On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 09:07 -0800, Kerim Aydin wrote: > I was mixing a response to two separate posts by comex, sorry that they > were muddled, but they weren't lies. Some points/clarifications: > > 1. The Feb '08 change predates you and ehird, personally as players, if > I read the registration history correctly [hard to to with ehird and it > feels like e's been here for an eternity]. How could you personally be > confused? The test for "confusion of communication" IMO and in precedent > is whether a range of reasonable Agorans should reasonably be confused... > were you actually confused based on something that was never a part of > "your" ruleset? Or just taking comex's word for it that you should be > confused? I think there are some Agorans who have never read the whole ruleset; it's certainly reasonable to conclude that there's such a thing as an Agoran Proposal unless you've read the whole thing. I think what's actually happening here is a much bigger ruleset bug. Atm, dependent action intent has to be clear. It seems that a Scamster can create a sufficiently big cloud over anything outside the rules to make it unclear... Something similar happened in 5707 (with the SELL * n bug), but I think that one ended up resolved correctly, as the unclarity seemed to come out not from a scam but naturally. Personally, I think that the judgements were quite possibly correct, but I don't like judgements to be made whilst there's still heated a-d discussion, because some new point might come up later. There's a continuum here: is something unclear because someone says it is, because someone recently misinterpreted it, because it would have meant something else recently, because it used to be ambiguous but no longer is, because it means something different now to the time it was created? If a rule had attempted to democratise a proposal rather than the decision on it, and ordinary/democratic proposals existed at the time the rule was created or amended (or when similar language was first added to the rule, in order to avoid situations where something else in the rule is amended first), I'm pretty convinced that would have worked; rules don't need to be clear or unambiguous to work. For dependent actions there is a much higher standard of inclarity, but we should be wary of setting it too high. Quite possibly the democratisation worked, but I think the current judgement is insufficient.
> 2. In any case, I was comparing comex's Feb 08 dates with your arrival. > I should note that, if some cleanup/fix proposal to remove old language > was something you personally had a hand in, shouldn't you personally > be well aware of the situation and not confused of what exists? [There's > a precedent as well that being "unaware" is not necessarily what you are > honestly aware of, but what a reasonable player in your position with your > history should be aware of...] Ah, OK. I personally am well aware of the situation, but don't see whether my person knowledge of the rules matters in this case; clear is not "clear to ais523", but "clear". Imagine a person, say Zefram or Iammars, who had been active around the time of the old text, but not paying too much attention since. Would it be clear to them? Should it matter? > 3. Again, is there evidence that someone, specifically looking at the > earlier email, thought the communication was unclear in what it referred > to? Other than someone like comex who looked and said "e technically > said it wrong, I can attack that" (such a sentiment is just evidence > that it is clear enough for a scammer to decide to twist it). I've been trying to pull off a similar scam for ages (claiming people were voting on proposals, not the decisions about them), but that would require Wielder of Rubberstamp, and I'd probably be laughed out of town. This is all about reasonable synonyms vs. unclear synonyms, I think; which is which? > 4. In a later email, comex used, as eir argument, a version of the > Rule by Swann (I think?) that had been out of the ruleset for years. > I really, really find it hypocritical that -- if I've been following > arguments correctly -- folks who have argued "if it's out of the > ruleset, we don't pay attention to it" would say that quoting a > rule of that lineage would have any bearing on today. Anyway, this is > the ancient rule I was talking about. I don't understand comex's argument there either; presumably, the older a rule is, the more likely people are to be confused by it as it's been around by longer? Maybe if people spent their time reading random older rulesets, rather than the current one, that would make sense. -- ais523
