On Dec 9, 2010, at 10:42 AM, Kerim Aydin <[email protected]> wrote: > But I should state that I think that 3/4 of > scams tried here are a trivial attempt at misunderstanding legal > procedures as mathematical logic, which would be laughed out of court > but maintain a credence here.
It's not "just" a legal system simulation though. The high specificity with which we write the rules makes doing so somewhat akin to programming, which I suspect helps to explain why the niche Agora lives in seems to be made almost entirely of programmers. On the other hand, finding the kind of scams you cite is not dissimilar to hacking. The same rules apply: the better you know a system's actual behavior (rather than what it's "supposed to do"), the easier it is to spot inconsistencies; the more convoluted something is, the more likely that there's a bug lurking in it; often multiple exploits must be used sequentially in order to progressively elevate privileges. (Somewhat related: I don't like the kind of scam that just consists of pedantically misinterpreting rules, but such scams are often laughed out of the *Agoran* courts. But I distinguish between that kind and the kind that merely takes advantage of weird or unintuitive definitions in the rules, or unexpected interactions between rules (still at a low enough level that it might be laughed out of a real court), such as the act-on-behalf-of-Monster-rule one (which I'm partial to even though it failed), or, heck, the "pocket veto" in the U.S. Constitution. That is my favorite kind of scam.)
