Cuddle Beam wrote:
I also believe that its entirely possible for the rules to be faulty and
be acted upon via those flaws, as per ais523's withdrawal scam, where
the intent was clear, but the result was a mini dictatorship. I doubt
becoming a dictator would be "Treating Agora Right Good Forever", but it
was allowed to happen, without these 'Judge Interventions'. I don't
believe 'Judge Intervention' should apply to supersede the lack of other
arguments to prevent my scam (or any other "scam", really).
This is conflating two types of faulty language. Roughly:
1) A rule is intended or expected by most players to say X, but due to
faulty language, it's ambiguous whether it actually says X or Y. In this
case, Rule 217's "Where the text is ... unclear" favors interpreting it
as X.
2) A rule is intended or expected by most players to say X, but due to
faulty language (possibly intentional on someone's part), it /clearly/
(once the fault is pointed out) actually says Y. In this case, that bit
of Rule 217 doesn't apply; the rule does what it actually says it does,
unless some other rule (e.g. Rule 1698's protection against Agora
becoming ossified) also applies and contradicts it and takes precedence.
ais523's recent withdrawal scam falls into this category. Here's a
similar case from October 2015:
Amend Rule 955 (Determining the Will of Agora) by replacing
(b) If the decision has an adoption index, then if the strength
of FOR is greater than the strength of AGAINST, and the
ratio of the strength of FOR to the strength of AGAINST is
greater than or equal to the decision's adoption index (or
the strength of AGAINST is zero), then the outcome is
ADOPTED; otherwise, the outcome is REJECTED.
with
(b) If the decision has an adoption index, then if the strength
of FOR is greater than the strength of AGAINST, and the
ratio of the strength of FOR to the strength of AGAINST is
greater than the decision's adoption index (or
the strength of AGAINST is zero), then the outcome is
ADOPTED; otherwise if the strength of FOR is equal to or
greater than the decisions adoption index and the ration of
the strength of FOR to the strength of AGAINST is equal to
the decision's adoption index, then the vote collector shall
select either ADOPTED or REJECTED as the outcome;
otherwise, the outcome is REJECTED.
[Give the Assessor the power to break ties, including to get a
majority on a vote or when the voting ratio exactly matches the AI].
What this /actually/ did was enable a scam. Translating the above into
pseudocode to make it clearer:
if F > A and (F/A > AI or A = 0) then ADOPTED
else if F >= AI and F/A >= AI then vote collector's choice
^^^^^^^ not "F >= A" as expected by non-scammers
else REJECTED
and it was followed up by an AI = 0.2 proposal of basically "omd and
eir cronies get some rewards", which (with only three non-cronies
voting on it) they were able to arrange F=1 A=5 and trigger the
broken tie-breaking clause.
