On 7/30/2019 7:52 PM, James Cook wrote:
On Tue, 30 Jul 2019 at 16:06, Kerim Aydin <ke...@uw.edu> wrote:
Proto for time protection (a homage to B Nomic):
Amend Rule 1698 (Agora Is A Nomic) by replacing its first paragraph
with:
Agora is ossified if it is IMPOSSIBLE for any reasonable
combination of actions by players to cause arbitrary rule changes
to be made and/or arbitrary proposals to be adopted within a
four-week period. Rules to the contrary notwithstanding, dates and
times in Agora refer to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [*]
[
Comments:
[*] The first sentence is for context and unchanged. I thought about a
longer version e.g. "Time CANNOT pass at any other rate" or similar but I
think just stating "time is always UTC" as above does the trick without
adding extra stuff that could break - thoughts??
I'm confused. Doesn't R217's "Definitions in lower-powered Rules ..."
already protect R1698 from this? Are you proposing this to give R1698
better protection against Power-3 instruments, which could e.g. repeal
R217? If so, aren't there other basic definitions to protect as well,
like "rule", "exist", "take effect'?
So a few points here -
* This isn't intended to protect R1698 specifically, but all the lower-
powered uses of time (that could be re-defined by lower-powered rules). The
placement in R1698 seemed to make sense rhetorically, e.g. "you must always
be able to adopt proposals within four weeks, and no, you can't monkey
around with the definition of time to get around that, for this or anything
else" (since rule changes and proposal adoption are explicitly defined
elsewhere, 'time' is the only major concept left undefined in R1698,
really).
* It's pointless to defend against power-3 instruments that are malicious,
because such things could just repeal all the rules. It's mainly to protect
against accidental breakage of time.
* Maybe this is a semantic point, but it's to protect the concept/process of
time passing, not so much protecting a "definition" of a single term.
* we've muddled with time before and it's caused hassles (the old holiday
rule is one example) so we know it's something we've contemplated - and seen
from the B Nomic example that it's worth being cautious about it. We haven't
really muddled with redefining other basic concepts like "exist" except for
scams (and as mentioned above, protecting against maliciousness may be
pointless). Also note that your examples like "rule" and "take effect"
already have context-specific definitions at power-3.
* if a particular type of idea ("messing with time") is one that naturally
comes up on occasion, it's sometimes better to say "even though our
precedents and R217 covers us, let's put in something explicit so we don't
have to re-litigate every time the player base turns over a bit".
* as part of a fairly long philosophical conversation a while ago (sometime
in 2017 I think), it was pointed out that Agora "legally recognizes" two
types of input from "external reality": from persons (via forum posts and
language in general) and from time (triggers for events happening). There's
a lot of regulations around persons and communications and protecting those,
so at the time someone suggested "we should put in a simple high-level
protection on time, too".
* we all forgot about that, but the conversation on "timelines" reminded me
that we'd come to a consensus on a need back then and never followed
through, so I thought it might be good to put that in explicitly if we were
contemplating such stuff again, just in case.
* [ok, more than a few points, just got typing there, sorry!]
-G.
