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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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"By your logic" isn't a claim about what the other person thinks or believes, it's a claim about what the structure of their argument logically implies. If polygamy is bound to die out because its practitioners fail to reproduce, then the same reasoning should generalize to other analogous situations. If it doesn't generalize, that implies the claim being made is either wrong or insufficiently precise.

Surely you believe it's based around what the logic of the argument implies, not the structure of the argument. A structure is just how it's organized. Anyways, the comparison between London's population flows 500 years ago and the individual mating practices of the people in Scott Alexander's blog are obviously not bounded by the same arguments or logic. It's totally meaningless.

"Structure" as in logical structure. If you argue "Polygamy's practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore polygamy is bound to die out," then you've made an argument with the following logical structure: "[Thing]'s practitioners reproduce at a low rate, therefore [thing] is bound to die out." If someone can find a value of [thing] that falsifies the claim, it implies that there is something wrong (incorrect or incomplete) about the logical structure of the argument presented.

So you agree that additional information is needed beyond effects on population growth. Which was the entire purpose of the analogy.

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