Having been entered into Moot, I hereby initiate the Agoran Decision to
determine public confidence in R. Lee's judgement of CFJ 3922.
For this decision, the vote collector is the Arbitor, the voting method
is first-past-the-post, and the valid options and their consequences
are listed below. (PRESENT is also a valid vote, as are conditional
votes)
* AFFIRM - uphold R. Lee's judgement as final
* REMAND - reopen the case for reconsideration by R. Lee
* REMIT - reopen the case, recusing and barring R. Lee
The quorum for this decision is 6. Please note that a result of FAILED
QUORUM is treated identically to AFFIRM.
CFJ 3922 and the judgement in question are quoted below for
convenience, along with the intent to enter it into Moot.
On 2021-08-03 15:55, Aspen via agora-business wrote:
On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 9:31 AM D. Wet via agora-business
<agora-business@agoranomic.org> wrote:
I propose to create a new Rule in the Agoran commmunity to be adopted
according to the current rule adoption procedure. The Rule is:
Onboarding of Newly Activated Players
1. Newly Activated Players MUST be requested to take their first
Action
in a timely fashion after being switched to Active.
2. Players that are Active less than one month MUST actively be
educated
when their Action is IMPOSSIBLE within the current Ruleset.
3. The education in referred to in 2. MUST contain references to N
specific Rules numbers as to why their Action is ILLEGAL within the
current Ruleset. N is at least 1 and at most 3 and NEED NOT to lead
to a
POSSIBLE Action when taken into account during the next try to act.
I'm afraid it's a bit unclear whether this worked. Submitting
proposals is governed by Rule 2350. There's specific information that
needs to be specified when you create a proposal. A lot of it is
optional, but the one thing that's absolutely essential is the text.
Here, it's unclear where the text of the proposal begins and ends.
I CFJ "D. Wet has created a proposal in the last 7 days."
-Aspen
On 2021-08-25 11:37, Sarah S. via agora-business wrote:
D. Wet attempted to create a proposal in an unorthodox manner. Eir
message
is quoted below.
[snip]
The question is whether this message is a proposal. A proposal CAN be
created by announcement, specifying its text (a proposal is a body of
text). Per rule 2350 other attributes may be specified as well, but
these
are irrelevant here.
Usually text would be specified with quotation marks, brackets or the
like.
Nonetheless, the words that are meant to be proposal text are clear to
me
here. The message begins "I propose to", which are action words that
effectuate the requirement to announce. The rest of it is text that is
clearly meant to be proposal text ('create a new rule...') as they
would
only have function inside a proposal. The process of 'specifying'
proposal
text just needs to clearly distinguish text that's inside the proposal
from
text that's outside of it. In this case the words "I propose to" are
clearly separated from the rest of the message's text not by
formatting or
punctuation but by the purpose they serve. These words serve the
functional
purpose of announcing the proposal while the other text only makes
sense as
proposal text (this is clear to any reasonable Agoran reader).
'Specify' and 'clearly specify' are synonyms, as a specification will
make
clear exactly what text is meant to be proposal text. If this is
clear,
then obviously text is both specified and clearly specified.
I judge CFJ 3922 TRUE
--
R. Lee
On 2021-08-28 17:11, Aspen via agora-business wrote:
I intend, with 2 support, to enter this judgement into moot.
At this point, y'all are probably getting the feeling that I really
don't want this to be a proposal. That's sort of true. My personal
opinion is that this proposal didn't work, because to me the creation
of the proposal seemed ambiguous. However, I do have a more specific
reason for discontentment with this judgement.
I believe that the proposed reading fails to make sense of the text.
The first sentence of the message reads "I propose to create a new
Rule in the Agoran commmunity to be adopted according to the current
rule adoption procedure." There is no sign in the punctuation of that
sentence that it should be split in two, with one part introducing a
proposal and the other part comprising the proposal's text. In fact,
to make this work, the reading actually has to break apart an
infinitive, leaving a dangling "to" that isn't really doing anything.
It just doesn't make syntactic sense. I realize that it does make
semantic sense, but I don't think we should ignore the clear
formatting of a message just because doing so produces a desired
result.
I'd like to pause here to note how extraordinary this interpretation
is. When I looked at this message, it did not even occur to me that
this interpretation was possible, despite the fact that I spent some
time thinking over possible interpretations. Even now, the
interpretation doesn't seem plausible to me.
However, the burden here is actually quite high. To quote the judge,
"a specification will make clear exactly what text is meant to be
proposal text". In other words, this being a plausible interpretation
isn't good enough. It has to be clear that the interpretation is
correct. Given how far this reading goes against the syntactic clues
provided, I don't see how it could possibly be clear to the mythical
reasonable Agoran that this reading is the correct one.
-Aspen
P.S.: I'll also note, tangentially, that I'm not even sure the given
interpretation would accomplish what the author intended. When an
author submits a proposal, e specifies the text, not the intended
result. It seems unlikely to me that the author intended to create a
proposal with this text. Firstly, if e had, that's not the way e would
have done the syntax, per my earlier argument. Then there's the
phrasing e used. E said "I propose to create a new Rule in the Agoran
community to be adopted according to the current rule adoption
procedure". This strongly implies that e believed that we were using
Suber nomic's rule adoption procedure, where one can submit an
individual rule to be coted on. In this case, e would not have
expected to create a proposal, but merely to submit a rule for
adoption. In any case, I don't want this to distract from my main
argument, hence this postscript.
