Ok, maybe a better analogy would be something along the lines of:
Some martians are able to afford expensive tentacle cream which stops the tentacles stinging, meaning that they can find more willing humans and become a deeper shade of blue then less well-off martians.
Also, there’s a country where most martians borrow so much money to buy cream that they have to work like 80 hours to hope to ever pay back the debt, as most humans only let indigo martians tickle them.
For the analogy to make sense, blue tickling has to be done to the same humans as green tickling. If blue tickling means “the employer (as an individual) hires an educated person and benefits”, green tickling would be “the employer (as an individual) pays for an uneducated person to be educated”. Pretty much nobody thinks that employers should be obligated to pay for people’s education.
You guys have been making valiant efforts to apply the tickling analogy to education, but I really don’t think it works.
Nowhere in the story is it implied that the humans a martian will pleasantly tickle once blue must be the same ones he unpleasantly tickled when green in order to become blue.
The analogy doesn’t require that the same individual human who is green-tickled is the one who’s blue-tickled, but the analogy does require that the humans and Martians who green-tickle them are an analogy for the same kind of thing as the humans and the Martians who blue-tickle them. So if “humans blue-tickled by Martians” means “employers hiring educated people on an individual basis”, then “humans green-tickled by Martians” means “employers paying to educate people on an individual basis”. Employers don’t do that—the analogy fails.
You can’t just say that blue-tickling means hiring and green-tickling means paying for education, without considering who is hiring whom, and who is paying to educate whom.
Ok, maybe a better analogy would be something along the lines of:
Some martians are able to afford expensive tentacle cream which stops the tentacles stinging, meaning that they can find more willing humans and become a deeper shade of blue then less well-off martians.
Certainly true :-D
The idea is that the green and blue Martian analogy can be used, as is, as an argument about education. I don’t buy that.
Of course you can use it as an argument about education if you replace it with a better analogy.
Also, there’s a country where most martians borrow so much money to buy cream that they have to work like 80 hours to hope to ever pay back the debt, as most humans only let indigo martians tickle them.
For the analogy to make sense, blue tickling has to be done to the same humans as green tickling. If blue tickling means “the employer (as an individual) hires an educated person and benefits”, green tickling would be “the employer (as an individual) pays for an uneducated person to be educated”. Pretty much nobody thinks that employers should be obligated to pay for people’s education.
You guys have been making valiant efforts to apply the tickling analogy to education, but I really don’t think it works.
Nowhere in the story is it implied that the humans a martian will pleasantly tickle once blue must be the same ones he unpleasantly tickled when green in order to become blue.
The analogy doesn’t require that the same individual human who is green-tickled is the one who’s blue-tickled, but the analogy does require that the humans and Martians who green-tickle them are an analogy for the same kind of thing as the humans and the Martians who blue-tickle them. So if “humans blue-tickled by Martians” means “employers hiring educated people on an individual basis”, then “humans green-tickled by Martians” means “employers paying to educate people on an individual basis”. Employers don’t do that—the analogy fails.
You can’t just say that blue-tickling means hiring and green-tickling means paying for education, without considering who is hiring whom, and who is paying to educate whom.