I think your cat box needs changing."

"They were right, of course. They came from cat-free environments and could sense a drop of urine at 30 paces, while I had grown so desensitized to the aroma that my schnozz would tell me I was romping through a fresh pine forest."

And I bet we could even work in some slippery-slope reasoning here!

So, to answer Kevin Drum's question: we don't cling to the frog story, even knowing it's false, because there is no possible other illustration from the realm of shared human experience that would illustrate progressive desensitization. The litterbox problem is one that is actually true -- and I bet a million times more people have experienced it than have actually seen a boiled frog. There's some other psycho/linguistic reason why the boiled frog story has caught on. But for the moment, this is my candidate for a new image: the reeking kitty-litter box. If someone has a better candidate, great.

___

*On the cat-fancier theme: to demonstrate that I am a friend of all animals involved in these image controversies, the hapless frogs as well as the reeking cats, herewith a photo of the now quite elderly Mike the Cat, in his prime. He has been in loving adopted care, since our departure for China. Then and now, no odor came from his litterbox -- according to us.

Well, at least Glenn Beck has confirmed my theory

By popular demand: Volokh on frogs and slippery slopes

"I think there are some good uses of slippery slope arguments. One example is the general constitutional idea of safe harbor, which I became acquainted with while reading the transcripts and decision in Reno v ACLU, where it became clear that the law was written in such a way that there were large number of sites which would not be considered to be pornographic under the normal understanding of pornography but which the statue would allow to be prosecuted. The prosecution (in Reno vs ACLU) essentially argued, "Oh, we don't intend to prosecute those cases" and the court in effect said, but the law doesn't allow anyone to be sure they are doing the right thing."

Harmonic convergence dept: frogs, China Daily, etc

The editorial is about universities in Australia making things "hot" (get it?? ho-ho!) for international transfer students, including those from China. Great headline too:

Well done all around. Let's learn from Asia! Thanks to numerous informants.

Guest-post wisdom on frogs

Goltz work inspired George Henry Lewes--actor, philosopher, friend of Dickens, bigamous partner of Marian Evans (George Eliot) and of note, literary critic--to extend the slowly-boiled brainless frog oeuvre by slowly-boiling frogs with partial brains or with their spinal cords severed at various locations. Lewes published his findings four years and many frogs later as Sensation in the Spinal Cord in Nature, Dec. 4, 1873. He summarized the story this way:

"Goltz observed that a frog, when placed in water the temperature of which is slowly raised towards boiling, manifests uneasiness as soon as the temperature reaches 25° C., and becomes more and more agitated as the heat increases, vainly struggling to get out, and finally at 42° C., dies in a state of rigid tetanus. The evidence of feeling being thus manifested when the frog has its brain, what is the case with a brainless frog? It is absolutely the reverse. Quietly the animal sits through all successions of temperature, never once manifesting uneasiness or pain, never once attempting to escape the impending death."

The boiled frog goes PoMo

"Are you familiar with the late French writer and philosopher Jean Baudrillard? My favorite memory of his insight was his comment on the progression of societies' images from reality toward unreality in identifiable stages.

1. It is the reflection of a basic reality, 
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality, 
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality, 
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

"The stylized sport of wrestling as it advanced from Greek olympics to modern television might be an example of this progression, with Lou Thesz somewhere in the middle range. This last stage was his area of fascination; the progression itself is mine. The Onion is #4, but intentionally as humor."

Jones says that the frog story is in stage two; I think it has skipped ahead to stage four, where we don't care (a la Krugman) whether it's true or not because it's become a convenient way to convey a message ("raining cats and dogs"). Either way, it's nice to be literary about it.

Peace on the boiled frog front

"I'm referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it's in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot -- but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time."

I'm joining the GOP

Did you consult any former presidents or celebrities about the fishbowl effect in raising the girls?
Well, you know, the truth of the matter is that the campaign was the equivalent of me being the frog in the saucepan of water and the temperature slowly being turned up. By the time the inauguration had taken place, we had pretty much gotten accustomed to it.

Out of towners often ask me how it is that folks in Chicago and Illinois put up with all the hanky and panky that goes on in our political snakepits.

I tell them about my cat litter box.

Currently I have two cats--once I had nine. In any case, I used to think I kept their potty clean and odor free. Then, every so often someone would come to the door, sniff the air and whisper in confidence, "I think your cat box needs changing."

They were right, of course. They came from cat-free environments and could sense a drop of urine at 30 paces, while I had grown so desensitized to the aroma that my schnozz would tell me I was romping through a fresh pine forest.

So it is with the denizens of our city and state.

I'm saying nothing about boiled frogs for now...

... because I'm conserving my ammo for a final, comprehensive, withering, all-crushing barrage that will shame anyone out of using this cliched and ignorant imagery ever again. Also, because my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg is now on the case.

But I am saying: you, Professor Willem Buiter of London, and you, the otherwise estimable Dahlia Lithwick, had better watch out, if you want to avoid a place in that end-of-days frog Hall of Shame. This is your warning...

The bright side #3: Reinforcements in the frog wars

Stumbling just now into my apartment in Beijing, some 24 hours after pre-dawn checkout from the airport hotel at LAX, I discover that my Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg has volunteered for the noblest of efforts. This is the long, twilight struggle to mock politicians, journalists, raconteurs, etc who repeat the stupid, cruel, hackneyed, and unscientific boiled-frog cliche, so that eventually people will stop saying it. I knew I'd find an ally some day.

We all pick our causes. During my brief and enjoyable stint at Microsoft long ago, I worked on various big-think projects. But my claim to have changed the world may rest on my all-out war against "Clippy," the moronic "help" feature that popped up to say "Hey, you seem to be writing a letter!" each time you typed "Dear ..." I don't want to overstate things, but before I arrived, Word came with Clippy turned on by default. Now it's turned off by default. Judge for yourself.

So may it someday be concerning the frogs, thanks to their new defender Mr. Goldberg. And I actually have frog news, which at some point after I get some sleep I may share.

Boiled-frog idiocy goes Ivy League

A writer compares her experiences as a female athlete at Princeton with Harvard's new plan to have gym hours for Muslim women only*. (Update: the complaints were from Muslim women, but the request was merely for women-only hours, not Muslim-women only. Sorry) She makes some very good points -- but then wraps it all up in the most cliched and brainless way possible. Yes, you guessed it:

Harvard’s “Jim Crow” gym has moved America backwards not beyond. Its potential consequences are best represented in the story of the boiled frog.

Ever tried boiling a frog? You can’t do it by dropping a frog into a pot of boiling water. The frog will leap out, scalded perhaps, but very much alive. To successfully boil a frog, you must put the frog in a pan of nice, luke-warm water and slowly, ever so slowly, turn up the heat.

Before you know it you will have a boiled frog.

(If somehow you've missed the previous 4,000 entries on this topic, this observation from a zoologist makes the point, well, pithily:

"The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.)

Fresh from Kenya: a breakthrough on boiled frogs

THE STORY IS TOLD OF HOW an adventurous young frog struggled hard to climb into a pot of water. After a few false starts, he finally managed and had a nice time, enjoying the swim.

But the pot's owner came, proceeded to light a fire, and placed the pot on it. When the water started warming, the frog found the conditions even better.

But soon, conditions inside the pot became unbearable and the frog decided to jump out. But upon seeing the fire below, he stopped dead on his tracks. He was trapped in a dilemma of his own making. The water was killing him slowly, but the fire would kill him instantly.

As we seek answers on how the dispute over the 2007 presidential results could have triggered such wanton killings, we might ask ourselves how we got trapped in a dilemma of our own making....

Political writers, politicians: let John Mbaria be an example unto one and all. (Thanks to Nicholas Wadhams of Nairobi for this tip.)

Boiled frog interim update

In the Asian hinterland and away from the internet for last few days and one or two more.

Nonetheless sending dispatch via Blackberry to post this timely entry in the boiled-frog contest, from reader Alex Frankel. Yes, I know this is not a substitute for the (scientifically flawed) boiled-frog cliche. But still....

Continue reading "Boiled frog interim update" »

This is not, in itself, reason to oppose a candidate....

... but Hillary Clinton is plummeting rock-like to the bottom of the crucial "boiled frog" primary.

I still have not seen any evidence of Barack Obama using this hackneyed, heartless, and flat-out ignorant formulation. ("You throw a frog into a pot of boiling water....")

That is, he has not used it, "as far as I know."

John McCain? Again, as far as I know, he is boiled-frog-free.

But Senator Clinton goes there again and again.

When Senator Obama wants to start fighting tough on the stump, the path is clear. "Senator McCain has a lifetime of resisting boiled-frog idiocy. I have a lifetime of resisting boiled-frog idiocy. Senator Clinton has her boiled-frog speech."

(As promised for months, results of the exciting "come up with a replacement for the boiled frog cliche" contest will be announced any day now.)

Why I won't end up voting for Ron Paul (updated!)

The Daily Paul has a ringing new endorsement, based on.... the (cliched+ignoramus) boiled-frog principle!!!

I've heard more and more people on the forums wondering why the average Joe out there just ~doesn't get it~. Here is an analogy that I use when talking to people to get the point across... it's odd, but it works.

Take a frog and throw it into a pot of boiling water. It'll jump out as quickly as possible! Take the same frog, put it in a pot of cold water, and heat it up slowly... it will sit in the water until it dies. (I've not had the heart to bench test this theory, I'm just going with what I was told.)

Close readers will recall that Hillary Clinton also went in for boiled-frog balderdash before her defeat in Iowa. As far as I can tell, she's steered clear ever since -- and look at the results! Maybe this is what people mean when they say the Clintons will do whatever it takes to win. If only the Paul team had her discipline....

(Thanks to Dylan Matthews. And note to any sincere Ron Paul supporters who come across this item: I actually have a lot of sympathy and admiration for his role in this campaign. This is less about him than about my ongoing lament over the moron-ization of American political rhetoric. Update! Judging from recent entries in my email inbox, I guess I need to make something a little bit clearer. This post is not really about Ron Paul. It is a what we English-speakers refer to as a "tongue in cheek" reference to a bit of political bombast I am determined to shame people out of using: the inaccurate "boiled frog" story. Sometimes the term used is, "a little joke." No offense meant to Paul-dom!)

For the record, two (interesting!) boiled-frog updates

Both referring to yesterday's shock-horror revelation that the NYT, Oxford Univ, and a skilled tech writer had combined to repeat a cruel bit of misinformation.

1) My friend Dottie Hall, a veteran of Microsoft, Symantec, Eclipse Aviation, and other ventures, points out in her blog that the boiled frog story was not the only canard in the NYT article. The column, by G. Paschal Zachary, also said this:

Businesses crave a sweet spot: where the line is drawn in favor of the innovator. The late Akio Morita, founder of Sony, talked about satisfying appetites that people didn’t even know they had. He achieved such a feat with the Sony Walkman, the music player introduced in 1979. While at the Lotus Development Corporation, [Mitch] Kapor created another such “killer app,” or application: the spreadsheet for the PC.

Mitch Kapor is a wonderful guy, creator of such truly innovative programs as Agenda and Magellan during his years at Lotus and in recent years hard at work on the innovative Chandler project. And while he can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC, namely Lotus 1-2-3, that was less a break through than the real innovation of creating the spreadsheet itself. All honor for this latter achievement lies (as Dottie Hall points out) with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented VisiCalc for the Apple II.

2) Reader Gregory Sokoloff points out a version of the boiled-frog story that, if we called it boiled-salaryman, might actually be true. He lived in Japan when I did, in the late 1980s, and reports:

You may remember that the most common form of bath in homes was of a design not found in the West. The bath would first be filled with cold water, then a natural gas heater would be lit and the water would slowly circulate from the bath into the heater and then back into the bath, much like a heated swimming pool. The recirculation was achieved simply through convection without any pump, and thus the device was very, very quiet. Apparently, people commonly would get into their baths when the water was tepid, fall asleep, and then wake up with serious burns requiring treatment in a hospital. I don't know if there were deaths. Of course, only one who has lived in Japan can fully appreciate how sleepy and inebriated many Japanese are by the time they take a bath after rounds in the local bars (the best named one where I lived was the "Salaryman Daigaku" ["Salaryman University"]).

I may be repeating an urban myth here, but a good friend of mine their swore she witnessed the aftermath of such an incident.

So, consistent with my emphasis on the scientific approach to tall tales, I hereby request that henceforth people begin the cliched story thus: "Throw a salaryman into a boiling hot bath, and he'll scramble right out. But put a salaryman in a nice comfy tub, and....."

Stop the boiled frog madness, part 612 (NYT repeat-offender dept)

G. Paschal Zachary is a very good writer. The New York Times is a very good newspaper. Oxford U. is a very good university, and its comparatively-new Said Business School is presumably OK. But these worthies have joined forces to produce the latest high-profile example of boiled-frog idiocy.

From Zachary's tech column today, on the riskiness of innovation:

IPod “addiction” seems benign. Yet some worry that other innovations may harbor health threats. As a result, they may be vulnerable to what Marc Ventresca, a lecturer at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, calls the “frog boiling” problem. For the frog, gradually rising heat causes no alarm — until the water is so hot that death is imminent.

The boiled-frog metaphor seems benign. Yet some worry that it reveals not merely weakness for cliche but also amazing gullibility on the scientific front.

The real culprit here, of course, is the Said Business School professor. Although why Zachary would feel he had to attribute a bromide to an "authority" is interesting in itself. ("The predicament comes down to what Ludwig Wittgenstein, of Trinity College, Cambridge, called 'six of one, half-dozen of the other.' ") But the NYT falls into this trap again and again. It is time for the newspaper of record to get the record right!

(Thanks to Steve Corneliussen for early alert on this threat.)

Maybe this is why Hillary lost in Iowa? (Boiled-frog dept)

A head start for the historians: Perhaps it was because in the final weekend of campaigning she fell back on that hoariest and most boneheaded of political cliches, the boiled-frog canard?*

“If you want to boil a frog, don’t put it in hot water because it will jump right out,” she said. “You put it in cold water and then turn up the heat gradually and it’s a goner.”

Mrs. Clinton punctuates the parable by declaring that “we have got to figure out how not to be the frog in cold water.”

OK. But we have also got to figure out how, for the sake of scientific accuracy, freshness in language, and the dignity of the poor frogs, we can stop talking about them in this heartless and formulaic way. (By the way, minus points to the New York Times for reporting the episode as if Sen. Clinton were using a clever image.) Soon, I will release the results of the contest to find other words to get across the point that people can get used to slowly worsening circumstances that would shock them if confronted all at once.

If you're ready for more on the topic, try this, this, this, this, and this. And I'm an equal-opportunity frog defender: I'm picking on Hillary Clinton at the moment because she's the only one I've noticed picking on the frogs.

* Yes, yes, I understand the irony of using canard to describe a tale about les grenouilles

Boiled-frog contest update

Thanks for the entries I have received directly, in response to the call for some actually-true metaphor we can use in place of the "throw a frog into a pot of boiling water..." cliche, which is memorable but false. Entries via posts and comments on Matthew Yglesias's and Brian Beutler's sites qualify too.

Winners announced in a couple of days, and then I'll lug a bottle of choice Chinese wine back with me on an upcoming US visit (and will somehow get it to the winner). If you've got another suggestion - for the frog metaphor, I mean, not the prize -- send it now.

Stop the Madness! (Gail Collins, Hillary Clinton, and Boiled Frogs)

From Gail Collins in Saturday's New York Times:

The Democratic Party seems to be gradually acclimating itself to the idea that Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. It’s a little like that frog in a beaker of water that Al Gore talks about in his global warming speech — the one who won’t notice he’s being boiled to death if you turn up the heat ever so gradually.

NO NO NO NO NO!

I'm not talking about the politics of the thing*. I'm talking about the poor frog. Ms. Collins may be off the hook in attributing the frog metaphor to Al Gore -- he used it in An Inconvenient Truth, and he keeps right on using it. But he is flat wrong -- right on Global Warming, wrong on Amphibian Warming -- and so is everybody else who tries to explain things this way.

Summary of the undisputed science on this point: If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will either die or else be so badly hurt it will wish that it were dead. If you put it in a pot of tepid water and turn on the heat, the frog will climb out -- if it can -- as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.

Continue reading "Stop the Madness! (Gail Collins, Hillary Clinton, and Boiled Frogs)" »

The hot frogs ask: Et tu, Al?

I finally took the unwise step of searching Google News for recent uses of the (totally fictitious) boiled-frog cliche.

Sigh. Of the many examples, these two were most dispiriting:

Continue reading "The hot frogs ask: Et tu, Al?" »

The boiled-frog myth: hey, really, knock it off!

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is scientifically impressive, politically important, and no doubt personally redemptive for Gore himself, who has endured an injustice that would leave most people screaming all day every day. Plus, it's an Oscar winner! But as noted several months ago, the movie also contains one moment of pure ignoramus-hood: the perpetuation of the boiled-frog myth. ("Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump right out, but just raise the temperature slowly and he'll let himself be cooked." In reality the situation is more like: "Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll be scalded to death, but give him a chance to escape when the slowly-warming water gets uncomfortable, and he will hop right out.")

Comes now The Economist, to give Gore (and countless other speech-makers) company.

Continue reading "The boiled-frog myth: hey, really, knock it off!" »

The boiled-frog myth: stop the lying now!

A twelve-hour flight from Shanghai to San Francisco has its drawbacks, but one of the plusses is the chance to catch up on a whole slew of movies. Oddly enough, it was under these circumstances that I finally saw Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. Since I found him persuasive on the big points, let me mention only a small one: the "frog in boiling water" myth that simply won't go away.

Continue reading "The boiled-frog myth: stop the lying now!" »