People eating what is usually called food should be a minority because there are so many other things that fit in your mouth: stones, grass, computer components …
When two people meet, what is called some kind of handshake / traditional greeting should be a minority because there are so many other potential ways of interacting: touching their head, touching their elbow …
Just because one “umbrella term” unpacks into more constituent types does not imply at all that the cumulative probability of a random human belonging to that umbrella term dominates.
Diverse preferences do not mean each atomic category is equiprobable.
What are the odds that a majority of people would just happen to converge on exactly one ideal relationship type?
Almost as if there are some … common characteristics, which preclude some i.i.d. dispersion over every conceivable category?
I’m not saying what is or is not the majority “ideal relationship type”. I’m just saying that I don’t think your argument works.
People eating what is usually called food should be a minority because there are so many other things that fit in your mouth: stones, grass, computer components …
For this to be a relevant analogy, we need to have adequate reason to think that monamory, like food, deserves its privileged position out of possibilityspace. There are specific, overwhelmingly powerful reasons to think that stones, grass, and computer component are inadequate sources of human nutrition; but in the absence of such considerations, it would certainly be unreasonable to simply assume that what we’ve always eaten is the best thing we could possibly eat out of some set of options.
My claim isn’t that no possible evidence could ever show that monamory is better than polyamory. My claim is only that in the absence of strong evidence in either direction, we should expect polamory to win, for the same reason we should expect 99 randomly selected stones to have at least one stone that’s shinier than another 1 randomly selected stone. Some positive argument for monamory is needed; whereas no positive argument is needed to privilege polyamory, so long as it permits orders of magnitudes more varieties of human behavior than does traditional monogamy. It’s because no one specific behavior has yet been shown to have a privileged amount of utility that the broader category gets a head start.
Non sequitur.
People eating what is usually called food should be a minority because there are so many other things that fit in your mouth: stones, grass, computer components …
When two people meet, what is called some kind of handshake / traditional greeting should be a minority because there are so many other potential ways of interacting: touching their head, touching their elbow …
Just because one “umbrella term” unpacks into more constituent types does not imply at all that the cumulative probability of a random human belonging to that umbrella term dominates.
Diverse preferences do not mean each atomic category is equiprobable.
Almost as if there are some … common characteristics, which preclude some i.i.d. dispersion over every conceivable category?
I’m not saying what is or is not the majority “ideal relationship type”. I’m just saying that I don’t think your argument works.
For this to be a relevant analogy, we need to have adequate reason to think that monamory, like food, deserves its privileged position out of possibilityspace. There are specific, overwhelmingly powerful reasons to think that stones, grass, and computer component are inadequate sources of human nutrition; but in the absence of such considerations, it would certainly be unreasonable to simply assume that what we’ve always eaten is the best thing we could possibly eat out of some set of options.
My claim isn’t that no possible evidence could ever show that monamory is better than polyamory. My claim is only that in the absence of strong evidence in either direction, we should expect polamory to win, for the same reason we should expect 99 randomly selected stones to have at least one stone that’s shinier than another 1 randomly selected stone. Some positive argument for monamory is needed; whereas no positive argument is needed to privilege polyamory, so long as it permits orders of magnitudes more varieties of human behavior than does traditional monogamy. It’s because no one specific behavior has yet been shown to have a privileged amount of utility that the broader category gets a head start.