alt Hacker NewsYou fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before.
You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.
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You write a metaphore in a comment, you remove half of it, you add another one in the middle, you add the half of the first one, and… nobody understands anything.
In a more advanced civilisation, you would be put in the pillory for the townsfolk to throw rotten cabbage at you until the Lord fixed whatever made you say that.
You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you put your right foot in, and you shake it all about.
> You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, [some water overflows], you remove half of water...
That water overflow step is missing / implicit. But that's an observable event.
you fill the 3 liter bottle up to the top, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle
then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full
empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter bottle into the 5 liter bottle
fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water
The point of the metaphor is not to say "spending time is mechanically similar to putting things in a container". It is to look at spending time from a new angle, and see if it helps you understand it better. A wise person sees a metaphor as a launching point for thought, not as an expression of a metaphysical connection.
Yes, there are bad metaphors, and people who take metaphors too seriously. That you can conjure a bad metaphor with somewhat similar to semantics to some other metaphor does not mean that said metaphor is bad.