On 4/3/2021 5:32 PM, Kerim Aydin wrote: > The below CFJ is 3903. I assign it to G. > > status: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/#3903 > > =============================== CFJ 3903 =============================== > > R. Lee's votes on the referendums on proposals 8549 and 8552-8555 > were clearly specified. > > ==========================================================================
I judge CFJ 3903 as follows (no major difference from proto): In the past, we've accepted many complicated conditionals. In principle, I don't see why "does this specified proposal add text to ruleset" is more complicated or error-prone than, say "I vote for the candidate who transfers me the most coins" in terms of difficulty to the vote collector. For the latter, for example, the vote collector would need to track any coin transfer, look at recent reports to know if the transfers succeeded, and maybe even (if the transfers had previous transfer dependencies) track more. And errors would be made. Yet I suspect we would accept such a conditional without thinking about it too much and the poor officer would be on the hook. So I don't think we can throw out proposal parsing for conditionals just because they're proposals or rule changes, or else if we do, we'd throw out many conditionals that we've accepted in the past. As an example, looking at one of the proposals in question (8549), the proposal is of the form "insert after [text] the following [other text]". I looked up the rule, checked the power, and knew that the proposal in question would increase the words in any of the rulesets. 3-5 minutes, and fewer references to check than the coin thing. And probably less prone to error than the coin thing. So in principle, proposals aren't special. Some are harder to interpret than others in the name of interpreting conditionals, That's evaluated case-by-case - it doesn't force evaluation of "arbitrary" text - some proposals, just like some conditionals, could be "too hard", but it's case-by-case). Now, some of the ones in this batch may be too difficult - but the caller notes that they're not. Having looked over them for 5 minutes, I conclude similarly - these are not difficult tasks. TRUE. I'll note that what's easy in the individual is often difficult in the aggregate, but that's a matter of social restraint. Doing too many blanket conditionals is similar to submitting lots of proposals and not pending them, or calling and retracting lots of cfjs, or whatever. I don't think a blanket cfj-ban based on the reasonableness of each one (and these in particular are reasonable) is an appropriate way of handling that, if it becomes an actual issue. However, I'll futher note that, given the nature of cumulative effort, the effort for each individual conditional needs to be truly fairly small. The standard I'd suggest is that the conditional must be clear and obvious within a minute or two of checking on facts. So a proposal that repeals a rule (requiring a word count), or has more than one add or subtract clause so character count had to be tracked, would be too much. -G.
