It provides a serviceable analog for discussing model behavior. It certainly provides more value than the dead horse of "everyone is a slave to anthropomorphism".
How do you figure? It seems dangerously misleading, to me.
It does provide that, but currently I keep hearing people use it not as an analog but as a direct description.
Where is Pratchett when we need him? I wonder how he would have chose to anthropomorphize anthropomorphism. A sort of meta anthropomorphization.