On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 11:21 -0800, Kerim Aydin wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, comex wrote:
> > The only way around this is to argue that a proposal also includes its
> > AI and II (which is dubious given a reading of the relevant rules);
>
> No, it's trivial. Think databases. The relation "One text per
> proposal" does not imply "one proposal per text." All you're raising
> is that there's some ambiguity in referring to two proposals in the
> latter case. Various aspects (in particular ID numbers) make
> referring to multiple proposals with the same text easier, but if
> those all break down due to ambiguity, you can always refer to
> "I vote for the proposal submitted with the following text in the
> following message" as a trivial though annoying solution. But
> you're right, text alone is not enough. See my last paragraph
> below.
I agree that there's only one text per proposal.
{{{
A proposal is a document outlining changes to be made to Agora,
including enacting, repealing, or amending rules, or making
other explicit changes to the gamestate.
}}}
It's pretty clear that a proposal can have an AI, II, title, etc, as per
the rules. Text is a feature of a document, just as those other things
are features of documents which happen to be proposals.
>
> You've made various analogies "proposals may be like contracts" or
> "proposals may be like reports". I wonder how you get around the
> English definition we're required to use; e.g "proposals" (Agora)
> are like "proposals" (dictionary):
>
> 1 an act of putting forward or stating something for consideration
> 2 a: something proposed : suggestion
>
> By this definition, a proposal is tied to "something" proposed. The
> only "something" that a person is required to submit for our
> proposals is published, marked block of text. By common definition,
> a different block of text would a different "something" put forward
> and a different proposal. Or are you saying that two different
> texts are somehow the same "suggestion"?
If I remember correctly, B Nomic used to allow players to amend
proposals, before they were voted on. PerlNomic allows players to amend
proposals even /after/ they've been voted on, if they had more abstain
than no votes (which resets the vote count). Certain real-life legal
systems also allow amendments of their equivalents to proposals; it is
common for proposed laws to change several times in both the US and UK
parliaments, for instance, before being adopted or rejected. Whether
common-language suggestions can be modified without retracting or
remaking them is, I suspect, normally irrelevant in conversation; I
expect that altering a suggestion would be treated as an entirely
possible action in real-life, and whether that is just an abbreviation
for making a different similar suggestion is nearly always irrelevant,
confined just to the outer realms of philosophical argument (and nomic,
of course). That makes it not particularly helpful...
>
> Actually, by this definition, if a second person puts forward the
> same text, it *is* the same proposal. There used to be a specific
> clause preventing that:
> The delivery of text identical to another Proposal which was
> Proposed less than three weeks previous does not create a
> new Proposal unless accompanied by a clear and explicit
> indication that the intent was to Propose a duplicate Proposal.
> This is part of the historical record I was thinking of. But I
> wonder if its removal was a mistake? That some of those case of
> the same text were, by definition, the same proposal?
That rule looks to me like it's an attempt to prevent duplicate
proposals being submitted by mistake; an anti-typo rule, so to speak,
rather than anything inherent in the nature of proposals. (Remember all
the accidental double-distributions from the PNP? Presumably, something
similar happened on a whole-Agora scale back then.)
Actually, the PNP double-distributions are interesting, as I think we've
ruled that they create two different proposals. Which one is the
originally proposed one, I wonder?
>
> A way out of this is to say that text alone is not enough.
> "Text submitted by a certain person in a certain message" is
> needed to identify a proposal (R106). (evidence: what happens
> when a copy/paste error is made by the distributor? A new text
> therefore a new proposal). On the other hand, AI, etc do
> not make a new proposal.
I'd say a copy/paste error creates a new proposal because it could have
been created. Clearly, typos shouldn't be capable of editing the text of
a proposal! (Also, see CFJ 1669. That CFJ was back when attributes of
proposals needed to have particular values for them to be distributed.)
The important thing here is that the Promotor is assigning an ID number
to the proposal, and so has to identify it by some means other than
number. In this case, the text is used to identify the proposal. If the
text is incorrect, therefore, the proposal isn't identified.
However, given that the Promotor is entirely capable of creating a
proposal on eir own accord, I expected that such a proposal would count
as submitted by the Promotor if submitted. (See, however, CFJ 1780,
which seems inconsistent with both of our views; I wonder what the
result would be if it were made again nowadays?)
Now, suppose the /Assessor/ makes a typo in the text of a proposal
Assessing a proposal. Does that cause the assessment to be ineffective?
No, because the the text of the proposal need not be published during
the assessment of the proposal. The proposal is now being identified by
ID number, and there can only be one proposal with any particular ID
number (rule 2161). It's possible to amend the text of a proposal (a
document), and the ID number continues to refer to the proposal, just as
a rule (an instrument whose content takes the form of text) can be
amended and keep the same ID number, and a contract (a binding
agreement) can be amended and still keep the same ID number. (I wonder:
if proposals didn't have ID numbers and had to be identified by their
text during assessment, and the Assessor made a typo that fundamentally
changed the meaning during assessment, would it adopt that proposal with
a different text? Would it adopt a different, newly created, proposal
with a different text?)
--
ais523
