On Sun, 2021-01-31 at 21:17 +0000, Falsifian via agora-discussion wrote: > There are probably problems with the proto I haven't thought of, so > it might be more dangerous to pass this without careful scrutiny than > to just leave things as they are. I wonder if it would make sense to > leave in the old mechanism for a while and add the new mechanism as > an alternative.
At present, if we unperson everyone, AIAN will prevent the unpersonning proposal passing. With a change like this, AIAN would no longer directly block a rule change that unpersons everyone, and it might be hard to recover. This would happen even if the two systems existed in parallel. I also note that if there are ever no players, it becomes possible to send a public message by broadcasting it to no people, making the gamestate incredibly unclear because anyone could take private public actions. At present, AIAN platonically prevents any deregistrations-of-everyone (because it requires a "combination of actions by players" to be able to pass proposals, which isn't possible if there are no players). Perhaps that would do with being made more explicit, but I think it makes more sense to rely on AIAN keeping our playerlist intact than it does to try to create a mechanism for recovery – there are just too many assumptions that there will be players around to object to potenitally damaging actions (and of course, if nobody is a player, nobody can object to an RWO, so the first-to-fix could well try to gain a dictatorship). A bit of Agoran history, related to all this: the "Woobleverse theory", a theory by Wooble, not subscribed to by the playerlist at large, that there had for many years been no public fora, a state that the rules don't appear to rule out. E concluded that due to this, most registrations had failed, and in fact IIRC e decided that e was the only player and thus could send secret public messages at will, without telling anyone. We resolved the issue by taking actions that would merge the Woobleverse gamestate in with the general consensus gamestate, just in case. Perhaps we should have an AIAN-like requirement that there are always at least *two* players? -- ais523
