On Mon, 2021-06-14 at 05:40 -0700, Kerim Aydin via agora-business wrote: > On 6/14/2021 3:08 AM, ais523 via agora-business wrote: > > On Sun, 2021-06-13 at 15:47 -0700, Kerim Aydin via agora-official > > wrote: > > So a summary of my findings: > > - it is the case that petitions are directed at an office, so you can > > deputise to answer them > > - but Murphy failed to clearly take the action of directing a petition > > at an office (it's clear what action e was trying to take – directing a > > petition at a person – but that action doesn't have any defined rules > > effect, so it doesn't create a duty to respond) > > - so no obligation was created, and so no deputisation, FALSE. > > > > I judge CFJ 3916 FALSE. > > > > I intend to motion to reconsider this with 2 support. > > Frankly, this seems unfair and like trying to have it two ways. > > Let's say I had been PM. And let's say I failed to respond to the petition. > > Do you really have any doubt that a finger pointed at me for failing to > respond to the petition wouldn't have succeeded? We'll never know of > course. But if I'd defended myself by saying "hey, that wasn't directed > at me as PM, it was directed at me as a person" that wouldn't have held > any water - the answer would be "you were the PM, you are you, there's no > ambiguity, what's the problem?" > > If I had been the PM, I would have been forced to respond. But since I > wasn't the PM, it's somehow retroactively ambiguous? Punished if I am, > punished if I'm not.
To explain in more detail: the rules for action by announcement require you to unambiguously state which action you're performing. They don't say anything about the action needing to be rules-defined, and in particular, they don't seem to give any preference for interpreting a sentence as though it refers to a rules-defined action. Say we had two actions listed in the petitions rule, "petitioning an office" and "petitioning a person". Murphy's statement would clearly be interpreted as taking the "petitioning a person" action, rather than the "petitioning an office" action. (Further evidence for this is that Murphy says "possibly-H.", expressing doubt as to whether you're an officer at all; there wouldn't be any reason to be concerned about whether a particular person was an officer in general, as opposed to holding some office in particular, if you were petitioning an office.) Now, look at the current situation where we only have one action listed. Murphy's statement *still* has to be interpreted as taking the "petitioning a person" action, which isn't rules-defined (but something that you can still do via sending email messages even if it isn't rules-defined, so it's a successful action, just as much as taking the rules-defined action would have been, merely one with no consequences). The reason for this is that the only argument I can see for interpreting it as the rules-defined action is to say "this action isn't rules-defined, but it's pretty similar to a rules-defined action, so it makes sense to resolve the ambiguity as to whether this is the rules-defined action or the non-rules-defined action in favour of the action that actually does something". But as soon as you're using tiebreaks like this to resolve an ambiguity, that means that there *is* an ambiguity, thus no action by announcement could have happened because those have to be unambiguous. It may well be that game custom has drifted somewhat from the text of the rules in this respect. If the rules had said something along the lines of "if a player is clearly attempting to perform an action by announcement, then this takes whatever rule-defined action they appear to be trying to take", then Murphy's action would have had rules- defined consequences. But that's not actually what they say at all; especially when ruling on a CFJ, I have to look at the text of the rules and if it's clear enough, that overrides anything that game custom might indicate. -- ais523
