Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 2013-08-04 at 22:37 -0400, Fool wrote: > There's someone the vast majority of Agorans would be willing to appoint > as dictator in order to fix this? :) Sure. For instance, I could probably get a 2/3 supermajority for a dictatorship proposal if I gave a good explanation for why it was needed, promised not to abuse it, and set out specifically what I intended to do with it, and I'm not the only player who's trusted by Agorans in general to that extent. If it were needed to fix a broken gamestate, there are many players who could be trusted to do nothing more but fix the broken gamestate and perhaps give emself a trophy. (Even ehird, widely regarded as the least trustworthy member of Agora, would take care not to destroy it if given dictatorship powers; eir most likely course of action would be to repair the gamestate to known values without removing the ability of anyone else to play, but likely to make bizarre and wide-reaching changes to the rest of the gamestate at the same time.) In general, I'd expect that fixing a broken gamestate would be top priority for pretty much all Agorans. Showing that your top priority is hanging onto the dictatorship, and fixing the gamestate is only secondary (or even much lower), is a breach of that (implicit) trust, and is likely the reason that everyone is so angry. (From my point of view, I enjoy the scam/counterscam cycle; as someone who's normally perpetrating the scams, having an opportunity to counterscam once in a while is refreshing. But fixing the gamestate is much more important than even that, and is rather souring our recent game of counterscam tennis.) -- ais523
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 10:30 PM, Alex Smith wrote: > normally we just CFJ on > whether they worked and then let the Registrar's report ratify, but if > ratification is broken, that doesn't necessarily work, both due to the > possibility of the CFJ having been judged incorrectly (ratification and > to some extent rule 217 is how CFJs get their power!) For the record, as I've stated to you on IRC, I have never thought this was true (and didn't know you did). I do believe that a CFJ outcome can be platonically wrong (whatever that means) and papered over via ratification - indeed, we concluded this was the case for my own registration attempt! - but I would call this unlikely and ancillary to the combination of rule 217 and game custom, not a primary mechanism for how CFJs get their power. Especially because (a) CFJs often set precedent for how actions should be interpreted moving forward, which is then used uncritically many times (meaning that ratification would just make the game limp along dysfunctionally with periodic resynchronization at reports) and (b) CFJs are a lot older than ratification, I believe that once a controversy is resolved, we should usually just trust the outcome and not worry about the possibility of the resolution being "wrong". > and due to the > possibility of the registration rules being different from what people > thought they were. They haven't changed recently, so as I previously stated, in my opinion my fix proposal is unambiguously sufficient.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
If we're attempting a single-player recovery, at this point the best option would be to find the player with the least ambiguous registration over the last several years, and check that it worked with every version of the registration rules that had even been proposed in that sequence of time. Was my registration ambiguous? Also the player would have to be someone that the rest of Agora could trust with that sort of power. You've proven over the last several days that the vast majority of Agorans would be unwilling to appoint you as a dictator, so would be a bad choice. There's someone the vast majority of Agorans would be willing to appoint as dictator in order to fix this? :)
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 2013-08-04 at 22:16 -0400, Fool wrote: > Okay. Why would he have to have been continuously registered since > ratification broke? Wouldn't it be sufficient for him to have registered > after ratification broke, and been continously registered since? It reduces the variables as much as possible. There are basically two ways you can go about fixing things: a) Massive Gamestate Recalculation. According to conversations I've had on the topic, people /are/ willing to go through with this if it's necessary, but it's easy to make a mistake, and it's a huge amount of effort. (It consists of checking every action in the past 3 years to see what its effects were, taking the bug into account.) It probably wouldn't take too long if we restricted ourselves to tracking merely things that affected the ruleset (registration status, voting limits, proposal results). b) Uncertainty reduction. Instead of trying to work out the effects of every action, try to calculate a sequence of actions that necessarily works to recover the gamestate. This normally involves pinning down the variables as much as possible; for instance, there may be players which nobody's even attempted to deregister, thus they're necessarily players under any ruleset that we might reasonably have ended up with. However, registrations in Agora are often ambiguous; normally we just CFJ on whether they worked and then let the Registrar's report ratify, but if ratification is broken, that doesn't necessarily work, both due to the possibility of the CFJ having been judged incorrectly (ratification and to some extent rule 217 is how CFJs get their power!), and due to the possibility of the registration rules being different from what people thought they were. If we're attempting a single-player recovery, at this point the best option would be to find the player with the least ambiguous registration over the last several years, and check that it worked with every version of the registration rules that had even been proposed in that sequence of time. Also the player would have to be someone that the rest of Agora could trust with that sort of power. You've proven over the last several days that the vast majority of Agorans would be unwilling to appoint you as a dictator, so would be a bad choice. But with your scam muddying the waters, we're quite low on choices. -- ais523
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On 04/08/2013 4:51 PM, Alex Smith wrote: On Sat, 2013-08-03 at 19:50 -0400, Fool wrote: If I pull a Lindrum, then Agora is formally continuous, in that the game played one day is the legal continuation of the game played on the previous day. If you start another game, there's a discontinuity. However, as we've seen, this continuity is rather illusory. No! It's one of the main reasons I play. In B Nomic, we spent /months/ trying to reconstruct the ruleset from disaster. Ratification become broken a little over a year ago. It's a bit more than that I think. Reconstructing a year of gameplay is a reasonably minor price to pay to get things back to normal. However, it's not helped at all via sources of uncertainty. For instance, one method to fix the problem would have been to find one player who had certainly been continuously registered since ratification broke, and for every other player to deregister, with that remaining player assuming Assessor and Promotor and fixing the ruleset via proposal. This would neatly get around the vast majority of sources of uncertainty. Due to your scam, though, this method of fixing things is no longer open to us, because now there are no players who have certainly been continuously registered since ratification broke. Okay. Why would he have to have been continuously registered since ratification broke? Wouldn't it be sufficient for him to have registered after ratification broke, and been continously registered since? In that case, OF COURSE there is a candidate. :) -Dan
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Alex Smith wrote: > Ratification become broken a little over a year ago. 3 years, as if it was broken then R1551 was never ratified back to power 3. > For instance, one method to fix the problem would have been to find one > player who had certainly been continuously registered since ratification > broke, and for every other player to deregister, with that remaining > player assuming Assessor and Promotor and fixing the ruleset via > proposal. There is little need to do this, as there is no reason that the list of first-class players would not be what we think it is, as the rules regarding joining and leaving rarely change. I believe I'm definitely Promotor and Assessor: I should have been successfully elected Promotor unopposed if Machiavelli was indeed IADoP from 12-20 Apr 2013, and Assessor unopposed if scshunt was IADoP from 23-30 Jun. No particular reason why our record of officeholdership would be incorrect in the first place, but likely other holders of IADoP (IADoPs between ratification breakage and then): scshunt circa 2011 - became inactive on 9 Jan 2012 (among other times) Murphy circa 2011 - resigned on 24 Jan 2012 Yally in Jan 2013 - resigned on 11 Feb 2013 441344 circa 2012 - was deregistered 7 Apr 2013 Machiavelli attempted to assume IADoP on 12 Apr, and there is no reason the office would be Postulated and held by any of those players at that time. I assume our history since then of scshunt becoming IADoP is correct. There was an issue with scshunt possibly being deregistered by self-ratification, but with ratification broken there is no need to worry about it. So my emergency distribution should have succeeded, and the forthcoming resolution should as well. If anyone thinks this might be incorrect, easiest way forward would probably be deputising to distribute and resolve that proposal, but without some specific reason for this I wouldn't bother. This is ignoring the possibility of Fool's interpretation being correct. Although we could attempt to merge the gamestates, we do have a CFJ system for a reason (and, on the other hand, almost certainly do not have a platonically correct gamestate if we don't assume that the results of CFJs are correct). Wooble's interpretation is perhaps more likely. I disagree with CFJ 2940 on the ramifications (yes, I just said that we have to trust the CFJ system, but I believe the CFJ didn't receive that much attention due to being about a hypothetical): imo the inherent dysfunctionality and ambiguity of being able to take actions by sending to /dev/null (how is that even defined? couldn't every possible message be said to have been sent to no one?) means that if it was correct, it would have made Agora inherently impossible to play, so Rule 1698 prevented the relevant proposal from taking effect, and ratification did or will paper over things. But you might disagree with this, and no harm in Wooble trying to merge eir branch at some point.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, omd wrote: although I suppose it's the job of an invasion to be polite, Someone should have told that to the mongols. Greetings, Ørjan.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sat, 2013-08-03 at 19:50 -0400, Fool wrote: > If I pull a Lindrum, then Agora is formally continuous, in that the game > played one day is the legal continuation of the game played on the > previous day. If you start another game, there's a discontinuity. > However, as we've seen, this continuity is rather illusory. No! It's one of the main reasons I play. In B Nomic, we spent /months/ trying to reconstruct the ruleset from disaster. Ratification become broken a little over a year ago. Reconstructing a year of gameplay is a reasonably minor price to pay to get things back to normal. However, it's not helped at all via sources of uncertainty. For instance, one method to fix the problem would have been to find one player who had certainly been continuously registered since ratification broke, and for every other player to deregister, with that remaining player assuming Assessor and Promotor and fixing the ruleset via proposal. This would neatly get around the vast majority of sources of uncertainty. Due to your scam, though, this method of fixing things is no longer open to us, because now there are no players who have certainly been continuously registered since ratification broke. This means that more effort will be needed to reconstruct the gamestate, but - if you /stop trying to mess things up/ - we should still be able to manage it. Fixing the ratification issue is my top priority in Agora at the moment. Not knowing whether your scam has worked is making it a lot harder, though. (Here's an example of what may have gone wrong, for instance: Wooble used to believe (maybe still does) that agora-business is actually not a public forum, in which case your registration failed, in which case the scam failed because you weren't a player. That would mean that we had no way to make you unambiguously the only player, so we can't shift our gamestate to match yours. It'd make things much simpler if you just undid the scam voluntarily, but I'm not even sure if there's an unambiguously working way for you to undo it. Destroying the promises and waiting a month for us to reregister manually / Teucer to fix it would probably work, though.) -- ais523
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Fool wrote: > On 04/08/2013 8:55 AM, Ørjan Johansen wrote: > > On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Fool wrote: > > > > > Ratification is a legal fiction. Lacanist obscurity implies > [...] > > OK, please tell which Markov chain generator did you use for this. > > The PoMo generator at elsewhere.org, with some editing to stuff Agora terms in > there. (sorry G.) Holy carp, that site led me to someone I went to college with and also played my first round of f2f nomic with some 20+ years ago (the creator of the Discordian Tarot). Also I'm relieved, last time I had to keep tht sort of discourse up with a straight face was also 20+ years ago.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On 4 August 2013 18:19, omd wrote: > In theory, Rule 217 should make the consensus platonically correct unless it > blatantly contradicts the text. In practice, it might not actually stand up > for 20 years, never mind the time before that wording existed and the > likelihood of unambiguous pre-ratification errors that I was more concerned > about. The ways in which things are broken are more interesting than the ways in which they worked out fine, I think.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sunday, August 4, 2013, Kerim Aydin wrote: > If you go back and do this, you will come across some edge cases, where > the rules are silent or inconsistent, where you must make some decision. > The decision you might make, however logical, might not be the decision > I might make, nor omd, Steve, Fool, or any particular person (or set of > collaborators). Even the places where you choose to decide might vary > depending on what you (versus others) might consider textually clear - > one would think that even a cursory read over the CFJ history would be > educational in this regard. > In theory, Rule 217 should make the consensus platonically correct unless it blatantly contradicts the text. In practice, it might not actually stand up for 20 years, never mind the time before that wording existed and the likelihood of unambiguous pre-ratification errors that I was more concerned about. But even if it is a delusion, I just wouldn't be satisfied with an attempt to change the rules by consensus after some hypothetical game-breaker. Maybe if the resulting nomic had a different name (Agora: Foo, like a successor TV show? :) and a significantly revamped ruleset... but not just trudging on as if nothing had happened.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Elliott Hird wrote: > On 4 August 2013 09:43, Kerim Aydin wrote: >> I'm not going to tell you that you *can't* have the fun of reconstructing >> your own personal "platonic" state (to each eir own), but if it bogs us >> down and distracts us from actually playing based on our own current >> (non-platonic) consensus of the gamestate, then I'll go recruit some >> Postmodern Literary Critics to play. Just watch me. :P. > > The intention was for it to be done off the main lists, and of course > consensus judgements will be involved at some point -- but I think > foresight of major incidents and a likely increase degree of > carefulness compared to the early days of the game will make the state > somewhat more accurate than what we believe. And it's mostly to pacify > my true B player nature; of course it doesn't actually matter. The funny thing about your "true B player nature" is that I'm fairly sure B is Platonically stuck in an era when it isn't actually very Platonic at all. It certainly didn't used to be.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On 4 August 2013 09:43, Kerim Aydin wrote: > I'm not going to tell you that you *can't* have the fun of reconstructing > your own personal "platonic" state (to each eir own), but if it bogs us > down and distracts us from actually playing based on our own current > (non-platonic) consensus of the gamestate, then I'll go recruit some > Postmodern Literary Critics to play. Just watch me. :P. The intention was for it to be done off the main lists, and of course consensus judgements will be involved at some point -- but I think foresight of major incidents and a likely increase degree of carefulness compared to the early days of the game will make the state somewhat more accurate than what we believe. And it's mostly to pacify my true B player nature; of course it doesn't actually matter.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On 04/08/2013 8:55 AM, Ørjan Johansen wrote: On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Fool wrote: Ratification is a legal fiction. Lacanist obscurity implies [...] OK, please tell which Markov chain generator did you use for this. The PoMo generator at elsewhere.org, with some editing to stuff Agora terms in there. (sorry G.) Cheers, -Dan
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Elliott Hird wrote: On 4 August 2013 02:54, wrote: You may argue that after this long, there is probably *some* other reason why the platonic gamestate is wrong, and a few have been proposed over the years. But we try our best. If sufficient mail archives were obtained, I for one would find it an interesting long-term collaborative project to attempt to reconstruct the current platonic gamestate of Agora from scratch, with the goal of figuring out how to align it with what we've been assuming the gamestate is at the end. Aside from G.'s arguments, I would like to point out that there have been times when game actions where taken outside the list, in particular at some times votes were sent directly to the Assessor. Any undetected errors in recording these prior to the establishment of Ratification would seem to be utterly unfixable. Greetings, Ørjan.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Fool wrote: Ratification is a legal fiction. Lacanist obscurity implies that the goal of the participant is deconstruction, but only if consciousness is distinct from language; if that is not the case, we can assume that discourse must come from the masses. In a sense, several narratives concerning a mythopoetical totality exist. Consciousness is part of the defining characteristic of truth, or rather the absurdity, and eventually the stasis, of consciousness. Thus, the rules are interpolated into a posttextual libertarianism that includes narrativity as a whole. It could be said that the example of Lacanist obscurity exists already in rule 217, although in a more postsemantic sense. The rules are contextualised into a textual subcultural theory that includes language as a reality. Therefore, a number of theories concerning Lacanist obscurity may be found. OK, please tell which Markov chain generator did you use for this. Greetings, Ørjan.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Fool wrote: > It could be said that the example of Lacanist obscurity exists already in rule > 217, although in a more postsemantic sense. The rules are contextualised into > a textual subcultural theory that includes language as a reality. Therefore, a > number of theories concerning Lacanist obscurity may be found. ' The assertion of "common sense and best interests" in R217 rather belies any application of obscurism, IMO. Obscurism is not a wholly different concept from any charge to find a personal exegesis of mystical text, should we choose to follow that route (in my first Agoran post, I jokingly submitted a ditty comparing the Agoran ruleset to Torah - a passage describing Babylonian rabbis could equally compare to our arguments). Yet the charge to apply "common sense" would turn us against either formalism or the full deconstruction of text in the vain hope of communicatable enlightenment: while Wittgenstein suggests we must pass over [such things] in silence, R217 in fact provides a specific alternative to silence in establishing a communal common good (communal in that it is applied "for the good of the game") and if language is to serve reasonable purpose, we should strive for such a Middle Way in Rules interpretation, somewhere between strict formalism and discarding reasonable linguistic meanings as being part that of which we cannot speak. Otherwise, there's really not much point to playing the game, or being a Person at all, really.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On 04/08/2013 4:43 AM, Kerim Aydin wrote: I've never seen a better case for Deconstructionism [...] I'll go recruit some Postmodern Literary Critics to play. Just watch me. :P. Ratification is a legal fiction. Lacanist obscurity implies that the goal of the participant is deconstruction, but only if consciousness is distinct from language; if that is not the case, we can assume that discourse must come from the masses. In a sense, several narratives concerning a mythopoetical totality exist. Consciousness is part of the defining characteristic of truth, or rather the absurdity, and eventually the stasis, of consciousness. Thus, the rules are interpolated into a posttextual libertarianism that includes narrativity as a whole. It could be said that the example of Lacanist obscurity exists already in rule 217, although in a more postsemantic sense. The rules are contextualised into a textual subcultural theory that includes language as a reality. Therefore, a number of theories concerning Lacanist obscurity may be found.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, 4 Aug 2013, Elliott Hird wrote: > On 4 August 2013 02:54, wrote: > > You may argue that after this long, there is probably *some* other > > reason why the platonic gamestate is wrong, and a few have been > > proposed over the years. But we try our best. > > If sufficient mail archives were obtained, I for one would find it an > interesting long-term collaborative project to attempt to reconstruct > the current platonic gamestate of Agora from scratch, with the goal of > figuring out how to align it with what we've been assuming the > gamestate is at the end. I've never seen a better case for Deconstructionism as in this collective programmers' delusion over a "platonic" gamestate. If you go back and do this, you will come across some edge cases, where the rules are silent or inconsistent, where you must make some decision. The decision you might make, however logical, might not be the decision I might make, nor omd, Steve, Fool, or any particular person (or set of collaborators). Even the places where you choose to decide might vary depending on what you (versus others) might consider textually clear - one would think that even a cursory read over the CFJ history would be educational in this regard. You will end up with the "platonic" state of your collaborators, which will have no more basis in "reality" than the papered-over version that has trudged on for 20 years to today. I'm not going to tell you that you *can't* have the fun of reconstructing your own personal "platonic" state (to each eir own), but if it bogs us down and distracts us from actually playing based on our own current (non-platonic) consensus of the gamestate, then I'll go recruit some Postmodern Literary Critics to play. Just watch me. :P. -G.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 1:40 AM, Elliott Hird wrote: > On 4 August 2013 05:01, Craig Daniel wrote: >> Man, I've tried that with B. Server discontinuities make it more >> difficult than it's likely to be for Agora, to the point where as far >> as I can tell the gamestate is that we're in a maybe-fixable emergency >> but don't know which emergency procedures to use. > > As far as I know B's mail archive is more complete than Agora's. Also, > of course, B doesn't have 20 years of mail. So I suspect it's even > harder for Agora. Yeah, it seems like a pain either way. B has the problem that early rulesets aren't archived, at all, and the earliest ones that are are very hard to chase down. (Wooble has done a better job than I have.)
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On 4 August 2013 05:01, Craig Daniel wrote: > Man, I've tried that with B. Server discontinuities make it more > difficult than it's likely to be for Agora, to the point where as far > as I can tell the gamestate is that we're in a maybe-fixable emergency > but don't know which emergency procedures to use. As far as I know B's mail archive is more complete than Agora's. Also, of course, B doesn't have 20 years of mail. So I suspect it's even harder for Agora.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 10:13 PM, Elliott Hird wrote: > On 4 August 2013 02:54, wrote: >> You may argue that after this long, there is probably *some* other reason >> why the platonic gamestate is wrong, and a few have been proposed over the >> years. But we try our best. > > If sufficient mail archives were obtained, I for one would find it an > interesting long-term collaborative project to attempt to reconstruct > the current platonic gamestate of Agora from scratch, with the goal of > figuring out how to align it with what we've been assuming the > gamestate is at the end. Man, I've tried that with B. Server discontinuities make it more difficult than it's likely to be for Agora, to the point where as far as I can tell the gamestate is that we're in a maybe-fixable emergency but don't know which emergency procedures to use. - teucer
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On 4 August 2013 02:54, wrote: > You may argue that after this long, there is probably *some* other reason why > the platonic gamestate is wrong, and a few have been proposed over the years. > But we try our best. If sufficient mail archives were obtained, I for one would find it an interesting long-term collaborative project to attempt to reconstruct the current platonic gamestate of Agora from scratch, with the goal of figuring out how to align it with what we've been assuming the gamestate is at the end.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
Many of us value that continuity highly, and would consider an attempt to restart the game with different rules unacceptable (this was a large factor in the death of B). Although the ratification bug is very unfortunate, it is almost certain that my emergency proposal will paper over it, so it's not the end of the world (and there is no reason why we can't play "as if" for the next few days; e.g. I intend to initiate VT auctions tomorrow.) You may argue that after this long, there is probably *some* other reason why the platonic gamestate is wrong, and a few have been proposed over the years. But we try our best. Sent from my iPhone On Aug 3, 2013, at 7:50 PM, Fool wrote: > If I pull a Lindrum, then Agora is formally continuous, in that the game > played one day is the legal continuation of the game played on the previous > day. If you start another game, there's a discontinuity. However, as we've > seen, this continuity is rather illusory.
Re: DIS: Future of Agora
On Sat, 3 Aug 2013, Fool wrote: > * Lindrum continued Nomic World as a nomic, albeit "in a different from" Just for the historical record, what happened was, Lindrum claimed to take power, and wrote a new ruleset. Everyone pretty much thought (takeover aside) that Lindrum's ruleset was better and fixed quite a few things. Lindrum made the moves as if the scam worked to "continuously" implement the new ruleset. Players who never thought it worked made moves in their own version of reality to implement same. Some players who thought the whole thing had broken made the meta game decision that they were restarting the game with that ruleset. So they agreed to go on with Lindrum's new ruleset, but never came to any consensus on what if any legal path got them there. Of major importance was that Geoff the wizard/mod set the auto systems to match the Lindrum Ruleset, so that was the only version the MUD "supported". So we may or may not be in the Post-Interim Phase of Lindrum World.
