root wrote: > > I think it's > > probably a good idea to have some way to fix Agora if things > > go really bad. So this is an attempt to write a rule which can, > > by itself and without help from other rules, get the game out > > of just about any mess. > > What might this protect us from that R1698 would not? I can think of several things. For instance, 'proposal' and 'rule change' being accidentally misredefined so they no longer allow arbitrary changes; maybe all players being deregistered (although R1698 prevents this, I can sort-of imagine a situation in which R101 would take precedence over it, say if players were deregistering to avoid a scam), or indeed the B Nomic trouble where 'week' was effectively redefined to be infinitely long. (They distinguish between nweeks (their own concept) and rweeks (similar to Agora's weeks); most things are measured in ndays, and the issue at B nomic is that there haven't been any ndays in several months.) Also, the Fantasy Rules Committee had problems with people scamming a rule similar to R1698 (it's possible to win the FRC like that); there were rules stating things like "all proposals must contain a page from the Vladivostok telephone directory", and R1698 does not ban that because a 4-week period would be enough to fix the erroneous rule and then adopt an arbitary proposal. Another potential issue would be all the public forums disappearing for some reason (imagine a rival nomic DOSing them), which is a situation the new rule could escape from; it could also get Agora out of the 4E41 situation (B Nomic passed a rule, called 4E41, that effectively prevented any messages that mentioned it reaching the public forum; I'm not sure whether R1698 would stop something like that, but in the end they needed an emergency session to deal with it). Finally, I can imagine a situation where Agora winds up in a really drastically unknown gamestate, where even though there is a way to pass a proposal within four weeks, nobody is entirely sure how. (Imagine if we ran an experiment where some rules were kept secret, say rules which were the result of an Insaner Proposal; that could lead to a situation such as that.) There are probably lots of other things that I can't think of either. Yes, it's possible for a scamster to remove this rule when scamming for a dictatorial victory, or whatever: but I hope that it's robust against pretty much all accidental breakage that could occur (and accidental breakage in nomics can be pretty weird). -- ais523
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