DIS: Re: BUS: Proposal: Outside assistance

[Gaelan Steele via agora-discussion]

> On Jan 23, 2022, at 8:52 PM, Edward Murphy via agora-business 
> <agora-busin...@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> 
> Proposal: Outside assistance
> (AI = 4)
> 
> Amend Rule 1698 (Agora Is A Nomic) by replacing "players" with
> "persons".
> 
> [Explicitly avoids the interpretation suggested on CFJ 8591 that
> the "players making arbitrary changes" clause requires a current
> player, even if registration remains unblocked.]

This mostly seems like a good idea, but one potential concern: What
if we end up with a rule along the lines of “Rules to the contrary
nonwithstanding, people other than Hillary Rodham Clinton CANNOT
resolve Agoran Decisions.” Maybe any action by the former
secretary of state doesn’t meet the “reasonable” standard, but I’m
not sure that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

* * *

Actually, it occurs to me, there might be a current bug here.
Imagine this scenario, which I don’t think is too unrealistic:

- For some reason, one specific player’s action becomes necessary
  to make the game continue - maybe something is broken with offices
  and one player is stuck as the Assessor, or maybe someone scammed
  themselves a dictatorship with inadequate protections. (In
  practice, we’d probably also need ratification, RWO, or tabled
  actions to be broken.)
- That player stops playing Agora, and can’t be reached.

Action by that player being “unreasonable” wouldn't help: whatever
game state change got us into this mess happened before we knew
the player was inactive. The player stopping playing isn’t a
gamestate change, or if it is, the best AIAN could do is give us
a legal fiction that e's around, which doesn’t actually help us.
(And I think it’s safe to say that AIAN doesn’t retroactively
undo an action if information later comes to light that affects
“reasonableness”.)

Attempts to deregister the player would cause Agora to be ossified,
and therefore fail.

But none of that actually helps clean up the mess!

* * *

Anyway, I think the fix here is to replace “players” with something
along the lines of “arbitrary persons” - then, any gamestate change
that would cause the fate of the game to rest on one specific person
acting as required would fail.

Gaelan