On Sat, Feb 1, 2020 at 8:17 AM James Cook via agora-discussion
<agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> This is a counter-proto to Alexis's "Ratification by Legal Fiction", in
> the sense that I think it also fixes the problem of ratification
> failing due to minimal gamestate changes being ambiguous. It is a more
> radical change and makes the use of ratification less concise, but in
> my opinion the reward is that it greatly increases simplicity and
> certainty in what the effect of ratification actually is.
Proto-proto: Overturn CFJ 3337
[Treat the scope of ratification the way I always assumed it should be
treated... including when I wrote the current wording of Rule 1551,
back in 2010. (Previously, Rule 1551 had stated that "the gamestate
is minimally modified so that the ratified document was completely
true and accurate at the time it was published; I added the "what it
would be" clause.)
I believe this is orthogonal to your counter-proto; it could go
together with it, or it could serve as a basis for a more conservative
fix. For what it's worth, if you *don't* want these semantics, I
think you should have Rule 1551 say so more explicitly; in particular,
you should clarify the meaning of "what it would be".]
Create a new Power-3 Rule, titled "Gamestate":
The gamestate of Agora consists of the Rules, together with all
other entities and properties defined by the Rules. It does not
include a mutable record of its own history: when the Rules
refer to past game states or events, they refer to the actual
past. Nor does it include a list of 'legal fictions', or false
statements about external reality to be treated as true for game
purposes. A rule may state or imply that 'X is treated as if it
were Y', but this is considered an attempt to redefine X,
subject to the usual standards for definitions.
