I'll grade based on the following marks: 30 marks, Introductions: How well-presented the main topic/s are, the rationale for the thesis, the background, etc. 30 marks, Body: How well the topic is argued, researched and discussed. 30 marks, Conclusions: How reasonable the conclusions are based on what has been presented and their utility and relevance to Agora. 10 mark, Originality: How novel and different it is. 0 marks, My personal opinion on the subject matter:
For a grand total of 100 marks. If you get 50% or more, I'll vouch for the relevant degree. -- Introductions: 10/30 Part 0 and the TL;DR is useful, but terrible. It's short and could be expressed much better, imagine how a player reading this 20 years in the future would read it. What's the context? What are you going for? Its presentation isn't great either. You could've put the chapter titles in there too and introduce the chemistry theme shebang earlier. Later on, even if you don't back up your claims with much evidence, I think quite a lot of the stuff you later talk about is pretty self-evident to most player's experience on Agora (or nomics in general) anyways, so it's not as much of a problem as it could be. -- Body: 15/30 You make up new vocabulary and creatively assign words to different concepts, like having certain things be "ideas" or "opinions". I'm largely OK with it, because I understand what you're referring to even if I don't entirely agree with the specific word you've assigned to it, but others might not have the same comfort with something like that. I have to address that there's a lot of other kinds of literary showmanship in the thesis as well: "Even time cannot escape the grasp of triggers, as officers must make their reports weekly or face the wrath of disgruntledness." I'm not giving or removing any marks for those specifically, because I feel like it's mostly a matter of aesthetic preference. You highlight some very compelling issues, like how people really want their own opinion to matter, which I appreciate. However, I felt like it was missing more discussion and contrast, like how Agora specifically has them in comparison to other nomics, for example. I think 2) is interesting but probably goes too far into overexplaining a simple input-output mechanism and "memory". 3) and 4) are fine. A lot of literary acrobatics as mentioned before, but the poetic style is readable (and fun). 5) I don't know enough about these events, but as far as I understand, you would've preferred a quicker solution rather than the more methodic and calculated one. I'm honestly not sure which would be better, but that doesn't matter, because what does is how well you argue what you do - and you leave us hanging and just get into speculation instead. I wasn't too happy about it. -- Conclusions: 0/30 There's a very serious problem in that you don't really connect your solutions much to the rest of the thesis. You offer up nice things, sure, but why would they work? Why those things and not something else? How do they relate to the things you've spent most of the thesis talking about? It's jarring. -- Originality: 10/10 I don't think there's anything written yet in a style that is this eccentric, it felt to me like a like a cult acolyte explaining religious arcana which, behind the veil of metaphors and meaning, it artistically traces the silhouette of some really hard-hitting nomic matters. You get full marks for it. -- My personal opinion on the subject matter: 0/0 You get the minimum, shame on you for not agreeing with me. Rejecting bugfixes? Madness. To the guillotine with you. -- Final marks: 35/100 Which is unfortunate, but it needs quite a lot of work still. But I wholeheartedly support its style and look forwards to a revision. REVISE & RESUBMIT On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 6:59 PM Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion < agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 9:44 AM Forest Sweeney via agora-discussion > <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > > In response: > > I had written this thesis with exactly as you say also in mind. We take > > conclusions to their logical extremes without first testing and > confirming > > via CFJ or otherwise if the Truth that we'd found ACTUALLY holds up in > > court. And we therefore move through the motions of accepting and > adopting > > bugfixes that may not actually be necessary. For example, in Time B Safe, > > it doesn't make ANY sense at all whatsoever, to me, in most scenarios, to > > interpret that Agora would stop Time Itself before becoming ossified, as > > this actually feels like a paradox to me: Agora would still be ossified > > that way, since time would be stopped and that itself would ossify Agora > > just as much, even if the interpretation of time were different. > > Just on the minor point of Time B Safe, this was in fact the result of > a CFJ. The judgement could always be wrong/reconsidered etc., but it > was "CFJ-tested" (albeit via a fairly hypothetical CFJ statement) in > the sense you're describing and the proposal was a direct, if delayed, > result: > https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/?3580. This isn't to > take away from your overall point of our tendency to fill the rules > with too many edge-case and hypothetical "bug" fixes. > > Also, culturally, several of us lived through the demise of B Nomic > some years ago, a well-established and popular nomic which died > precisely because it came up with a way to stop time and not restart > it. > > -G. >
