Is the “crab boiling” metaphor substantially different from the traditional “frog boiling” metaphor?
I’ve heard the frog version over and over since I was a child, and I’ve also heard that it is not experimentally verified.
Like… frogs do, in fact, try to escape objectively hot water when there are low barriers to exit. A good biology keyword for research on the clade-spanning mechanism(s) involved here is the “thermal critical maximum”. There is a whole family of proteins for “responding to stress by paying more attention to folding or re-folding proteins” all the way down at the bacterial level, and the whole family is named for the first kind of stress response discovered: the stress response to heat.
Your post initially made me wonder if real crabs (whose recent evolution may have lacked really big temperature swings because of oceanic temperature buffering somehow?) might live up to the metaphor’s implications better than real frogs (that are fresh water ectotherms whose entire life sorta revolves around leveraging their environment to control their internal state, with temperature being near the top of the list), but casual googling suggests that (warning: disturbing video) crabs also flee hot pans.
An uncharitable reading is that crabs are a better metaphor simply because they “seem more convincing” because it there has been less time for the crab version to have been debunked?
Frog experts perrenially get questions about this, because the meme refuses to die, and in their responses they sometimes note that the typical spreaders of the frog meme are individuals like business consultants, political activists, and religious preachers. When I squint and put on my cynic hat, this reads to me basically as “people who specialize in personally benefiting from tricking entire groups of people into doing things that often don’t make a lot of sense”.
Despite the fundamental dishonesty, if the frog metaphor was accepted by the audience, it could be a rhetorically solid part of a larger process of achieving group compliance for nearly arbitrary changes.
Basically, the frog metaphor encourages people to distrust their own ability to think objectively about how the world works now, or how it has worked in the past, and in the face of this uncertainty it offers the idea that a large but unmeasurable and essentially invisible harm can be avoided by doing… something… anything? It depends on the situation.
If there was a genuine large imminent loss (like dying from hyperthermia) then many dramatic changes might be justified to attempt to avoid this outcome. Run! Jump! Pull levers at random! Thus, a boiling frog metaphor, deployed with no “kicker” attached, is a slightly confusing thing…
One naturally wonders when the other shoe will drop and the speaker will reveal their claimed harm and propose a more specific plan...
...basically I’m wondering where you’re going with this ;-)
This is a good point. I anecdotally hear that crabs don’t do this from my parents who cooked crabs, but this may be suspect due to memory issues on my part. If I am understanding correctly, the major objection your comment brings up is: this article presents a faulty anecdote and a ‘lesson’ that can be abused by the speaker. And that is dangerous.
In particular, I think you are referring to speakers who do misuse the metaphor to achieve group compliance. I agree this seems possible, and I respect your experience with it. Thus, I agree that there is a phenomenon at play here that can be misused.
Anyhow, I like to attach ” The discerning reader will find problems in each of the anecdotes and applications. ” at the end of my writings, in order to ameliorate the effects you mention -- you will notice it on the original article. Perhaps this doesn’t actually achieve the right ends of encouraging skepticism and cynicism, hohwever.
Thank you for bringing this up. I will check my anecdotes more carefully next time (I did check this one on Googling, but hearsay from people who have cooked crabs in the past led me to believe the initial title was solid enough to post.) In due time, I will edit this post to reflect your thoughts :).
Is the “crab boiling” metaphor substantially different from the traditional “frog boiling” metaphor?
I’ve heard the frog version over and over since I was a child, and I’ve also heard that it is not experimentally verified.
Like… frogs do, in fact, try to escape objectively hot water when there are low barriers to exit. A good biology keyword for research on the clade-spanning mechanism(s) involved here is the “thermal critical maximum”. There is a whole family of proteins for “responding to stress by paying more attention to folding or re-folding proteins” all the way down at the bacterial level, and the whole family is named for the first kind of stress response discovered: the stress response to heat.
Your post initially made me wonder if real crabs (whose recent evolution may have lacked really big temperature swings because of oceanic temperature buffering somehow?) might live up to the metaphor’s implications better than real frogs (that are fresh water ectotherms whose entire life sorta revolves around leveraging their environment to control their internal state, with temperature being near the top of the list), but casual googling suggests that (warning: disturbing video) crabs also flee hot pans.
An uncharitable reading is that crabs are a better metaphor simply because they “seem more convincing” because it there has been less time for the crab version to have been debunked?
Frog experts perrenially get questions about this, because the meme refuses to die, and in their responses they sometimes note that the typical spreaders of the frog meme are individuals like business consultants, political activists, and religious preachers. When I squint and put on my cynic hat, this reads to me basically as “people who specialize in personally benefiting from tricking entire groups of people into doing things that often don’t make a lot of sense”.
Despite the fundamental dishonesty, if the frog metaphor was accepted by the audience, it could be a rhetorically solid part of a larger process of achieving group compliance for nearly arbitrary changes.
Basically, the frog metaphor encourages people to distrust their own ability to think objectively about how the world works now, or how it has worked in the past, and in the face of this uncertainty it offers the idea that a large but unmeasurable and essentially invisible harm can be avoided by doing… something… anything? It depends on the situation.
If there was a genuine large imminent loss (like dying from hyperthermia) then many dramatic changes might be justified to attempt to avoid this outcome. Run! Jump! Pull levers at random! Thus, a boiling frog metaphor, deployed with no “kicker” attached, is a slightly confusing thing…
One naturally wonders when the other shoe will drop and the speaker will reveal their claimed harm and propose a more specific plan...
...basically I’m wondering where you’re going with this ;-)
This is a good point. I anecdotally hear that crabs don’t do this from my parents who cooked crabs, but this may be suspect due to memory issues on my part. If I am understanding correctly, the major objection your comment brings up is: this article presents a faulty anecdote and a ‘lesson’ that can be abused by the speaker. And that is dangerous.
In particular, I think you are referring to speakers who do misuse the metaphor to achieve group compliance. I agree this seems possible, and I respect your experience with it. Thus, I agree that there is a phenomenon at play here that can be misused.
Anyhow, I like to attach ” The discerning reader will find problems in each of the anecdotes and applications. ” at the end of my writings, in order to ameliorate the effects you mention -- you will notice it on the original article. Perhaps this doesn’t actually achieve the right ends of encouraging skepticism and cynicism, hohwever.
Thank you for bringing this up. I will check my anecdotes more carefully next time (I did check this one on Googling, but hearsay from people who have cooked crabs in the past led me to believe the initial title was solid enough to post.) In due time, I will edit this post to reflect your thoughts :).