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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs
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To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (44431)7/28/2010 6:14:53 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 71588
 
I stand corrected. Your statement only applied to "ALL large trends". Not all trends of any size.

But it does not only apply to demographic trends.

Your exact statement was - "Yet ALL large trends --- (particularly large ones involving large human populations as we were talking about here) --- have fluctuations *within* the data series."

The operative point is is "ALL large trends have fluctuations", adding "particularly...{" doesn't change the point, it just emphasizes the point for a subset of the large point addressed by the statement.

The context of the conversation also doesn't change the point. Yes the context of the conversion was about demographics, but when you start throwing around "all" without qualifiers or limitations (other than "large") the statement applies outside of the context of the immediate conversation. If we where talking about elephants, and I said "all large mammals have a trunk", my statement would be false because "all large mammals" includes whales, and rhinoceroses, and other animals (and to a lesser degree since presumably not every single living elephant has a trunk, some may have lost there's do to injury or infection).

OTOH, its not worth beating this to death, if you meant "all large demographic trends", we can go forward based on that. Establishing the meaning is more important than rehashing mistakes.

Fine you meant "All large demographic trends have fluctuations *within* the data series.". I'm not going to outright say its true. ("All" always makes for such a strong statement, once exception would make it invalid.) But I'm not going to dispute it either. We can go forward based on the thought that its true (or probably true, or mostly true).

And whatever the status of "ALL" is, doesn't matter much since I accept that the actual specific trend in question has all sorts of fluctuations.

But that doesn't mean statements about the trend are statements about fluctuations. The trend is still a distinct thing from fluctuations in the data behind the trend.
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