On Fri, May 12, 2023 at 8:03 AM Yachay Wayllukuq via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > Having such an unwieldy amount of arcana puts a lot of power in being able > to give out 'hedonistic' Judgements; ones that are heavily based on "well > this is best for the game"/"this makes it playable"/etc, especially ones > that have to be that way because of ambiguity. Because we don't know for > sure everything that has even happened until now, and even then, we're > likely to have more disagreements the more arcana that we have to consider > in order to compute the current gamestate. > > It's probably not so bad then, because the longer back you go, the harder > it is to be sure of it, and the easier it seems that a hedonistic Judgement > will just overwrite it.
Arcana *generally* doesn't have that strong an impact - an old CFJ can always be revisited, even if cited, and new CFJs have often said "that old one doesn't apply". And believe me, current judges are *very* ready to overturn or just ignore precedent that's somewhat old, that happens regularly. The reason this one is relevant is because voters, in the modern time, last week, voted FOR this Rules text, and so it's become current rules text. As I said, I can't speak for other voters' reasoning - no deals were made etc. - but there's all sorts of ways to go wrong in the rules by voting for unwise text, whether than unwise text is drawn from an ancient source or entirely new. Knowing about the old CFJs gives a *minor* advantage, in that when something comes up that's happened before, I can say "hey - here's a ready-to-go argument for the situation I don't need to re-argue first principles". But it still has to persuade the current judge (and any potential appealers) all over again. People do feel a "weight of history" a bit, in the sense of saying that this is a long-running game and it would be a shame to destroy it on a whim of a single judgement, but that applies to entirely new arguments/issues just as much as "old" ones. -G.
