On Sun, 2023-06-04 at 06:25 -0700, Kerim Aydin via agora-official wrote:
> The below CFJ is 4034. I assign it to ais523.
>
> status: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/#4034
>
> =============================== CFJ 4034 ===============================
>
> G. has withdrawn consent from the Rice Plan in evidence, so that
> plan currently does not have G's signature.
>
> ==========================================================================
>
> Caller: G.
>
> Judge: ais523
>
> ==========================================================================
>
> History:
>
> Called by G.: 27 May 2023 17:16:28
> Assigned to ais523: [now]
>
> ==========================================================================
This CFJ hinges around what "consent" means, from the point of view of
rule 2682.
There are two main possible meanings that we could use. One is the rule
2519 definition of consent, which defines what it means to consent to
an action. The other is that it reflects some notion of "natural
consent", which is a state of mind that players can change their mind
about at any time (in this viewpoint, rule 2519 does not apply because
the consent is to something other than an action).
First, let's see what would happen under the rule 2519 definition. In
this case, the sort of revocation in question would be effective only
if G. had "publicly withdrawn eir statement", which rule 478 defines as
the withdrawal of eir statement "within a public message". Rule 478
requires actions by announcement to be clear and unambiguous, but this
is not an action by announcement, and thus a rule 2519 withdrawal of
consent can be done by any means that can be reasonably implied from
the body of the message. In order to do that, the message would have to
indicate that G. desired to withdraw eir consent: it could either do
that by explicitly stating it (in the style of an action by
announcement), or else by clarifyng G.'s mental state. But the message
fails to accomplish the former (it has a conditional that cannot
reasonably be evaluated and thus fails to state that the action is
being performed), and in the case of the latter, the rule 2519
definition basically collapses down to the "natural consent"
definition. (Note: rule 2519 should probably be fixed to explicitly
make withdrawal of consent an action by announcement.)
So what matters here is either a) whether G.'s actual state of mind is
that e consents to the rice plan in question, or b) whether G.'s
message indicates that eir actual state of mind is that e consents to
the rice plan in question. With the actual message in question, G.
appears to wish eir consent to be ambiguous or impossible to determine;
this is a situation that already has precedent. CFJ 2980 found that a
message that "unambiguously indicates that [a player] is trying to
ambiguously register" is sufficient to indicate eir intent to be a
player. (This judgement makes sense to me: after all, if e wanted to
avoid the possibility of becoming a player and being bound to the
rules, e'd have been unlikely to make an ambiguous registration
attempt; and this is a very similar situation to the "natural" meaning
of consent, so there's no reason to expect it to be resolved
differently.)
It's also worth noting that G. explicitly stated in eir message that e
consented to the Rice Plan – the subsequent withdrawal was sent in the
same message. Although Agora assumes that multiple actions listed in
the same message happen one after another, this isn't something that
can be true of a player's state of mind, because the entire message is
sent at a single point in time; if the player had changed eir mind and
no longer consented, e would just not send the email, or edit it before
sending. As such, the first statement ("I consent to the above Rice
Plan") would be a violation of No Faking if G. did in fact not consent
to the Rice Plan in question. This is further evidence from the message
that G. does actually (in terms of mental state) consent to the rice
plan; and if the message implies that G. is consenting to the plan in
question, it fails to indicate withdrawal of consent.
I suspect it would make more sense for this sort of "consent by public
statement" to be made into an actual action by announcement. Under that
reading, the CFJ is obviously FALSE, because the conditional cannot be
resolved from publicly known information. The actual standard in the
rules seems to be somewhat laxer, but it's clearly somewhere between
"consent is an action / consent withdrawal is an action" and "consent
withdrawal requires a message that indicates/implies that the player no
longer consents". As explained above, from the "natural consent" point
of view, G.'s message indicates that e consents more strongly than it
indicates that e does not consent, and thus the CFJ would be FALSE
under that point of view, and all points of view in between.
As such, regardless of how the exact mechanisms of consent are
interpreted, this CFJ finds that G.'s message failed to withdraw
consent. As such, it does not matter for the purpose of this CFJ what
the effect of withdrawing consent on a rice plan would have on that
rice plan's signatures: the CFJ is basically a logical "and" between
two different statements, the first of which is false, and thus there's
no immediate need to rule on the second.
I judge CFJ 4034 FALSE.
--
ais523
Judge, CFJ 4034
