On Mon, 2017-07-24 at 10:17 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > Is Judgement enough of a Tenet of All Nomics that it should be > put in the "Agora is a Nomic" rule, and say that Agora is also > ossified if a judgement can't be obtained in a four-week period?
I'd argue no, for two reasons: a) When using the Agoran style of CFJs, judgements could be handled as an entirely informal process (or via a secondary legal code such as a pledge or Organization) without really affecting the functioning of the nomic. In the absence of certainty about the gamestate, people can debate what the true gamestate is among themselves. The main benefit for live play of having a formal judging system (other than the small amount of input it has into R217) is that it allows people to know when they should keep arguing their side of the case and when they've lost it, but that doesn't seem all that major of a factor. This is a bit different in nomics such as BlogNomic (BlogNomic's CFJ system serves the same function as Agora's ratification system, rather than as Agora's CFJ system; notably, CFJ voters in BlogNomic aren't necessarily voting on what they believe the gamestate is, but what they believe it should be, although the two tend to be the same unless something in the current gamestate is obviously different). Having a suitable, functioning recovery system /is/ required for a long-running nomic (and I believe that this is what AiaN in fact codifies; note that it doesn't block breakage in the proposal system as long as some working recovery system works). It's just convention whether that's called CFJs or something else, though. Agoran CFJs have evolved quite a different function from a BlogNomic-style recovery process. b) There's already a major subset of nomics that has no judgement system or equivalent, nor would it obviously need one: the codenomics. In a codenomic, the rules are specified in machine-readable form, and thus any dispute can be solved simply by running the code in question on a computer. Until recently, I would have said that codenomics were a fairly minor subset of nomics. However, the second most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum, gained its popularity because it's effectively a virtual machine that crosses nomic with finance; when you store money in Ethereum, it's effectively owned by a computer program whose rules can decide how the money can be distributed downstream, and a large number of these (probably most, actually) are set up as codenomics (to allow the rules for withdrawing the money to be modified to adapt to changing circumstances). This makes Ethereum scams somewhat lucrative, and Ethereum probably the most popular nomic (nomic framework?) in the world, being distinguishable from legal systems like Canada (the country) in the fact that if something absurd happens, people can't realistically just decide to ignore it, roll it back, or fix it via common sense. For example, ether valued at over 30 million USD, well more than the total value of all Agora's shinies even at the apparent recent exchange rate, was stolen recently in a scam that exploited a misdefinition of "with X support" that had been copied to many different "smart contracts"; the problem was that the set of people who were allowed to support hadn't been secured/regulated and a mechanism for changing it was left in the ruleset-equivalent by mistake; this is exactly the sort of scam that happens in a typical nomic like Agora or B. As such, I'd say that there's quite a bit of evidence that a judgement system is not fundamental to nomic. It's certainly useful and helpful to have one (especially if you want your nomic to be equitable rather than legalistic), but there a real examples of nomics functioning without, and even in "traditional" nomics, there tends to be a lot of variety in how the judgement system functions and what it does. -- ais523
