On Sun, 18 Sep 2016, ais523 wrote: > On Sun, 2016-09-18 at 10:05 -0500, Nicholas Evans wrote: > > Being absurd doesn't generally make it untrue. > > > > If your line of reasoning is upheld, CFJs have no meaning because > > they do not refer to truth. If so, we have no conflict resolution > > system. I'm concerned that purposely breaking the conflict resolution > > system is not treating Agora Right Good Forever. > > Really, (inquiry) CFJs have never really been about the verdict, > they've been about the reasoning given by the judge. Often it's > possible to judge the truth value of a CFJ's statement without solving > the underlying problem at all.
CFJ's can never "officially" solve anything. The way the rules have been written as long as I've played, if a person doesn't like a verdict, they can always try for a different verdict by re-calling the exact same CFJ and hoping for a friendly judge. If the game is split into two camps that insist on doing this, there's no mechanism to stop it, nor can there be really. Think of CFJs like house rulings: if the dice fall under the table, do you accept the roll? Well, the table discusses it and comes up with an answer, or says "whomever owns the game decides" or "whomever is due to go next decides", and then for fairness keeps that answer for the rest of the game. And like a boardgame, if a couple people dislike the consensus answer, they can argue and argue and spoil the game. And we really can't stop that over email, either, if people choose to do that. So we "rely on the first precedent" (meaning whichever judge gets to it first is widely given deference to solve the problem, even if we don't like the answer, because it's "their turn" to solve the problem) but with the caveat that there are limits, so if the first judge egregiously says "true = false" there's a way to reconsider that. In addition to Motions to Reconsider or Moots, someone can (as I say above) just call the question again and hope for a more reasonable judge, though this of course alienates the first judge and doesn't make people happy. (Though this was done at least once before, when Partnerships were first judged to be People). But in the end, it's just a social construct for coming up with "house rules" without strict mechanism, so all we can do is deal with it socially, and say it's "bad form" or "not for the good of the game" to judge that "true=false", or more importantly, if someone DOES judge "true=false" (because this is a game, and we want to be experimental and have fun and not be sticks-in-the-mud) that said persons Don't Push It, accept an overruling without calling and re-calling the same CFJ to the point of becoming Those Persons. (That's not to imply that's happened here at all, or that the clauses on appropriateness of judgements shouldn't be put back if they're gone). -G.
