On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Alex Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 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.
I myself was around only during the most recent R106 definition of O/P, but yes, I think that the older the concept has existed, the more people might have been players while it was defined... For one thing... I personally actually did get confused, at least as to whether it was possible for proposal to be democratic. I thought that the democratization was surely ineffective because the chamber of a Proposal is defined separately from the chamber of a decision, when actually it's just the adoption index that's defined. (ais523 can back me up on that.) Of course I didn't have any doubts what Murphy intended, but did anyone have doubts what I meant when I specified a proposal's "power" instead of its AI and ended up with a default AI=1 proposal? In this case not a single reasonable person could have misunderstood what I meant. Nor could a reasonable person think that a "secret rule" is actually a Rule, that messages "announced to the Corporate Forum" must be sent to a Public Forum, that someone purporting to register as a watcher wants to become a Player, or even that I really intended to buy Murphy's vote on Proposal 5952. Scams are and have been rendered ineffective for the most trivial reasons (annotations, decrease by -1), yet anti-scams with glaring mistakes are considered effective? Maybe this is Agoran custom. Well, B's custom of extremely literal interpretations has yielded a culture of conservatism-- scamming is considered rude. Here at least scamming is still acceptable... but Zefram's influence wanes. Great scams-- the Black Repeals, the Mousetrap-- were eventually ruled ineffective. How long until no scam may be attempted with any expectation of effectiveness?
