I think "analytical argument" is the phrase I was looking for.
In Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (a pollution dystopia), someone figures out that there isn't enough clean land to produce the amount of clean food they're selling. At that point, you don't have to check the details of their production methods (assuming that hydroponics aren't feasible), though you still might want to.
Are there comparable terms for other sorts of arguments?
We're now at the point in the sequences when the AI-FOOM Debate took place between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson. Do people want me to include them in the sequence rerun posts, and if so, how? Should I make one post a day? Should I post all of the posts that were made in one day back in 2008, so that we would possibly get one Yudkowsky and one Hanson post in a single day of reruns? If I'm rerunning two posts a day, should I make one rerun post or two? When rerunning a Hanson post, how should the standard rerun template be adjusted?
I titled this as a poll, but that's not really what I want to do, since I'm not sure I have come up with all of the relevant options. I've got my own thoughts on all of the questions I just asked, but I'm going to hold off on mentioning them, in the interests of sparking discussion. Whatever I do, I will need to decide fairly quickly (as in, next three days at the latest).
I'm sorry that this is short term; I've been busy and wasn't really looking that far ahead.
How should I do this?