ais523 wrote:
On Sun, 2025-07-13 at 18:51 -0400, Janet Cobb via agora-discussion
wrote:
This means that any values that *are* provided will no longer
self-ratify into being correct, which seems far less than ideal.
R107, excerpt:
A public notice purporting to initiate an Agoran decision is a
self-ratifying attestation that the notice was valid, that the
person (if any) publishing the notice was authorized to initiate
the decision, and that such a decision was initiated.
Presumably "such a decision" covers the entire text that is reasonably
part of "the notice", regardless of whether it's essential or
significant or whatever.
Under the old rules, which worked for ages, they didn't self-ratify,
but the validity was defined with a future conditional, causing
initiations to automatically be valid (regardless of the essential
parameters being omitted or wrong) if nobody would challenge them
within the next week. Because this wasn't a ratification, it only
affected the validity, not the parameters themselves (which would
retain the "correct" value even if stated incorrectly).
I think this had desirable effects, even though future conditionals are
generally undesirable. Perhaps there's a way to get the same effect on
validity without it.
Proto: make initiations valid if the essential parameters are right,
but also specify that rules of power 3 or higher can cause intiations
to be valid even if they otherwise would be invalid. That way,
ratifying an initiation no longer adds a contradiction, because the
minimal change would be "some rule set the initiation to be valid". The
problem then would be to avoid the "multiple equally appropriate
changes" issue: probably you'd have to ratify the essential parameters
in addition to ratifying the initiation validity, because that would
cause the two possible changes to no longer be equal in
appropriateness.
In light of the previous proposal, maybe also specify that initiation
without specifying a value doesn't lead to ratifying the absence of that
value.
--
[ANSC H:GE]
