On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 3:03 AM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > On Mon, 10 Jul 2017, omd wrote: >> There's no law, >> for example, that we have to care about the true Platonic gamestate, >> no law that if we discover something's been done wrong (and not >> mitigated through rule-defined mechanisms such as ratification), we >> have to go back and recalculate everything. We could instead just >> collectively agree to ignore it. > > Actually, I think of the current self-ratification system as a > compromise between the recalculators and the just-ignore-it-ors.
Depends on how you look at it. It's a compromise in terms of everyday procedure, but it's one that enshrines platonism as the fundamental basis of the game. At a meta level, Agora is still defined as 'the platonic evolution of a gamestate that began in 1993' (in theory, anyway - something's probably broken since then but nobody knows what), not as 'what the players want to play'. If anything, the existence of self-ratification reinforces that. One consequence is that scams have true power, rather than existing at the pleasure of the playerbase. Even if a scamster acts in bad form and pisses off all the other players, they can't just say "yeah, whatever, let's just ignore what you did and keep playing without you". Well, they could, but then they wouldn't be playing Agora any longer, at least in my view. Is this a good thing? Well, if a scamster acted in /really/ bad form and managed to end the game or something, we might come to regret it. But there's a slippery slope: 'bad form' is subjective, and given the tendency of scams to raise heated emotions, players might be tempted to propose forking the game in much less egregious scenarios. What's worse, without a formal procedure for resolving which fork should win, you might end up with a standoff where half the players support one gamestate and the other half support a different one. Of course, platonic Agora needs to resolve disputes at a meta-level too, when there are questions of interpretation, and if players start refusing to accept the outcome of the CFJ system (maybe because a dictator tried to mess with it), we could end up with a similar split. Conversely, in a hypothetical pragmatic Agora, we could empower the CFJ system to determine what gamestate we should continue playing with, or even define a voting procedure. But with CFJs as they are today, the judge is theoretically tasked with determining the /correct/ outcome, not eir /preferred/ outcome; if e rules against a scamster, e's not sending the message "I'd rather play without you" (which could be hurtful), but "you tried but failed". Of course, the waters are muddied somewhat by the presence of "best interests of the game" as a factor (which is often interpreted as "anti-scam"), and the general arbitrariness of rulings in ambiguous cases... but overall, CFJs still feel like a truth-seeking mission, not a popularity contest. In this way, platonism arguably protects both scamsters and their opponents, by providing certainty about how play should continue.
