El 16/02/2022 a las 03:05, ais523 via agora-discussion escribió:
The thesis that was submitted basically has two parts. One is a history of a particular round of Infinite Nomic, which contains a huge amount of detail. The other is a set of conclusions, which are more perfunctory. This combination strikes me as being very awkward for a thesis, because it makes it harder to see how the conclusions are supported.
This reading is pretty accurate. I thought I mentioned somewhere -- but I may not have -- that the historical essay portion was originally the purpose behind writing the document. I wanted to create a time capsule for the Infinite Nomic community. Round 9 was a particularly memorable time for a lot of us and I wanted to make sure no one lost that memory.
It was not until about halfway through the first drafts that I thought about submitting this as a thesis. The document being probably several thousand words of narrative at that point, I figured it probably merited a degree based simply on how much effort had gone into the project. When I brought the question on Discord the Herald and others were quick to inform me that a historical essay would probably not merit any non-Artistic degree and that if I intended for it to go through scholarly channels it had to have some applicability to Nomic as a whole and included some context useful for Agorans. It's for this reason the analysis section and introduction to Infinite Nomic exists at all: I had to make the history applicable to a wider audience.
This is not to say that I saw this as an easy opportunity to get a cheap degree -- I fully intended to do all I could to actually earn the title by providing genuine insight with my analysis section. Now, that section is clearly very far from comprehensive and could probably stand some additions, but I wasn't sure which other broad topics to touch on with analysis. I assumed that's what peer reviews are for, right?
I think the thesis that this work "wants" to be is as some pieces of game design advice for nomics, illustrated using incidents that arose when the advice wasn't followed. (For example, "it's common for there to be scams based on players deregistering and immediately reregistering, so you need to either pay attention to these or to limit how often players can do it", or "it's helpful to ensure that any hypothetical scam that could be used to break the game can also be used to win the game, encouraging scammers to pick the less destructive option".)
This is certainly the kind of discussion I wanted to bring with my analysis, though perhaps I did not communicate it so directly. I suppose I was aiming more for an encyclopedia of nomic design issues and what has/could have been done to solve them rather than a guidebook for aspiring nomic gamerunners.
Given that all the examples are drawn from a specific round of Infinite Nomic, it's thus a lot less comprehensive than it could be.
This would be another great idea for a thesis, but it arguably does not fit within the scope of this one which, again, originally sprung up from a historical essay focused on one particular round.
In short, I think what's currently written is a long historical document that's been kind-of shoehorned into being a thesis, and although it serves its purpose as a history well, there's still a lot of scope to make it more fitting for the purpose of being a thesis. Despite there being lots of room for improvement, it might nonetheless be good enough as it is, though. I'd be onboard with either giving this a lesser degree, or reworking it to be more analysis heavy and less fact-heavy in order to make it worthy of a higher degree.
Again, I do intend to put in all the necessary work to make this thesis merit the patent title it is to be awarded. Having read your criticisms I find myself agreeing that what I have now isn't really fit for that. At the same time, the way you propose I effect changes to make this happen would go against some of the designs I originally had in writing the document, perhaps requiring a significant rewrite to make it accomplish this. I trust you understand my hesitance to do that.
-- Trigon ¸¸.•*¨*• Play AGORA QUEST <https://agoranomic.org/AgoraQuest> <https://agoranomic.org/AgoraQuest> <https://agoranomic.org/AgoraQuest> I’m always happy to become a party to contracts. I LOVE SPAGHETTI transfer Jason one coin nch was here I hereby don't... trust... the dragon... don't... trust... the dragon... Do not Construe Jason's message with subject TRIGON as extending this
