On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 5:07 PM Kerim Aydin via agora-official wrote: > > The below CFJ is 4013. I assign it to G. > > status: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/#4013 > > =============================== CFJ 4013 =============================== > > Janet is party to at least one contract whose title begins with > 'Riemann is'. > > ==========================================================================
Judgement on CFJ 4013: First off, the act of consent is an act of free will - whether someone consents to something is a truth outside the game. While messages may establish consent for legal purposes, consent can't be manipulated arbitrarily through such messages, but is instead bound by limits of thought and common sense. For example, it is nonsense to suggest that a person's consent alternates infinitely and instantly between consenting/nonconsenting (the brain doesn't work like that), or that we as observers alternate infinitely between accepting and denying consent. So, trying to set up an "infinitely back and forth" legal fiction or paradox might succeed for an asset (in the absence of explicit error-trapping in the rules), but when applied to consent it's noncommunicative nonsense. Secondly, consent is an important social concept that shouldn't be taken lightly. To the extent that Agora is a community as well as a game, it is in the best interests of Agora that we (as much as the rules allow) assert the general principle that silence does NOT equal consent. Leaving aside real world reasons, silence != consent is in keeping with Agoran custom. Ever since the Mousetrap of 1995[0], Agorans have carefully crafted rules to ensure that players could not be drawn into subcontracts and so forth without wilful, expressed consent. Further, there is a current exception that proves the rule: "Without Objection" is literally a silence=consent process, but this process is our most carefully and stringently wordsmithed, and is the only process for which we award a full championship for demonstrating a bug. This shows that Agorans have acknowledged the danger of assuming silence=consent in an Agora gaming context, and we've adopted explicit legislation to guard against its consequences. Taking the position that silence != consent also means assuming that uncertainty != consent. In many cases in Agora, we have legislated away the law of excluded middle - just because something isn't true doesn't mean it's false, it may be logically indeterminate. However, in dealing with consent, we should generally avoid such logic and maintain that a lack of clear consent means NO consent exists, at least to the extent that the rules allow. So, with this "good of the game" bias in mind, how do the rules apply to this case? Determining consent is governed by R2519/2, in which four numbered clauses describe different means for communicating and/or inferring consent. Clauses #2 and #3 (preexisting contracts and promises) are not relevant here, so simplifying somewhat: > R2519/2 [excerpt] > A person is deemed to have consented to an action if and only if, > at the time the action took place: > 1. e, acting as emself, has publicly stated that e agrees to the > action and not subsequently publicly withdrawn eir statement; or > 4. it is reasonably clear from context that e wanted the action to > take place or assented to it taking place. Note that whenever clause #1 is true, clause #4 is also true, because what could be "clearer from context" than a direct positive statement of agreement? With that in mind, I find that clause #1, on its own, does not allow for conditionals. Clause #1 clearly says that a statement of agreement must be made, and given the bias above towards uncertainty not equalling consent, this should be interpreted as a strict requirement. Clause #1 requires a direct statement of agreement that does not allow for conditionals. However, clause #4 *does* allow for conditionals. A simple statement "I agree with this contract if Janet transferred a coin to me yesterday" together with the public record of actions provides sufficient context for assent if and only if the conditions can be reasonably and clearly shown to be true. So, if the caller's attempt to join a contract succeeded, it would be through clause #4, not clause #1. This has a couple of consequences. First, it is subject to the "reasonably clear" standard which outright rejects conditionals based on the Riemann hypothesis[1]. Second, clause #4 doesn't ask about the reasonable clarity of a particular *statement* but rather of the full context. And the context includes the entire message. So instead of forcing us to interpret a single statement within a message, that might contain logical contradictions or uncertainty when examined in isolation, we look at the message as a whole to ascertain assent. And the context of the whole message is: clearly there's some trickery going on. The caller has set up some conditionals based on a "fact" that, unless e's about to reveal a proof and win the Fields Medal, e doesn't know, we don't know, and e knows we don't know (that's also part of the context). How can consent for one of those contracts "at the time of the message" be inferred from that? E knows that Agora can't assign em to one or the other with actual knowledge of the "correct" answer, so e isn't truly consenting to be in either, at least not with that message. So, since the message in question contains no direct, unconditional statement of agreement, and it was not reasonably clear from the overall context of the message and surrounding facts that consent for anything was actually meant, neither clause #1 nor clause #4 are satisfied, and therefore no consent has been given for joining these alleged contracts. I judge FALSE. [0] https://agoranomic.org/Herald/theses/txt/1996-XX-XX-Swann.txt [1] https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/?1460 -G.
