Re: DIS: Re: BUS: CFJs 3784, 3785, and 3785.5 judged FALSE

[Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion]

On 1/18/2020 4:13 PM, omd via agora-discussion wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 2:48 PM Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion
> <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
>> So this judgement actually extends the concept of physical reality quite a
>> bit, by saying "even though no rule outright forbids this, we're still
>> saying it's R106-prohibited due to our (unwritten) precedents about assets."
>> I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think it's important enough that it should
>> be brought into the judgement directly.
> 
> I'd say it's not prohibited so much as logically meaningless.  The
> rules don't explicitly define "transfer", but by the ordinary language
> meaning, if you transfer 5 coins from yourself to A, you must end up
> with 5 fewer coins.  Creating 5 coins out of thin air in A's account
> is logically possible, but it's not a "transfer", so it's simply not
> what the proposal would be requesting.

I wholly agree with the meaninglessness of a transfer without source in
common language and our past assumptions, but I'm not sure that nonsense, on
its own, gets us out it.

If a Player says for a by-announcement action "If [paradoxical condition] I
do X" then we just throw it out.  But the reason we throw it out (in
precedent) is because it doesn't meet the "unambiguously and clearly
specifying the action" part of R478.

For a proposal, except for Rule Changes, there's no standards in R106, it
just states right out that it "applies the changes" (though there's a little
wiggle room in "specify").  In fact, if a Proposal said "If [paradoxical
condition] then X", I'm pretty sure the custom/ precedent (my memory is
there's a precedent, but I'm not sure) is that we are forced to accept it,
and mark X as Indeterminate and follow whatever game consequences there are
for an indeterminate X.

> It may as well ask for 2 + 2 = 5.

If a Proposal said "for the purposes of the below calculations, we're taking
2+2=5", followed by some arithmetic to calculate coin balances, I'm not at
all sure we wouldn't attempt to use that as an axiom/legal fiction for some
kind of modified arithmetic and see where that led us.  Is it much different
than saying "let's assume that these messages that weren't delivered
actually were delivered" or other legal fictions that we set up?  In the
recent attempts to draft the message ratification proposals, it was brought
up in our discussions that if it ratified a paradox, we might be stuck with it.

To be clear:  I'm not saying that's the road we have to take, but this
judgement takes for granted that proposals can't get around "rule-defined
reality" when (e.g. in retroactively validating messages) we use proposals
like that all the time.  A clarification in how we deal with that sort of
thing, specific to R106, is worth making IMO.

-G.