Falsifian, could you forward the below message to the PF with an "if I have not already delivered these judgements, I do so"? I think that takes care of any Troubles issues for assigned CFJs (now to deal with the unassigned ones...)
-G. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: James Cook <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 9:52 PM Subject: BUS: Judgement of CFJs 3780 and 3782 To: Agora Business <[email protected]> Below are my judgements of CFJs 3780 and 3782, as well as my answer to what CFJ 3780 was probably intended to ask. CFJ 3780: "there exists a CFJ, created by twg in November 2019, with the text “I am a candidate for prime minister.”" CFJ 3782: "There is a proposal in the proposal pool with the title "Swimming"." Contents: 1. Judgement of CFJ 3782 2. Judgement of CFJ 3780 3. Did twg create a CFJ? 4. Gratuitous arguments 4.1. On CFJ 3780 4.2. On CFJ 3782 4.3. On both CFJs 1. Judgement of CFJ 3782 ======================== On December 2, G. published the following: > I submit the following Proposal, "Swimming", AI=1: > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > I withdraw my proposal "Swimming" from the Proposal Pool. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > I CFJ: > There is a proposal in the proposal pool with the title "Swimming". The key question here is whether the text "I withdraw my proposal "Swimming" from the Proposal Pool." had the effect of withdrawing the proposal. Publishing text containing an announcement does not always entail making that announcement. Rule 478 says: > Where the rules define an action that a person CAN perform "by > announcement", that person performs that action by unambiguously and > clearly specifying the action and announcing that e performs it. Even if G.'s message contained an announcement that G. withdrew eir proposal, it was certainly not an unambiguous one. Therefore, G. did not withdraw the proposal in the quoted message. (Note: in a discussion htread, I suggested that the rule text could be parsed as applying "unambiguously and clearly" only to "specifying the action". Thinking about it more, though, it seems unlikely to me that the text was intended that way, since I think that text was intended to require by-announcement actions to be clear and unambiguous as a whole.) Some other examples where publishing the text of an announcement doesn't constitute announcing it: * Quoting text in email replies. We do this all the time; nobody thinks we're repeating those actions by doing so. * Judges quoting text as evidence. * Publishing hypothetical examples. I wasn't easily able to find examples of this (the judge's arguments in CFJ 3751 contain hypothetical message text, but in that case the point is that it wouldn't work), but I'd be surprised if there aren't any public messages containing hypotheticals that nobody thought actually had any effect. I judge CFJ 3782 TRUE. Q1. Did twg create a CFJ when e wrote 'Election speech: "CFJ: I am a candidate for Prime Minister."'? 2. Judgement of CFJ 3780 ======================== In November, twg said: > Election speech: "CFJ: I am a candidate for Prime Minister." It is not obvious whether twg created a CFJ in this message. However, my judgement does not rely on answering that. As G. pointed out in a gratuitous argument, the text in CFJ 3780 uses a different capitalization. I find that even if twg did create a CFJ, it did not have the text > "I am a candidate for prime minister" since the capitalization is different. Does the difference in capitalization really make the text different? The rules don't explicitly address this question, but game custom and common sense tell us that it does: * The rules use capitalization in different ways; for example, the words CAN, MUST, SHOULD, etc covered by the Mother, May I rule tend to be in all upper-case, some words tend to be capitalized, etc. * Rules 2599 and 2221 explicitly mention capitalization, and a proposal from September (8236, "Definition de-capitalization") consists mostly of capitalization changes. If differently-capitalized text were the same, these rules and proposals would be about non-existent differences, which would be strange. Finally, could twg have created such a CFJ in another message? I have no memory of this, and a quick email search shows no other messages from twg containing the word "candidate", so this is very unlikely, considering the "unambiguously and clearly" requirement in Rule 478. I judge CFJ 3780 FALSE. 3. Did twg create a CFJ? ======================== Ignoring the capitalization issue, it is interesting to consider whether twg created a CFJ in their message at all. (For example, it affects whether Jason Cobb earned 5 coins by judging the alleged CFJ.) This has some similarity to CFJ 3782, in that the text calling the CFJ was set aside in a way that could be construed to indicate that it's a mere mention of the text, rather than an announcement with that text as its content. In this case, the text was in quotes, and in the case of CFJ 3782, it was clearly marked as the text of a proposal. (Note: the text of Rule 478 changed between CFJs 3780 and 3782 being called, but the difference is not relevant to these arguments.) There is an important difference here: twg presented the text as eir own speech. The obvious reading of 'Election speech: "X"' is that one is announcing X, and also noting that it is one's election speech. For example, if I wrote 'Election speech: "I promise to grant Coins to all players."', it would be absurd for me to later claim I never made that promise. I see no reason why wrapping an announcement in an election speech should rob it of its effect. For this reason, I see no ambiguity in twg's announcement, so e did in fact create a CFJ. Thanks to G. for leading me to this point of view (see gratuitous arguments below). I find that twg did create a CFJ in eir message, and so CFJ 3779 exists. (This does not assign a judgement to a CFJ, since no CFJ asks this question.) 4. Gratuitous arguments ======================= 4.1. On CFJ 3780 ---------------- 2019-11-08, by G. in eir capacity as Arbitor: > A note: past habits are to assign the alleged CFJ, then if it turns > out it wasn't a CFJ, it still stays in the record with that ID number > but with an added note "this didn't turn out to be an actual CFJ due > to [other CFJ]". > > Also, IIRC, the argument "it must have been a CFJ, because the Arbitor > assigned it" has been tried and was not found to be logically sound... > > The alleged CFJ was numbered 3779: > https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/#3779 2019-11-08, by G.: > Gratuitous: Since the statement of CFJ 3780 asks if the specific-quoted > text string is a CFJ, it's worth noting (I double-checked) that twg's > alleged CFJ 3779 call capitalized Prime Minister, while Gaelan's 3780 > statement did not. I don't know if that's a substantive difference in this > context. 4.2. On CFJ 3782 ---------------- 2019-11-02, by G.: > CFJ 3780 revolves around this text: > > Election speech: "CFJ: I am a candidate for Prime Minister." > > The CFJ question was whether a text published in quotes or delimiters > for one stated purpose (an "election speech") would succeed in another > stated purpose (calling a CFJ). > > At first I thought this was pretty trivial because we've allowed this > before. We've considered it "successful" when a person buried an Apathy > intent inside an Officer's report for example (before the "unobfuscated" > standard was added for intents), and at least once in my memory I put some > actions in text labeled as a "formal apology" and no one questioned that > it served both as the apology and as successfully performing the contained > actions. > > But then I thought of the Proposal situation, where the usual intent in > submitting text is for the text to take effect at a later date - but > nothing in the rules says that explicitly really. And maybe the proposal > example demonstrates the danger of allowing double-acting text like this. 4.3. On both CFJs ----------------- 2019-12-11, a conversation: Falsifian: > Here are preliminary thoughts on CFJs 3780 and 3782. Comments welcome, > especially precedent. > > R478 says performing a by-announcement action requires "unambiguously > and clearly specifying the action and announcing that e performs it". > > In both cases, the player's message was ambiguous about whether e was > actually performing the action. Intentionally ambiguous in the case of > CFJ 3782, and maybe in the case of 3780. > > If we parse the rule text as "unambiguously and clearly (specifying > the action and announcing that e performs it)", then I don't think > this counts as "unambiguous" so it didn't work. If we parse it as > "(unambiguously and clearly specifying the action) and announcing that > e performs it", it's less clear. Judging that the actions did not take > place is at least somewhat consistent with both ways of parsing, but > judging that the actions did take place isn't. So I would judge 3780 > FALSE and 3782 TRUE (i.e. the actions did not happen). > > I didn't spend much time looking for related cases, but a couple that > I found through the FLR annotations: > > * CFJs 2179 and 2238 is about whether parameters of an action (sender > in the case of 2179) must be unambiguous. They don't seem directly > applicable. > > * CFJ 3409 (about an action taken in a subject line) laid out some > possible tests of effectiveness. I think these cases both fail the "Is > there a real doubt as to what is intended?" test. G.: > I wholly agree for 3782 - the encapsulation of the action within a > clearly-delimited proposal leaves it entirely in doubt whether > execution of the action is intended. For 3780, though, the presence > of the quotes is not encapsulating an official type of document like a > proposal. I'd probably think through the following logic: > > 1. Saying 'CFJ: [statement]' is long-standing acceptable shorthand > for 'I call a CFJ on [Statement].' In terms of precedent, there's a > CFJ (which I'll have to look up later) that "Proposal: [text]" > suitably implies "I submit a Proposal with the following text" and > this seems similar. > > 2. So with that substitution, if you said 'As my campaign speech, I > call a CFJ with the statement "I am a candidate".' I don't think > anyone would have an issue with it. > > 3. The quoting in the actual statement seems close enough to #2 to > work. (this is the "IMO" part, you might disagree here). Falsifian: > I agree that the quoting is close to #2, but I think there's ambiguity > in the quoted version that's not in #2. It looked intentionally > ambiguous to me, maybe because twg included it in the same message as > the ambiguous "And my axe!" statement the alleged CFJ was about. G.: > Fair enough! I was on the fence myself. -- - Falsifian
