On 08/07/2013 9:21 PM, Kerim Aydin wrote:
And when you think about it, no Nomic compels its own rule following. All Nomics are implicitly mediated by something, and this is not subject to amendment. Usually this is by its players directly, but there are other possibilities.But they *are* subject to amendment in a true nomic. Sure, some of these things start out as a meta-agreement ("we're all playing in English, or Perl, or via email") but if a rule changes, any of these initial meta-agreements could be changed. In Agora (true nomic), we could change the way the mailing list works, or whether it's conducted over email at all. But for a party of Agora, as currently defined by Agora, an outside rules body (Agora) governs these things, they can't be set arbitrarily in the party constitution itself. Honestly, the Claustronomic case is worth a read, since it's an official set of Agoran precedents on the matter (let me know if the CFJs aren't clear, and I'll try to summarize - actually at the time I had an opinion similar to yours, but the CFJ didn't go my way). -G.
I had a look. The situation looks to me like this: the question was whether Agora would recognise it as a Contest, and when it broke a certain Agoran rule, it ceased to be a Contest. There wasn't a "divergent" version of Claustronomic that still existed in Agora, which is how your ruling sort of made it sound. The verdict was that Claustronomic ceased to exist (as a Contest, i.e., as far as Agora was concerned).
In fact Claustronomic's rule changes were not being made through Agora, but in the usual way. So I don't find it a very good precedent.
PerlNomic seems like a more pertinent precedent. Now, I don't know Perl. But presumably there's no way to say "interpret this in English" in Perl. PerlNomic could not become a regular nomic by the processes it defines. There's also a CFJ (2168) about whether stuff on some guy's hard drive was a Nomic, and it was judged true (thank you again woggle). Same idea.
Generally I don't think it's true the "meta-agreement" is subject to amendment by even "true" nomic. There are still limits. What if we made Agora purport to be played by the NZ All Blacks?
A less silly example is, that, even without my consent, you could legally repeal the rule saying I can stop playing. But it'd still be a "meta-rule", and I can still stop playing.
-Dan
