On Thu, 28 Jun 2012, Ozymandias Haynes wrote: > But in any case, you could always say that a certain controversial > judgment is wrong. Indeed, I would expect players with strong views > contrary to any official judgment to have this belief, and divided > belief on some point is the reason for the CFJ in the first place. > Isn't judgment supposed to be the legitimizing mechanism by which the > game settles a controversial matter and moves forward? Or is it your > view that some judicial decisions are "incorrect" and, if the Agoran > community lets this "incorrect" ruling stand, then the game bifurcates > in an illegitimate way? Or have I misconstrued you entirely?
The judgement "settles" a question, but doesn't officially change the truth. But there's nothing in the rules that stops someone from raising the exact same question, over and over again. If we were really angry at each other, we could paralyze the game that way. If two camps were arguing about whether you won, each camp could call a CFJ (hoping it got assigned to someone on their side) and it could ping-pong back and forth forever. This would be equivalent to someone at a boardgame table just saying "I don't care if everyone else says I can't do that! I say I can!" and generally having a fit. The whole reason it works is that we generally have a meta-agreement that we're playing a game, and one of the rules is that the first judge has precedence on the matter (and if the first judge is really wrong, the appeals judges do). But really, if that broke down, it would just be an unplayable game (not oscillating "truth" or bifurcation). I've sometimes kinda wondered what would happen if there was such a bifurcation that two camps each claimed their side was the "real" Agora, each publishing different sets of reports, etc. There'd be no in-game (e.g. logical) way of deciding, it wouldn't be a logical bifurcation, just two competing interpretations. Oh, hmm, that is what happened in Lindrum World... -G.
