On 6/22/2022 2:08 PM, ais523 via agora-business wrote:
> On Wed, 2022-06-22 at 15:40 -0500, secretsnail9 via agora-discussion wrote:
>> On Jun 22, 2022, at 3:15 PM, ais523 via agora-business <
>>> agora-busin...@agoranomic.org> wrote:
>>> I intend, with support, to appoint ais523 to the office of Speaker.
>>>
>>> [As far as I can tell, although I can't actually resolve this intent,
>>> that doesn't prevent me making the intent. It seems as though it could
>>> potentially be resolved by someone else?]
>>>
>> I don't think you can actually make the intent? It's not a tabled
>> action because it's not an action described in the rules. "any player
>> CAN appoint *another player* to the office with support." And since
>> you didn't do that I don't think it works? Just like you couldn't
>> intend to deactivate someone with notice before it's been 30 days of
>> inactivity. Unless you can idk
>
> I call a CFJ on the statement "My attempt to intend to perform a tabled
> action in the above-quoted message succeeded".
>
> Arguments:
>
> This basically boils down to whether I can intend to perform a tabled
> action, despite it being an action that I personally could not perform
> even if I had the required support. There are situations in which one
> person can act on a different person's intent (either due to an office
> changing hands, or due to the "I support and do so" mechanism), so it
> can matter whether the intent is valid even if the stated action isn't
> possible.
>
> Historically, I think we've held that intents to perform an impossible
> action are valid, and can be made in case, e.g., rule changes make that
> action possible in the future, although the action has to be described
> precisely enough to make it clear that the intent matches up. This
> situation is analogous. (As a side note, rule 2471 has an explicit
> exception for intents – this was designed so that a player could table
> an intent to perform an action simply so that they'd have the option
> available, without planning to actually act on the intent later on,
> despite the wording of the announcement.)
>
> However, the rules for tabled actions have changed since the previous
> precedents, and they may no longer be applicable; a judge would need to
> check the current wording of the rule and see if anything has changed.
> In particular, the key to the case seems to be whether "table an intent
> to perform a tabled action" permits intents to perform a hypothetical
> tabled action, or only tabled actions that are defined in the rules.
>
> For what it's worth, I've been assuming that you can intend to
> deactivate someone before they've been inactive for 30 days (e.g.
> because you're planning to resolve the intent after the 30-day timer
> has expired) – the action that you're intending to perform is an action
> that can only be performed in the future, but that's fine because the
> your intention is to perform the action in the future, rather than
> right now. So "you can only intend to perform an action that you could
> (if you had an appropriately ripe intent) perform right now" seems like
> it's the wrong reading of the rule. Another possibility is "you can
> only intend to perform an action that you could (if you had an
> appropriately ripe intent) perform in the future", but that's a future
> conditional, and those are almost impossible to resolve correctly (and
> in this case, the 14-day ripeness limit is enough time to pass a
> proposal to make the action possible, so this sort of future
> conditional would hardly exclude anything anyway). So the most
> reasonable reading seems, to me, to be "you can intend to perform an
> action even if you can't envisage circumstances under which you could
> actually perform it".
>
> However, there's a disagreement about this, thus this CFJ.
>
> (The judge might also want to opine on whether the intent in question
> could be acted upon, without rules changes, if it's resolved by a
> supporter rather than the sponsor – the action of "appoint ais523 as
> Speaker" is impossible for ais523 but would be possible for a
> hypothetical supporter of the intent. I didn't file a separate CFJ on
> this because it was too difficult to come up with a short and loophole-
> free statement.)
>
Since the CFJ called, the "stretch" interpretation I mentioned is here:
A person CAN act on eir own behalf, by announcement, to table an
intent (syn. "intend") to perform a tabled action...
the possible interpretation being "it's not an intent to perform a tabled
action if it isn't currently a rules-defined action you can do via tabled
action" (instead, it's an intent to perform a non-tabled action via a
tabled action method, which doesn't qualify).
But I think this still supports the old interpretation of "if I say I'm
intending to perform an action by a tabled action method, it's an intent
to perform the tabled action. Because even if it's not currently possible,
I still *intend* to do it that way, who knows maybe by changing the rules
which is possible in the 14 day timeframe."
-G.
