DIS: Re: BUS: Brief for Moot on CFJ 3429
On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 5:41 PM, omd c.ome...@gmail.com wrote: While scamming, my interpretation was something along the lines of: an entity pertains to the Province of Agora if the Rules directly, statically associate the two, or if some *inherent* Rules-defined property of the entity makes it relevant. (This also provides a pretty strong distinction between the PoA rules and any random rule, to respond to G..)
DIS: Re: BUS: Brief for Moot on CFJ 3429
On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 5:59 PM, Alex Smith ais...@bham.ac.uk wrote: I dislike this always taking effect terminology. I'd word it as rules are capable of having ongoing effects. Taking effect sounds like they're actively doing something at every moment. It's from Rule 2141: A rule is a type of instrument with the capacity to govern the game generally, and is always taking effect.
Re: DIS: Re: BUS: Brief for Moot on CFJ 3429
On Wed, 2014-10-22 at 20:02 -0400, omd wrote: It's from Rule 2141: A rule is a type of instrument with the capacity to govern the game generally, and is always taking effect. Oh right. I remember disliking that wording even when it was added, but I got outvoted. Just out of interest, was it designed as a tie-in to a scam (it looks like it could have been)? Or an attempt to improve the rules generally? Because it doesn't make any sense. -- ais523
Re: DIS: Re: BUS: Brief for Moot on CFJ 3429
On Oct 22, 2014 8:09 PM, Alex Smith ais...@bham.ac.uk wrote: On Wed, 2014-10-22 at 20:02 -0400, omd wrote: It's from Rule 2141: A rule is a type of instrument with the capacity to govern the game generally, and is always taking effect. Oh right. I remember disliking that wording even when it was added, but I got outvoted. Just out of interest, was it designed as a tie-in to a scam (it looks like it could have been)? Or an attempt to improve the rules generally? Because it doesn't make any sense. -- ais523 It was to ensure rules can effect (pun intended) rule changes. -scshunt
DIS: Re: BUS: Brief for Moot on CFJ 3429
On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Eritivus eriti...@gmail.com wrote: I claim that, assuming the reader knows that pertaining to can mean belonging to, the text is quite clear. Pertaining to is obviously used as a synonym for contained in, inside and belonging to, and as the effect of add to (i.e. adding an entity to the PoA is to cause it to pertain to the PoA). At worst, the text is poorly worded, being susceptible to the confusion we have witnessed due to using a chiefly legal and relatively obscure sense. I have to disagree with this on a few parts. 1) No one mentioned that interpretation until you did, so this leads me to believe that interpretation is not the most natural one, and makes me think most people weren't aware of it (I certainly wasn't). 2) Knowing that definition by itself does not disambiguate the statement; it must be a sense that the players are likely to actually interpret it as. Let's say an imaginary rule states All players must publish one spritual document. A player publishes a document about eir beliefs, but its validity is contested for some reason X. We discuss this for a week. Suddenly a player notes that it never was valid, because writing their document was not directly influenced by the Holy Spirit. This has nothing at all to do with X. It seems clear to me that this interpretation, which is valid modern-day Christian jargon, is not a reasonable one. 3) If there is any preference in the current rules for either legalistic or ordinary-language meanings, it's for ordinary-language meanings because Mother, May I? (Rule 2152) seeks to provide guidance in determining the ordinary-language meaning of a term when a rule includes a term otherwise.
Re: DIS: Re: BUS: Brief for Moot on CFJ 3429
On Thu, 2014-10-23 at 01:27 +, Nich Del Evans wrote: 1) No one mentioned that interpretation until you did, so this leads me to believe that interpretation is not the most natural one, and makes me think most people weren't aware of it (I certainly wasn't). I argued in the Brief that, except for omd, players reading the text before the scam implicitly had this interpretation in mind. I find the interpretation natural for the same reasons we had that interpretation in the first place. Discovering the belonging to sense only made the original interpretation seem permissible given the text (where omd's scam had made it seem impermissible). Let's say an imaginary rule states All players must publish one spritual document. A player publishes a document about eir beliefs, but its validity is contested for some reason X. We discuss this for a week. Suddenly a player notes that it never was valid, because writing their document was not directly influenced by the Holy Spirit. This has nothing at all to do with X. It seems clear to me that this interpretation, which is valid modern-day Christian jargon, is not a reasonable one. Agreed. In your thought experiment as described, though, the influenced by the Holy Spirit reading does not 'lower the energy' of the text at all. The spiritual does not make any more sense in the context of the rule under that reading (actually, much less sense, I think). 3) If there is any preference in the current rules for either legalistic or ordinary-language meanings, it's for ordinary-language meanings because Mother, May I? (Rule 2152) seeks to provide guidance in determining the ordinary-language meaning of a term when a rule includes a term otherwise. We need no guidance for determining the ordinary-language meaning -- it's related to. I don't see how this text could be construed to give preference to the ordinary-language meaning. I note that this text was introduced into R2152 during the time that R754 still gave preference to legal meanings (not to imply that this is a good argument that it doesn't now give any preference).
DIS: Re: BUS: and Now For Something Completely The Same
On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Kerim Aydin ke...@u.washington.edu wrote: Well, Dungeon Master rules are definitely broken and don't see a proposed fix out there. I had this idea below combining the RPG idea, some FRC spirit thrown in, and perhaps a dose of ais523's old great Puzzle game. By the way, I'm interested in this.
DIS: Re: BUS: Intent to Deputise for Promotor
I had been planning to send a similar message. Happy to give the office a shot if neither you nor aranea want it.
DIS: Re: BUS: Brief for Moot on CFJ 3429
On Wed, 2014-10-22 at 21:59 +, Alex Smith wrote: This is something of a problem. If the rule had used a word with a meaning in English, and another meaning in a language that most players didn't know, then it'd probably be the English meaning that took precedence. In this case, we have a word with a familiar English meaning, and also a meaning that I was previously unaware of (and I expect many other players were too). At what point does a word become obscure enough to lose its ability to have meaning within the rules? Agreed that this is a problem. I think I probably didn't adequately address the failure to communicate concern in the Brief. At the very least some qualifications are needed. The intent of a rule, or how it obviously works, is thus rather dubious as a tool to judge a rule's meaning; it would be highly against the interests of the game for the meaning of a rule to depend on whether the person who submitted it introduced a bug intentionally. Imagine if omd had been the submitter of the proposal, and e'd placed the pertaining in there in the hope that nobody would notice. I agree that what aranea intended to say is mostly irrelevant. Actually, I was quite surprised to find eir message suggesting adding exclusively, because it seems to suggest that e didn't know explicitly about the belonging to sense -- otherwise, why wouldn't e have pointed it out? Still, that action also suggested to me that e did originally intend them as synonyms. Of course, that's mostly irrelevant. When I say that pertaining to is obviously being used as a synonym for belonging to, I don't mean that aranea obviously intended it as a synonym, I mean that when looking at just the text itself, this interpretation makes much more sense, regardless of whatever the author thought or didn't think. Would it influence your opinion to know that I was /totally/ planning to exploit this if G.'s process argument was upheld (most likely to set my own Power to 1)? I don't consider this situation as all that nonsensical; broader dictatorship rules have existed in the past. I don't think so. That you were going to try to use it doesn't make it seem any less absurd to me. If a rule directly said Eritivus CAN cause this rule to set properties of ais523 by announcement, I would consider that absurd: I cause R to set ais523's net worth to 1 billion USD. Again, the physical impossibility of some uses would not necessarily rule out other uses. If that were actually directly in a rule, I think it could work for e.g. setting power. But that text doesn't have a less absurd interpretation available. omd's points about this seem pretty convincing to me so far, though. I don't believe the meaning of the rule depends on our knowledge about potential meanings it could have, except inasmuch as it affects the R217 game custom clause (just as the meaning of a rule does not depend on its potential implications, except inasmuch as it affects the the best meaning of the game clause). I'm not sure I understand this point -- are you also a believer in Platonic rule meanings? I originally had (our interpretation of) the text, but dropped it. Would that have helped? 4) The only official actions and gamestate changes with direct bearing on this case was the judicial process up to this point (G.'s two judgements and this Moot). No large backlog of gamestate changes has accrued which would have to be retroactively fixed due to discovering the misinterpretation. This is, of course, not a reason to affect the interpretation of a rule, other than arguably the best interests of the game clause in R217. It's also worth mentioning here that Agorans have quite a bit of experience at this sort of reconstruction (partly in Agora, but mostly in B Nomic, where many Agorans also played). Agreed. I didn't tie those comments into the rest of the Brief very well. I think I only had a vague impression that large revisions of history were unacceptable, but no solid reason why. At the very least, such discussion must not establish custom before the first judicial test of the meaning of the term! This would seem to be at odds with practice. Often something only becomes controversial much later than it's been established (such as, for instance, the four-day waiting period on rules changes by fiat). Totally agreed! That wording was just horrible. omd also made this point, I think, so I will respond to this point when I respond to em.
