(Accidentally sent this to BUS so reposting it here)
On 2021-09-01 11:46, Telna via agora-business wrote:
The below CFJ is 3925. I assign it to ais523.
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If a Mad Scientist announces a random selection for a rule for a
specified future week, and the ruleset doesn't change, e both can, and
needs to, use that pick to fulfill eir weekly duties.
Called by G.: Tue Aug 31 2021 14:43:34
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On 2021-09-01 00:42, Kerim Aydin via agora-business wrote:
CFJ: If a Mad Scientist announces a random selection for a rule for a
specified future week, and the ruleset doesn't change, e both can, and
needs to, use that pick to fulfill eir weekly duties.
Arguments:
For the "can" part of the cfj, Rule 2655 reads in part:
The Mad Engineer's weekly duties include the performance of the
following tasks, in order:
a) Randomly select exactly one rule.
Now, we've generally accepted that random picks can be separate from
action emails (e.g. use a dice server to get a confirmably random number,
in a follow-up email perform the action that uses that number). But what
if there's weeks of ahead-warning for what the pick will be? Are random
picks well in advance on the dependent action still random, once
published?
The counterargument is that "weekly duties...randomly select" means that
the random result can't be known to anyone (must still be random) until
you get to the appropriate week.
For the "needs to" part:
If a draw is published, and later taken back (assuming the ruleset hasn't
changed etc.), then the full selection process was biased in terms of
discarding the previous pick, and wasn't determined uniformly.
