On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Alex Smith wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 10:25 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote:
>> In the example ais523 gives for points, the difference matters for
>> it depletes a reserve of points awardable for a particular contest.
>> However, that means the consequences differ. In the current situation,
>> the consequences do not.
>
> I submit the following proposal (AI 3, II 0, Title="Yes, it does matter.
> Anything can matter in Nomic."):
Well, certainly, it could be *made* to matter. But it doesn't matter
(e.g. "is not tracked") in the current ruleset. There's plenty of times
where some past event that didn't used to matter becomes tracked,
regulated, etc. That doesn't mean it mattered, or introduced ambiguity,
before tracking started.
Otherwise we would have to track every fact about everything and say
that it made a difference, lest it one day make a difference.
Or are you saying that because something is regulated now, that its past
state (before it was regulated) is now retconned into being regulated
and therefore retconned into "having been ambiguous therefore failing"?
Or that introducing a new mechanism now means that prior attempts to
perform the action through another path were retroactively ambiguous
("e could have been trying to do it using the yet-to-be-introduced
mechanism!")
What you've proposed above simply introduces a bootstrap issue (e.g.
no default state, and no sure measure of past state). When we've had
bootstrap issues before (e.g. we require a new rule to depend on
something that can't be determined, and we forget to initialize it in
the new rule's proposal) all we've ever been able to say is "the
current state is ambiguous so UNDETERMINED" and then fix it in place
by legislation.
-Goethe
