On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 at 23:29, Alexis Hunt via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 at 19:19, Alexis Hunt <aler...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > If you got rid of the bit about inconsistency between the rules and > > gamestate, then I don't think there's a lot of substantial difference > > between the choices, on the axes you care about. The only thing I can think > > of is that mine is unclear whether creating a legal fiction also triggers > > state change effects (e.g. "when X happens") but that is easily fixed. The > > other differences are the explicit vs implicit specification of what > > exactly happens, but I still don't see that as a major difference, and the > > retroactive vs non-retroactive approach. At this point, I'm actually > > thinking that retroactivity might be better there; I think it may be easier > > to address time paradoxes explicitly. The pseudo-retroactive approach > > attempts to work around this by preventing interference with itself, but > > when you have complex interfering ratifications, I'm not entirely sure that > > works. > > > > I should probably attempt to put that into an actual paradox attempt to > > see if it works. > > > > -Alexis > > > > Thinking about the paradox point a bit more: the current rule has some > paradox prevention that you draft didn't, IIRC, "If no such modification is > possible, or multiple substantially distinct possible modifications would > be equally appropriate, the ratification fails." But this requires deciding > whether or not there is a paradox in the first place, which is problematic. > > -Alexis
I suspect we're not understanding each other very well here. To me, it seems clear that my proposal inherently involves less thinking about how to resolve contradictory facts, and on the other hand, I don't think I really understand the advantages of your proposal. Sorry for the amount of text below, but I feel an urge to explain my point of view more. It seems to me that your proposal is built upon the idea of establishing sets of contradictory facts, with guidelines for deciding which facts win when answering any given question. Under the current rules (and surely under my proposal) contradictions can arise, and we deal with them as best we can, but your proposal seems to embrace it. Example: Suppose an ADoP report were ratified claiming some non-player, Alice, is the Registrar. We're required to pretend that's the case even though it's not. What if I transfer a Coin to Alice? Non-players can't hold Coins, but surely the Registrar can, since the Registrar must be a player. Ah, but your rule has an example clarifying that ratifying that someone holds an office doesn't make them a player. Well, what if Alice flips the master switch of some player to Agora? R2574 only allows players to do that, so did it work? What if Alice, as Registrar, were required to do so by R2574's last paragraph? Does that matter? I'm sure our wise judiciary would come up with good answers to these questions, but I don't like the fact that it's required of us. It seems worse than the current state of affairs, where the uncertainty is usually confined to the question of what the "minimal gamestate modification" was, and not about its consequences. Of course, my proposal does not eliminate problems entirely. As you point out, the ratification of a report could attempt to flip an officeholder switch to a non-player value. We could partly mitigate that by adding a clause that if an event would have been impossible under the rules, then ratifying that event fails. Yes, it requires us to decide whether or not the event was possible, but in many cases that won't be hard to determine. I think another thing that bugs me about your proposal is that a lot of the text there is just about cleaning up its own mess, after it drops the bombshell that there are legal fictions. (I do appreciate the fact that it includes an example, though.) My example also includes a lot of text, but it's boring, straightforward stuff: this is what it means to ratify a report with switches; this is what it means to ratify a report with asset holdings, etc. To summarize, here is my understanding of how often each ratification system requires us to figure out how to resolve contradictory facts (possibly with the help of judges): * Legal fictions: * Constantly. It's built-in. * The current system: * When it's unclear what the minimal change is, or * When it's unclear whether it contradicts the rules. * Retroactive events: * When it's unclear whether the event contradicts the rules. To be fair, I think a big part of my opinion here just stems from the way I like to think of Agora as working. To me, retroactive events fit my mental model of Agora easily; to figure out the current gamestate, I just imagine re-running a computer simulation with another input event added in at the appropriate point in time. Your legal fictions idea seems to force me to move far away from my idea of how Agora's gamestate works. - Falsifian
