Would a slowly boiling frog jump out of the pot?

Posted By Blake Hounshell Monday, October 1, 2007 - 10:00 AM Share

James Fallows protests the omnipresent frog-boiling metaphor, often used to describe climate change:

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.

Please! It's mean to the frogs to keep talking about them this way. Plus, it drives me crazy! ("You see, Bobby, here's the real cause of global warming: The earth is attached to the sun by a giant rubber band, and first the band was stretched so now it is snapping back and pulling the sun closer, making us hot.") I will give a reward -- maybe some nice Chinese wine? -- to the person who comes up with the best simple metaphor for the underlying idea: that people get habituated to worsening circumstances that they'd reject if they considered them afresh. Only catch: the metaphor, unlike the frog story, can't violate the known facts. I bet that the whole topic of bad marriages would yield some possibilities.

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