On Wed, 2018-10-24 at 10:11 -0400, D. Margaux wrote: > I’m considering proposing a rule that would enable proposals to be > ADOPTED through dependent actions. The idea is that a player could > announce intent to ADOPT a proposal with X support, where X is the > number of players who by voting FOR could cause the proposal to be > ADOPTED if all active non-supporting players vote AGAINST and all > zombies vote PRESENT. Seems like it could result in potentially > quicker adoption of uncontroversial proposals. > > I’m curious whether people think this is a good or bad idea
I suspect it's a bad idea. The proposal process is so powerful (i.e. able to change anything) that it's needed a /lot/ of safeguards added over the years to help avoid dictatorships and/or ruleset uncertainty. This means that an alternative proposal process is likely to either a) accidentally trigger the safeguards and not function correctly, or b) accidentally leave a hole in the safeguard that a scamster could exploit to do something unpleasant. (Most, but not all, dictators have been fairly responsible in the past, but there's no guarantee that that will always hold into the future.) As it happens, I can already see at least two scams simply in what you've written above, without even knowing the details or exact rule wording! If you're concerned about the length of time proposals take to adopt, a better approach would be to add some mechanism for reducing the length of the voting period; that would mean that almost all the existing mechanisms are still in place, and thus things are more likely to work. We've done that in the past. It was, however, AI-limited (I can't remember the exact number but it was somewhere in the 1 to 2 range), to help prevent really fundamental things breaking if someone tried to scam it. (G. and I both have quite some experience with the concept of "escalator scams" (mostly with me perpetrating them and G. trying to stop them); these are things that you use if you've found a way to force through an arbitrary proposal but it's stuck at AI 1 for some reason, and try to get a power-3 dictatorship as a result; in other words, you need to find a loophole in the Power structure. As of a few years ago, these were very rare, partly because people were patching them to stop scamsters, partly because when they were exploited the loophole that allowed them tended to be removed afterwards. The rules have changed so much since that there are probably some more, nowadays. The idea's been fairly useless recently because people have just been forcing through wins and/or dicatorship attempts directly, without running into this sort of AI 1 roadblock.) -- ais523
