I highly recommend the book "Metaphors We Live By", which discusses how metaphors are not arbitrary, but are part of schemas. For instance, there are whole classes of orientational metaphors that fall into the schemas: "more is up, less is down", "good is up, bad is down", "virtue is up, depravity is down", "rational is up, emotional is down", "having control is up, being subject to control is down", and so on. (Yes, I'm sure you're clever enough to find counterexamples.) This is a thought-provoking book that changed how I view the world, so check it out.

The book: https://archive.org/details/lakoff-george-metaphors-we-live-...

Norvig's review discussing the book in the context of AI: https://norvig.com/mwlb.html

Or how some cultures see time "passing" like a progress bar filling up, while others see time filling up like a barrel, while other see time cycling, like the seasons. How English speakers would say they have a "long" meeting, Spanish speakers might say a "big" meeting. Our abstractions effect our perceptions.

The problem is not considering them arbitrary or not. We are sure to derive expressions from reality in some way, I'm sure that many languages have different versions of saying that something is so boring it puts someone "to sleep", no matter if speech is not hypnotic, the human experience will relate the boredom with sleep.

The problem is when from that we derive, with little justification and with the by now widely recognized horrible standards of social science, that in those rationalizations lie very important hidden truths about our society and psychology.

Many things boil down to an implicit association test of some sort, and that's now considered basically junk science.

There's a pipeline in which basically anything that can be considered a social issue in some way can get picked up by someone in the social sciences whose biases it confirms and given a justification, and since it has a political backing and is powered by preconceived bias and academia it goes through and actually has a negative effect on the world.

The stupid Stanford prison experiment. Facilitated communication. Power posing. Trigger warnings. Learning styles. Priming. All bullshit. All popular. All part of "the science".

And people wonder why there's a problem of institutional trust.

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