On Tue, 2025-04-15 at 00:46 +0100, Katherina Walshe-Grey via agora-official wrote: > LegallyBearded wrote: > > I CFJ each of the following four statements: > > > > 1. "Proposals created since the enactment of this rule" is not a valid > > entity type for the purpose of creating a switch by R2162. > > > > 2. If a lower-powered rule than R2162 (for example but not limited to > > R2606) attempts to create a switch on entities of a type, but attempts > > to attach some extra condition that will always be met (and is > > impossible not to meet) for entities of that type, then the rule has > > validly constructed that switch under R2162. > > > > 3. If a lower-powered rule than R2162 (for example but not limited to > > R2606) attempts to create a switch on entities of a type, but attempts > > to attach some extra condition, the rule is interpreted as though the > > extra condition was not included. > > > > 4. Some proposals have a Class switch > > These are CFJs 4108 through 4111, respectively. I assign them all (in > order, if relevant) to ais523.
These CFJs are basically about which sets of entities can be described as being a "type of entity". "Type" has a lot of meanings (including one in computer science), but I think the relevant meaning here is the one listed first in Wiktionary: "A grouping based on shared characteristics". Other dictionaries I checked are broadly consistent with this, e.g. the Cambridge English Dictionary gives the definition "a particular group of people or things that share similar characteristics and form a smaller division of a larger set". The first thing to note is that it's possible for one type of entity to be a subset of another type of entity. Persons and players are both, I think, pretty clearly types of entity; but the set of players is a subset of the set of persons. So just because the rules define proposals as a type of entity (in fact, they're the only set of entities that are explicitly defined in the rule as a "type of entity"), that doesn't necessarily prevent some subset of proposals from also being a type of entity. The relevant requirement for a set of entities to be a type of entity generally seems to be the requirement to have some shared characteristic that lets you know whether an entity is of that type or not. "Proposals created since the enactment of rule 2606" seems to meet this condition: perhaps it wouldn't if you picked an arbitrary rule, but the rule in question is designed to divide proposals created after it into two classes (Ordinary and Democratic), and thus there's a reasonable shared characteristic (having been divided into Ordinary and Democratic classes, as opposed to existing in an era before proposal classes). As such, I judge CFJ 4108 FALSE and CFJ 4111 TRUE. The main question behind CFJ 4109 can be resolved by noting that attempting to restrict a set of entities by choosing only those entities that meet a condition that is always met is a trivial operation that actually doesn't change the set at all. So if it referred to a type of entities without the condition, it does so even without it. However, CFJ 4109 is missing some conditions: it assumes that not specifying a type of entity is the only reason why switch creation could fail, but there is another possible reason (the rule might not specify any possible values for the switch). As such, I judge CFJ 4109 DISMISS – there is insufficient information in the provided hypothetical to determine what would happen in that hypothetical. I judge CFJ 4110 FALSE: although there is again insufficient information in the hypothetical, I can't see any rules-based reason why a failed attempt to create a switch would be resolved like that. It is hard to see how a rule would restrict a type of entities to a subset that is *not* based on a shared characteristic, because the restriction has to be expressed somehow. If a rule managed it somehow, then it would simply end up creating a swtich-like object which is not (according to rule 2162) a switch. (The reasoning here is based on a rule 217 tiebreak based on game custom and best interests of the game – if a high-powered rule says that something isn't a switch, then a low-powered rule can't make it a switch, but we still have to interpret "switch" in the rule and it has commonly been used for more general switch-like objects in Agora's history. Under older versions of the Switches rule, contracts were not given permission to create switches, but it was very common for contracts to create switch-like objects that were not technically switches. The main difference it would make is that switches self- ratify, whereas switch-like objects in general typically don't.) -- ais523
