The “forest fungi are just like our conception of the internet/kinship/brains/etc.” story is a fun one and I suspect it’ll be around for a long time. But I think this piece is a good model for one way to shoo back an overextended idea.

https://undark.org/2023/05/25/where-the-wood-wide-web-narrative-went-wrong/

I think there’s a powerful force in popular science writing, more or less necessary to what we’d recognize as popular science writing at all, to familiarize the strange. This is not formally divisible from what it means to explain something.

But metaphors are always not good enough or too good. There’s never the one that takes you exactly as far as it’s accurate and leaves you hydrated, sunscreened, and pointed in the right direction.

A wrinkle in the “forests are internets” thing is that (I suspect) a lot of people promulgating it are trying to do forests a favor by putting them in these terms. In practice, this may often be true. But it seems worth watching closely. These things get away from us.

Things we aren’t – forests or LLMs or planets or abacuses or moths or whatever – aren’t us in domino masks. It is not the case that everything other than the human soul is only present in creation in order to provide metaphors to humans for their souls. I also suspect that Italian is not just English with a really strong Italian accent and bees are not a model for a perfect human society. Different things are actually different.

I am grateful for popular science writing that can keep some epistemic humility about its work: that can balance astonishing news carrying weird implications against the reminder that sometimes the truth doesn’t make sense even if we do have it.