On Sun, 2 Feb 2020 at 00:41, omd via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > On Sat, Feb 1, 2020 at 8:17 AM James Cook via agora-discussion > <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > > This is a counter-proto to Alexis's "Ratification by Legal Fiction", in > > the sense that I think it also fixes the problem of ratification > > failing due to minimal gamestate changes being ambiguous. It is a more > > radical change and makes the use of ratification less concise, but in > > my opinion the reward is that it greatly increases simplicity and > > certainty in what the effect of ratification actually is. > > Proto-proto: Overturn CFJ 3337 > > [Treat the scope of ratification the way I always assumed it should be > treated... including when I wrote the current wording of Rule 1551, > back in 2010. (Previously, Rule 1551 had stated that "the gamestate > is minimally modified so that the ratified document was completely > true and accurate at the time it was published; I added the "what it > would be" clause.) > > I believe this is orthogonal to your counter-proto; it could go > together with it, or it could serve as a basis for a more conservative > fix. For what it's worth, if you *don't* want these semantics, I > think you should have Rule 1551 say so more explicitly; in particular, > you should clarify the meaning of "what it would be".] > > Create a new Power-3 Rule, titled "Gamestate": > > The gamestate of Agora consists of the Rules, together with all > other entities and properties defined by the Rules. It does not > include a mutable record of its own history: when the Rules > refer to past game states or events, they refer to the actual > past. Nor does it include a list of 'legal fictions', or false > statements about external reality to be treated as true for game > purposes. A rule may state or imply that 'X is treated as if it > were Y', but this is considered an attempt to redefine X, > subject to the usual standards for definitions.
I would like to exclude the past from the gamestate. Having it there is unintuitive to me, and I was surprised to learn about it. On the other hand, we have to be careful. For example, Rule 2034 describes ratifying that an Agoran decision "had the number of voters indicated". Would that still work after this change? We could probably fix it by a careful re-wording of the quorum rules, but there are probably lots of other examples like this. Also, in my thesis [0], I listed a few examples where having the past in the gamestate allow ratification events to reduce uncertainty. Copied here: * Rule 2555: "If a player has neither gained blots nor expunged any blots from emself in the current Agoran week, e CAN expunge 1 blot from emself by announcement." * Rule 2496: Whether a player can earn a reward depends on whether they have fulfilled the condition in the past 7 days, and also on whether e has already claimed that reward. [This is out of date, but there's a similar issue in the new version.] * Many rules allow or require a player to take an action "in a timely fashion" after a past event. It's not the end of the world if ratification no longer directly helps us in those cases. E.g. even if it's unclear whether I should have earned a reward, a self-ratifying Treasuror report will still resolve the ambiguity. I think my personal dislike of past-in-gamestate would probably be enough for me to vote for getting rid of it, but only after someone takes a careful look through the rules. And of course it would be nice to hear from others, e.g. I think Aris said e likes having the past in the gamestate. - Falsifian [0] https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-business/2019-June/040456.html
