Subject: acka-research Digest V4 #178
From: [email-masked]
To: acka-research digest users <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 00:00:05 -0400 (EDT)

acka-research Digest	Wednesday, September 29 1999	Volume: 04  Issue: 178

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From: K 2 <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Re: Proposal 4371 NULL.
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 06:40:25 -0400 (EDT)

Randy Hall wrote:

> First of all, the proposal I sent to the main list on the 16th called
> "Kernel" in an attempt to submit to the promoter attempted to contain the
> following as part of the proposal, near the top, right after the '='
> customary delimiters:
> 
> > Change rule 1's text to this: [...];
> 
> [My copy of this e-mail in both my send and receive folder has this
> text (I considered the text of the proposal to be everything after the
> word "Text:"; this seems like a reasonable interpretation unless the rules
> say otherwise)] -- and that the e-mail labeled Proposal 4371, distributed
> on the 17th has this text missing.  This difference seems to have not
> entered into the ongoing discussions; I'm not sure if it needs to or
> not.

Rule 2:
A Voting player may submit a proposal by sending its text to the
Promoter, who shall then post it publicly to be voted on.

The promotor did not correctly distribute the proposal then and thus
P4371 was an invalid figment of our collective immagination - if thats
not the case then the proposal that was created lacked the all important
text and when it was created and thus was applied without it - roughly
back to where we were.

P4371 was distributed on 17 Sep 1999 19:10:31 it is now 29 Sep 1999 so
the pargamtism isn't applicable.

> Secondly, it seems to me that the _nomicky_ thing to do is to continue
> playing the game started by Ackers in 1996 called Ackanomic, to
> continue to call it Ackanomic, and to attempt to determine as close as
> possible what its game state is.

Hopefully CFJ 730 will do this.

K 2

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From: Randy Hall <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Re: Proposal 4371 NULL.
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 08:51:20 -0400 (EDT)

K 2 wrote:

> > Secondly, it seems to me that the _nomicky_ thing to do is to continue
> > playing the game started by Ackers in 1996 called Ackanomic, to
> > continue to call it Ackanomic, and to attempt to determine as close as
> > possible what its game state is.
> 
> Hopefully CFJ 730 will do this.

I'm not so sure it will.  Just as the CFJ in the kernel thread was
obviously true, CFJ 730 is obviously true in the thread in which it
exists, so it seems to mean very little (at least to me) that it 
came back true.  Its _reasoning_ perhaps could provide insight (even
if it didn't exist officially), but it is unfortunate that its judge 
did not seem to consider the issue of what exactly P4371 
was in light of the missing text (and whether the missing text mattered).
a) Did it exist?  b) Did it exist in its distributed form?  c) Did it 
exist in its publically knowable submitted form?  d) Did it matter?

Good arguments can be made for a) and c) (its seems obvious to me that
b) did not happen).  K 2 has already showed the argument for a) so
the argument for c) goes something like this: the promoter probably did
not have the rule-based power to alter its text, so it existed platonically
in its submitted form, regardless of what eir mailer did to it.  Did this
ever happen in the previous ~4000 proposals?  Probably.  Did we ever 
notice?  No.  What happened then?  Since the pragmatism clause was 
created, the platonic game state was automatically adjusted to conform to
the consensus view of the game state.  Before the pragmatism clause
existed, we stopped playing true Acka do to unnoticed game state drift
when this sort of thing (and other errors) happened, and we did not care
because we could do nothing about it.  (I believe it was brought back
into alignment when the pragmatism clause was added, though).  In this case,
the error was pointed out before the pragmatism clause would have a 
chance to adjust the game state to reflect P4371 in its distributed form.

K 2 quotes this part of rule 2 in pointing out the argument for a):

> A Voting player may submit a proposal by sending its text to the
> Promoter, who shall then post it publicly to be voted on.

I think whether you favor a) or c) comes down to how you construe the
pronoun "it".  Does "it" refer to the proposal or the text?  If "it"
refers to the proposal, c) is the correct interpretation, otherwise
a) is, IMO.  It is easy for me to accept that the promoter distributed
_the thing_ that was _the proposal_.  (A weak precedent that comes to
mind is the fact that when Guy Fawkes was promter, e used to distribute
submitted proposals with their submitters' sig files, whilst other
promoters, whether using bots or not, sometimes removed the sig files.
I'm not sure what the current bot does.  The _thing_ distributed was 
still _the proposal_ whether or not it was proper to include the sig 
file or not, and platonically, _the proposal_ was applied, because the
rules gave no power to do otherwise.  Since sig files would generally
have null effects, this would not have been noticed in practice.   I 
wish I had a stronger precedent, but I must leave for work now).

So, unless there is a clear cut precedent or rule indicating which 
interpretion to favor in construing "it", it seems that spirit of the
game must prevail, (assuming the spirit of the game rule exists or 
existed), and what happened should be derived from there.

PS, to prevent duplicates, which is the proper list(s) to send 
discussions of this matter to?

Malenkai

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End of acka-research Digest V4 #178
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