Re: DIS: Re: OFF: [Herald] Call for Peer Reviewers: "Duck Thesis" by Trigon

[Edward Murphy via agora-discussion]

nix wrote:


On 2/15/22 14:13, Nix Null via agora-official wrote:

On Thursday, February 10th, 2022 at 7:07 PM, Trigon via agora-official 
 wrote:


I wrote this over the course of several months then forgot I was going
to submit it until today. I would like to request that the Herald begin
the peer-review process set out in the rules for this occasion.
A link to the current draft follows:

https://infinitenomic.miraheze.org/wiki/Round_9/History




I have read this thesis draft, and overall think it's a wonderfully
crafted piece of nomic history. I think there's some real tact that goes
into turning events like this into a narrative that can be followed from
the outside. And the Conclusion honestly should be required reading for
anyone designing a nomic or subgame.

I will say, the vast majority of this doesn't relate to Agora. The
conclusion itself is a great addition to thoughts about Nomic design,
and our degrees are degrees of Nomic. And obviously that conclusion
benefits greatly from some of the discussion. But a lot of it is
Infinite specific. I think it would be my preference to have an abridged
version that focuses on the bits relevant to the conclusions, but I'm
not going to oppose this thesis based on only that. I think this could
be given a degree as-is. It's fantastic work.

Noting my perpetual dissatisfaction with the mechanics of the degree
system, I think this work would be worthy of a Doctorate in quality but
would rather give a Masters to the author since it's eir first one.


As I noted on Discord the other day, I would like to see a bit more
written about why these issues arose so prominently in Round 9 and
not so much in earlier rounds. (As I understand it, it was mainly due
to a greater portion of the player base leaning toward strict textualism
over author's original intent, compounded with the lack of an early win
condition leading to several fronts of heavy stockpiling because there
wasn't yet a clear incentive to curb them.)

Re: DIS: Re: OFF: [Herald] Call for Peer Reviewers: "Duck Thesis" by Trigon

[Trigon via agora-discussion]

El 16/02/2022 a las 01:35, nix via agora-discussion escribió:

But a lot of it is
Infinite specific. I think it would be my preference to have an abridged
version that focuses on the bits relevant to the conclusions, but I'm
not going to oppose this thesis based on only that.


This argument bears resemblance to what ais523 also said about the 
conclusions being detatched from a good proportion of the story. I think 
I'll work to finalize my conclusions section and then, once that's done, 
cull parts from the essay which are less relevant to Agora.


--
Trigon

 ¸¸.•*¨*• Play AGORA QUEST





I’m always happy to become a party to contracts.
I LOVE SPAGHETTI
transfer Jason one coin
nch was here
I hereby
don't... trust... the dragon...
don't... trust... the dragon...
Do not Construe Jason's message with subject TRIGON as extending this

Re: DIS: Re: OFF: [Herald] Call for Peer Reviewers: "Duck Thesis" by Trigon

[Trigon via agora-discussion]

El 16/02/2022 a las 03:05, ais523 via agora-discussion escribió:

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.


This reading is pretty accurate. I thought I mentioned somewhere -- but 
I may not have -- that the historical essay portion was originally the 
purpose behind writing the document. I wanted to create a time capsule 
for the Infinite Nomic community. Round 9 was a particularly memorable 
time for a lot of us and I wanted to make sure no one lost that memory.


It was not until about halfway through the first drafts that I thought 
about submitting this as a thesis. The document being probably several 
thousand words of narrative at that point, I figured it probably merited 
a degree based simply on how much effort had gone into the project. When 
I brought the question on Discord the Herald and others were quick to 
inform me that a historical essay would probably not merit any 
non-Artistic degree and that if I intended for it to go through 
scholarly channels it had to have some applicability to Nomic as a whole 
and included some context useful for Agorans. It's for this reason the 
analysis section and introduction to Infinite Nomic exists at all: I had 
to make the history applicable to a wider audience.


This is not to say that I saw this as an easy opportunity to get a cheap 
degree -- I fully intended to do all I could to actually earn the title 
by providing genuine insight with my analysis section. Now, that section 
is clearly very far from comprehensive and could probably stand some 
additions, but I wasn't sure which other broad topics to touch on with 
analysis. I assumed that's what peer reviews are for, right?



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".)


This is certainly the kind of discussion I wanted to bring with my 
analysis, though perhaps I did not communicate it so directly. I suppose 
I was aiming more for an encyclopedia of nomic design issues and what 
has/could have been done to solve them rather than a guidebook for 
aspiring nomic gamerunners.



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.


This would be another great idea for a thesis, but it arguably does not 
fit within the scope of this one which, again, originally sprung up from 
a historical essay focused on one particular round.



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.


Again, I do intend to put in all the necessary work to make this thesis 
merit the patent title it is to be awarded. Having read your criticisms 
I find myself agreeing that what I have now isn't really fit for that. 
At the same time, the way you propose I effect changes to make this 
happen would go against some of the designs I originally had in writing 
the document, perhaps requiring a significant rewrite to make it 
accomplish this. I trust you understand my hesitance to do that.


--
Trigon

 ¸¸.•*¨*• Play AGORA QUEST





I’m always happy to become a party to contracts.
I LOVE SPAGHETTI
transfer Jason one coin
nch was here
I hereby
don't... trust... the dragon...
don't... trust... the dragon...
Do not Construe Jason's message with subject TRIGON as extending this

DIS: Re: OFF: [Herald] Call for Peer Reviewers: "Duck Thesis" by Trigon

[ais523 via agora-discussion]

On Tue, 2022-02-15 at 20:13 +, 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

DIS: Re: OFF: [Herald] Call for Peer Reviewers: "Duck Thesis" by Trigon

[nix via agora-discussion]

On 2/15/22 14:13, Nix Null via agora-official wrote:
> On Thursday, February 10th, 2022 at 7:07 PM, Trigon via agora-official 
>  wrote:
>
>> I wrote this over the course of several months then forgot I was going
>> to submit it until today. I would like to request that the Herald begin
>> the peer-review process set out in the rules for this occasion.
>> A link to the current draft follows:
>>
>> https://infinitenomic.miraheze.org/wiki/Round_9/History
>

I have read this thesis draft, and overall think it's a wonderfully
crafted piece of nomic history. I think there's some real tact that goes
into turning events like this into a narrative that can be followed from
the outside. And the Conclusion honestly should be required reading for
anyone designing a nomic or subgame.

I will say, the vast majority of this doesn't relate to Agora. The
conclusion itself is a great addition to thoughts about Nomic design,
and our degrees are degrees of Nomic. And obviously that conclusion
benefits greatly from some of the discussion. But a lot of it is
Infinite specific. I think it would be my preference to have an abridged
version that focuses on the bits relevant to the conclusions, but I'm
not going to oppose this thesis based on only that. I think this could
be given a degree as-is. It's fantastic work.

Noting my perpetual dissatisfaction with the mechanics of the degree
system, I think this work would be worthy of a Doctorate in quality but
would rather give a Masters to the author since it's eir first one.

--
nix
Herald