On Sat, 2017-01-14 at 20:37 -0800, Aris Merchant wrote: > Recently I've been thinking about what might be necessary to defend > Agora against various threats. Some of these involve deliberate > action on the part of players, and some are things that could happen > accidentally. The only solution I see is to give the officers more > powers, but that comes with it's own host of problems. Some of the > new powers that I'm thinking of could be used in scams, or could > easily accidentally mess up the game. The solution appears to be to > provide a way to discourage people from using them casually, or in > scams. I'd like to thank o for helping me work out my thoughts on the > above proposal, and emphasize that any errors in it are entirely my > fault.
We already have various emergency mechanisms. Most notable are Agora Is A Nomic, and the proposal distribution backdoors (basically, there are a lot of sections in the rules designed to allow a proposal to be distributed despite any possible brokenness in the proposal system; for example, if every player cooperated, there would be at least two different ways to distribute a non-pending proposal if something happened that made proposals impossible to pend). In terms of fending off actions by hostile players specifically, Festivals were intended for that purpose. Accidental breakage can normally be fixed by proposal, or in cases where something is wrong with the proposal system, ratification (in emergencies you can write and ratify intentionally incorrect reports, although this requires the cooperation of every player; I think we've done it before). I'm a bit wary of a proposal that would add in a new emergency mechanism, because a) the existence of such a mechanism would make AIAN less likely to apply; b) accidental breakage of emergency mechanisms caused more problems for B Nomic than the emergency system solved in the first place; c) a simple SHOULD or even SHALL has not been enough to deter certain players in the past from performing scams. (A view that I disagree with but that is nonetheless held by a minority of Agorans is that it's OK to perform illegal actions if they grant you enough control over the rules that you can either retroactively make the action legal, or dodge any possible punishment. A related view is that it's OK to perform illegal actions if you're willing to take the punishment.) -- ais523
