On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 9:09 PM Jason Cobb via agora-business <agora-business@agoranomic.org> wrote: > > I CFJ, barring R. Lee: "R. Lee's votes on the referendums on proposals > 8549 and 8552-8555 were clearly specified." > > Caller's arguments: > > On the relevant decisions, R. Lee voted "I vote AGAINST all agoran > decisions that add overall text to the ruleset, and PRESENT on the > rest." This is clearly an attempted conditional vote. The question is > whether it is clearly specified under Rule 2127. > > Per Rule 2127, they are clearly specified if and only if they were > determinate at the end of the voting period, and they are determinate if > the values can be "reasonably determined [...] from information > reasonably available" (the other possibilities clearly do not apply). > > The information that this depends on is certainly "reasonably > available", as it is just the text of the proposals as well as the text > of the rules (assuming we are correct in our understanding of the text > of the rules, which is hopefully the case). This means that this case > depends on whether the vote can be "reasonably determined" from that > information. > > In general, evaluating proposals to determine whether they add or remove > text is arguably not "reasonably determined", as it involves evaluating > potentially arbitrary text. However, real distributions do not contain > proposals with arbitrary text, and the proposals in this specific > distribution are, individually, relatively easy to count characters > added/removed on. Perhaps that's sufficient for this specific case to be > considered "reasonable effort", but that's potentially opening a can of > worms for large, perhaps unreasonable, workloads for the Assessor. >
Gratuitous: I think opening this particular can of worms is a bad idea. It's just too hard to expect the Assessor, or anyone really, to interpret the effects of a proposal. First of all, it would basically require the Assessor to start doing ruleset diffs to resolve proposals, which is potentially a lot of extra work. Secondly, we often have proposals whose effects are incorrectly understood; for instance, due to insufficient power. This would put the Assessor in the position of having to figure out which portions of a proposal would be effective to resolve it. This sort of burden might be reasonable determination for the Rulekeepor, but it isn't reasonable for the Assessor, even if they happen to be the same person at the moment. Furthermore, I'd consider it preferable for *everyone* to be able to determine how a vote resolves with reasonable effort. If it's unreasonable to ask the Assessor to do this, it's even more unreasonable to ask the average player who's just trying to tally the votes on each side of the proposal for their own reference to do it. I'd honestly consider this a misuse of conditionals. The primary goal of conditionals is to account for uncertainty or future changes, not to offload work from the players to the responsible officers. This conditional is too far in that direction. As a final minor note, "overall text" is poorly defined in general. Are we counting words or characters? While this is a decidedly secondary consideration, the vote may have been insufficiently clearly phrased. -Aris
