[Long because I'm honored to finally weigh in on ISIDTID? Yes.
Too subjective a precedent? Maybe. Discuss. -Goethe ]
PSEUDO-JUDGEMENT 1774
First of all, Agora, by custom and practice, is based on actual
actions of individuals, not on purported actions by directed
avatars. Hence Kelly's Fallacy exists, which defines the assertion
"I say I do, therefore I do" (ISIDTID) as false, despite the fact
that virtually all actions are performed by "saying we do."
When Agoran Rules allow an action to be conducted "by announcement",
the specific announcement is the action in question, giving the
appearance that we support ISIDTID. In reality, we are recognizing
the actual act of posting a message as the action. We do not treat
the announcement as being the commanding of a puppet avatar to perform
the action, but it easily mistaken for such (hence the fallacy).
This custom, applied strictly, forbids multiple identical actions to
be collapsed in a command to perform the action "N times". But this
prohibition arises through game custom, not Rule.
And also as custom, we have accepted this falsehood in many cases,
most often in voting ("2xFOR" in place of "I vote FOR; I vote FOR"),
under the principle that it is an administrative and communicative
practicality to use shorthand for a set of actions for which it
would be trivial in EFFORT as well as CONCEPT to use the longhand.
Therefore, the net Agoran "policy" towards ISIDTID has always been
a compromise between principles and expediency.
Trivial in CONCEPT has been recognized; it is easy for any Agoran
in concept to recognize that "I do X N times" easily expands into
N instances of "I do X", provided N is not infinite, irrational,
imaginary, or otherwise impossible to enumerate. Also, the
communication must be clear: "I do X the same number of times as
hairs on my head" fails to communicate the intent.
Trivial in EFFORT, however, has not been explicitly recognized
in the past. We must mot lose sight of the fact that this is a
game, and in order to make a move in a game, one should be
expected to exert a reasonable effort in playing if one is to
"bend" interpretations such as ISIDTID (telling the referee "I
dribbled the ball once, please infer 100 more" would likely lead
to foot foul).
For this to serve as a principle, we must assert a standard of
reasonable effort: unfortunately this is subjective. And as
such, this will have to be tried on a case-by-case basis.
However, on the far-end of the spectrum, I would like to offer
the following test:
If the effort is an obvious or apparent scam or abuse of other
player's time and efforts, and the scam wholly depends on ISIDTID
to absolve the scammer of any comparative effort (e.g. the effort
of actually doing would be a significant practical barrier for
the scammer), we should treat ISIDTID as a fallacy for that case.
Note that requiring the scammer to repeat the message 10,000
times is not that much of a technical or time effort; eg. 5 minutes
and a perl script. It does present a cultural/social barrier
which is a de facto effort to break. We recognize that our email-
based society needs some "unwritten guidelines" (e.g. no spam) to
function. Requiring would-be scammers to bear the social stigma
of posting a long string of 10,000 actions in order to actually
perform them, while at the same time allowing legitimate ISIDTID
statements to function ("2xFOR") is a reasonable custom in the
functioning of the Agoran social compact, despite the appearance of
inconsistency.
Note, however, that this is not a license for arbitrary denial. The
Assessor can't accept a "2xFOR" while denying a "3xAGAINST" because
e wants the proposal to pass. We should a priori assume that
ISIDTID convenience works in the case of multiple identical actions
that function by announcement, and only obvious abuse should be
challenged as an abuse of the privilege, ultimately by an case-
specific CFJ.
Clearly, there is a great disparity of effort between the 10,000
purported actions and the single assertion of multiple actions in
Comex's attempt to call 10,000 CFJs with a single ISIDTID statement.
Therefore, this court holds that the effort failed, and judges the
statement TRUE: comex did not initiate any inquiry cases.
PSEUDO-JUDGEMENT 1775
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
An abuse of ISIDTID is in fact such a failure. Given the choice,
of allowing zero successes, one success, or all of the 10,000
successes:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Z/Zero-One-Infinity-Rule.html
This court says:
A failure is a failure, not a single success with later failures.
The court, building on the precedent of 1774, holds FALSE.
