On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Alex Smith wrote: > To put it another way, when there's debate about the natural-language > meaning of "proposal" (or "document" in the definition of "proposal"), > rule 754(4) is what determines what the word means. It takes the > natural-language definition, except that lower-powered rules SHOULD be > used for guidance. There's clearly quite a lot of debate going on about > what the natural-language term means, and whether it implies > immutability. Why aren't we looking at the scam rule for guidance about > the meaning? (However, countering this argument is that the fact that > the scam rule was added by a scam means it doesn't necessarily reflect > the definitions that Agorans are using, so the guidance may be weak, and > the SHOULD is not a SHALL.)
Er, well, yes... that counterargument is what I've been saying. If we hadn't specifically downgraded lower-powered definitions to SHOULD with the expressed, direct purpose of preventing exactly this sort of ladder scam, you or comex would have convinced me several messages ago. >> The second is whether any (every) document, submitted, unsubmitted, >> real, or conceptual, that outlines changes to the game state, is a >> proposal before it is submitted. While this argument, if accepted >> (I don't accept it) *might* slightly support the idea that every >> distinct body of text is a separate proposal, I suspect it is >> legally irrelevant: a proposal becomes a proposal in a legally >> meaningful Agoran sense once it's published with clear intent. Yes, >> this goes against the standing precedent. > I agree with you on the second point, at least to an extent. Regardless > of whether a bit of text which matches the definition of a proposal is a > proposal or not, it certainly /ought/ not to be! Incidentally, although > the precedent specifically about proposals says that random bits of text > can be proposals "by accident", so to speak, we have contrary precedent > more recently with the monster-is-a-person thing, IIRC; wasn't it ruled > that the Monster wasn't a person merely based on a clause saying what > persons generally were? Probably a similar argument works for proposals. We should get rid of all those bits of language about what something generally is... I think they're just confusing. Also worth noting is that the precedent of CFJ 1586 was written at a time when there were several more explicit ways of manipulating proposals and more ways in the rules themselves of creating them; e.g. there were rules where the promotor "placed a copy" of a proposal in a proposal pool (thus implicitly creating a new proposal), etc. I rather think, CFJs aside, that we might want a round of legislative clarification; perhaps explicitly encoding that an accidental proposal distribution does create a proposal (but is illegal to do knowingly), and getting rid of that general "what a proposal is" language. -Goethe
