Re: BUS: humble agoran farmer fingerdances for a good reason [Attn. Referee]

[Kerim Aydin via agora-business]

On 2/4/2021 10:40 AM, JTAC via agora-business wrote:

> The following two actions are performed simultaneously:
> 
> I announce the finger pointing at Cuddlebeam for violating rule 869 to
> be shenanigans.
> 
> I announce the finger pointing at Cuddlebeam for violating rule 2478 to
> be shenanigans.(^6)

CFJ:  In the above message, JTAC resolved at least one finger pointing.

Arguments

Rule 478 says the following:
>     Actions in messages (including
>     sub-messages) are performed in the order they appear in the
>     message, unless otherwise specified.

The question is whether claiming two by-announcement actions happen
simultaneously is the "I say I did" fallacy, or whether it works.

To clarify, we've used the "otherwise specified" within announcements, to
reorder things for convenience (e.g. "I perform the following actions
twice" followed by a list of actions, or making some kind of foreach loop,
etc), and when the resulting set of actions is reasonably clear about
ordering, it hasn't been questioned.

However, long Agoran assumed practice is that you can't make two
announcements simultaneously, the basic principle being it's impossible to
literally say two things at once and have it be clearly stated to the by
announcement standard, so claiming two statements as being simultaneous is
generally (CFJ 1267 may be relevant, but it's from an ancient ruleset so
it just illustrates the principle).

So, is that assumed practice wrong?  It's quite possible to interpret R478
as allowing simultaneous announcements, but such a result would probably
break a lot of other assumptions, so testing it via CFJ seems important.