On Tue, 2022-02-15 at 20:13 +0000, Nix Null via agora-official wrote:
> So right now, I'm asking for at least 3 people to please take the
> time to read Trigon's hard work and respond to it as described above.
There's a typo in the section "Ownership vs. Possession" (specifically,
an unfinished sentence "This was"). Similarly, "The Second Vote Emoji
Switch" ends with the unfinished sentence "Although".
The thesis that was submitted basically has two parts. One is a history
of a particular round of Infinite Nomic, which contains a huge amount
of detail. The other is a set of conclusions, which are more
perfunctory. This combination strikes me as being very awkward for a
thesis, because it makes it harder to see how the conclusions are
supported. (I'm reminded of Wikipedia's "{{no footnotes}}" cleanup tag,
"this article includes a list of references … but its sources remain
unclear because it lacks inline citations.")
I think the thesis that this work "wants" to be is as some pieces of
game design advice for nomics, illustrated using incidents that arose
when the advice wasn't followed. (For example, "it's common for there
to be scams based on players deregistering and immediately
reregistering, so you need to either pay attention to these or to limit
how often players can do it", or "it's helpful to ensure that any
hypothetical scam that could be used to break the game can also be used
to win the game, encouraging scammers to pick the less destructive
option".) Given that all the examples are drawn from a specific round
of Infinite Nomic, it's thus a lot less comprehensive than it could be.
(It might be interesting to carry out the same exercise on, say,
BlogNomic's glossary – almost every rule there is intended to cover
some past loophole or prevent the repeat of some past incident, and an
explanation of why they're all there would be very instructive.)
There's probably also scope for a full thesis discussing how textually
a nomic should be interpreting its rules, especially if they're written
in a fairly informal style; nomics often start out writing rules in the
hope they'll be interpreted the way that the author means them, but
then subsequently being interpreted with a non-obvious or perverse
reading of the text because that's required for a scam. I've seen a lot
of bad blood created at nomic due to players being upset that some
scams have been ruled to work and others have been ruled not to be, and
it's hard to be fair in this respect when using anything other than
very objective rules, but a very formal process of rules interpretation
has its own issues. This is only a minor part of the thesis as
submitted, though (it brings up the question, but doesn't really
produce an answer to it).
In short, I think what's currently written is a long historical
document that's been kind-of shoehorned into being a thesis, and
although it serves its purpose as a history well, there's still a lot
of scope to make it more fitting for the purpose of being a thesis.
Despite there being lots of room for improvement, it might nonetheless
be good enough as it is, though. I'd be onboard with either giving this
a lesser degree, or reworking it to be more analysis heavy and less
fact-heavy in order to make it worthy of a higher degree.
--
ais523
