On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 7:10 PM Aris Merchant <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 7:02 PM Jason Cobb via agora-discussion > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On 3/19/20 11:33 PM, Aris Merchant via agora-business wrote: > > > I was somewhat looking forward to judging a case older than I am too, > > > and I had some ideas on how to resolve it. Still, I suppose I can > > > submit gratuitous arguments, and was yours first. I recuse myself from > > > CFJ 7. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -Aris > > > > > > Aris, are you planning to submit gratuitous arguments? I ask because the > > deadline for judgement is coming up. > > Right, of course I am. I totally didn't forget about the entire set of > cases, one of which I'm responsible for judging. That would never > happen at all. *coughs* > > I'll attempt to have them written in the next 6 hours.
Gratuitous arguments in CFJ 7: This CFJ is, at it's core, remarkably simple. Rule 112 stated that "The state of affairs that constitutes winning may not be altered from achieving n points to any other state of affairs." This prohibition applies to alterations that would change the "the state of affairs that constitutes winning" "from achieving n points to any other state of affairs". I see two ways to read this. One reading says that any change that would create any other method of winning than "achieving n points" is prohibited. Another says that only changes that would both remove "achieving n points" as a winning condition and establish "any other state of affairs" as a winning condition are prohibited. However, the court should not reach this question. Fundamentally, according to its text, Rule 112 prohibits certain changes in Agoran law. It thus cannot be read to apply to anything that happened before it entered into force; only changes that came after it can be affected. However, all indications suggest that the initial ruleset entered into force all at once as a coherent whole. To rule otherwise would be to suggest that some of the initial rules were created before others. This is deeply disturbing. If Rule 101 was created before Rule 102, Rule 102 would have to have been either created by Rule 101 or inserted by some higher power, a power with the authority to insert rule changes after the game had begun without the rules saying so. However, the initial rules themselves provide an answer to this problem. Rule 101 provided explicitly that "The rules in the Initial Set are in effect at the beginning of the first game. The Initial Set consists of rules 101-116 (immutable) and 201-219 (mutable)." This solves the problem. All of the rules of the initial set were already in effect, as of the moment that the game came into existence. No higher power was needed to insert the rules after the fact. I accept that if Rule 112 conflicted with Rule 219, Rule 111 would have overridden Rule 219 and stripped it of legal force. However, a problem could only have happened if Rule 219 had somehow either initiated a change contravening Rule 112 or been created as a result of such a change (in the later case, Rule 219 would presumably just not exist, its creation having been blocked by Rule 112). This did not happen; per Rule 101, all of the rules were in force as of the time the game began. Thus, when the game began and Rule 112 began blocking changes to the state of affairs that constituted winning, any such change had already happened. At the beginning of these arguments I said this case was simple, and for all the verbiage I've put into it, it really is. Once one realizes that all the rules came into effect at the same time, all born seeing the others as peers rather than newcomers, the result follows. CFJ 7 should be judged FALSE. Respectfully submitted, Aris
