On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Geoffrey Spear wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Kerim Aydin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> The "great simplification" purposefully dropped this but didn't replace
>> it with anything, on the grounds that doing such would make it part of
>> "game custom and precedence" as long as the rules remained silent.
>
> Suber's justification for including a "you must follow the rules" rule
> seems to argue directly against this line of reasoning. He said
> (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm) that the rule was
> included rather than leaving it as an unwritten metarule of all games
> so that it could be explicitly repealed, as unwise as that would be.
>
> It's my thinking along these same lines that if something is purposely
> dropped from the ruleset, it should be seen not as a game custom that
> should continue to be followed, but an outdated rule that was
> explicitly rejected as unsuitable, and if anything the exact opposite
> of the removed wording should be followed.
I would agree if it were replaced with something, or if dropping it
made common definitions supersede it (as happened with the definition
of "Politician"). In the current case, dropping it made it so that:
(1) The rules are silent; and
(2) Common definitions do not reject it out of hand (I double-checked
that).
In such a case there is no reason reject the older definition as
"game custom where the rules are silent", in fact we are expected to
do so.
Ordering events within a message, or defining boundaries between two
time periods as belonging to one or the other time period, is entirely
arbitrary. Since it is arbitrary and the rules don't define it, we're
left with custom.
-Goethe
