Cultural Usage
If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.
Version of the story from Daniel Quinn's The Story of BThe boiling frog story is generally told in a metaphorical context, with the upshot being that people should make themselves aware of gradual change lest they suffer eventual undesirable consequences. This may be in support of a slippery slope argument. It is also used in business to illustrate the idea that change needs to be gradual to be accepted. The expression "boiling frog syndrome" is sometimes used as shorthand for the metaphor.
The story has been retold many times and used to illustrate many different points. It has been used to warn about diverse phenomena, for example: in 1960 about sympathy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War; in 1980 about the impending collapse of civilization anticipated by survivalists; in the 1990s about inaction in response to climate change and staying in abusive relationships. It has also been used by libertarians to warn about slow erosion of civil rights.
In the 1996 novel The Story of B, environmentalist author Daniel Quinn spends a chapter on the metaphor of the boiling frog, using it to describe human history, population growth and food surplus. Pierce Brosnan's character Harry Dalton mentioned it in the 1997 disaster movie Dante's Peak in reference to the accumulating warning signs of the volcano's reawakening. Al Gore used a version of the story in his presentations and the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth to describe ignorance about global warming. In his version the frog is rescued before it is harmed.
In philosophy the boiling frog story has been used as a way of explaining the sorites paradox. This paradox describes a hypothetical heap of sand from which individual grains are removed one at a time, and asks if there is a specific point when it can no longer be defined as a heap.
Read more about this topic: Boiling Frog
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