On Fri, 14 Feb 2020 at 17:34, Alexis Hunt via agora-discussion
<agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Feb 2020 at 11:17, 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.
> >
> > I proposed something like this in July when I was arguing for
> > "ratification via closed timelike curves". At the time, Aris argued
> > that this makes complicated (see
> > https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-discussion/2019-July/055130.html
> > --- search for "Also, how is this a rules simplification?"). To be
> > fair, I had claimed in my that thread that what I was proposing was a
> > rules simplification, and in this case, I'm not exactly making that
> > argument. I'm arguing that it makes the rules simpler to understand,
> > even if it makes the text longer and forces us to describe different
> > cases explicitly.
> >
> > I am curious to hear people's opinions. I personally would be much more
> > comfortable if ratification worked like this, but I'm not sure others
> > will feel the same way.
>
> I've finally had the time to read it through, and I think that the
> core approach we're advocating here is basically the same. The only
> difference is the way that we express it, really, something that I
> would like to scale down to my version, likely incorporating omd's
> proto downthread.
I'm not sure I agree that the core approach is the same. Maybe I'm
missing something.
For reference, here are excerpts from our protos about how ratification
works:
When a retroactive event is ratified, rules to the contrary
notwithstanding, the gamestate is modified to what it would be if
the event had occurred at the event time.
When a document ... is ratified, a legal fiction is established
that, at the time of the document's publication ... the text of
the document ... was wholly true and correct.
My intention is that when a player is computing the effect of a
retroactive ratification, e will never at any point have to stop and
make a judgement call about the most harmonious, or minimal, or
reasonable way to resolve two contradictory facts.
I think yours does not do that: legal fictions will naturally
contradict the inconvenient facts they are trying to override, so there
will always be some sort of judgement involved in deciding how to
reconcile them.
This may be intentional on your part, but it certainly doesn't seem
like the same approach as mine.
> My main concern is that in some cases, the lack of clarity is actually
> valuable. For instance, if memory serves, it has been held that the
> self-ratification of a distribution can modify properties of a
> proposal, rather than merely creating a new similar proposal. This is,
> I think, an advantage, and something where it is nice to still have
> space for interpretation by the courts.
We pay for this advantage in ambiguity. I would rather have the orderly
operation of the game rely more often on manual intervention and
well-written rules than have it rely on judges picking up the pieces.
- Falsifian
