Re: [s-d] Re: [s-b] CFI: All is Not Made Right.

[Jeremy Cook <athena@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 06:25:28PM -0500, Daniel Lepage wrote:
> 
> On Nov 3, 2004, at 1.30 AM, Jeremy Cook wrote:
> 
> > I make the following CFI:

I would like to add an additional comment now that Defendant has
clarified eir argument.

> > Argument:
> >
> > "indistinguishable" means "cannot be distinguished". We have no way of
> > knowing if the Voice is reading the list archives or not, and
> > regardless, both he and Wonko are capable of distinguishing them as
> > follows:
> >
> > Making a claim does not indicate that you think your claim is correct.
> > Defendant's argument seems to be:
> >
> > 1. If I cannot distinguish these actions from legal actions, they're 
> > legal.
> > 2. I claim I can do these things.
> > 3. Therefore, I cannot distinguish them from legal actions.
> > 4. Therefore they're legal.
> >
> > Step 3 does not follow. In fact, if they are not legal, e is certainly
> > capable of distinguishing, and it is circular to argue that the actions
> > are legal because e can't distinguish them, and e can't distinguish 
> > them
> > because they are legal.
> >
> > Since no rule other than r699 gives any authorization for these 
> > actions,
> > and Defendant's r699 argument does not follow, the actions are illegal
> > by The Default Case.
> 
>   Defendant's Analysis:: I believe the Plaintiff has misunderstood my 
> argument. It runs as follows:
> 
>    I claimed that I couldn't tell the difference between my actions and 
> legal actions.
> 
>    If this was true, then my actions were legal under r699.
>    If this was false, then my actions weren't legalized by any rule and 
> thus were illegal.
> 
>    Now, I still maintain that my claim was true, but it actually doesn't 
> matter. What r699 says, in effect, is that if we can't prove that an 
> action was legal one way or another, then it's assumed to be legal. And 
> it seems clear to me that there's nothing I can say that will convince 
> you that I was being truthful; but there's nothing you can do to prove 
> that it wasn't.
> 
>    So really, the reason why my actions were legal is because none of 
> you could distinguish them from legal actions - their legality depended 
> on my state of mind, which even I can't be entirely certain about 
> sometimes.
> 
>    So my argument relies on r699 twice: under r699, if I claim that I 
> can't tell if an action is legal, then it can no longer be proved 
> whether or not that action was legal; then by r699 again, it must be 
> legal.

Additional comment by Plaintiff:

In the BabelFish example, there is genuinely no way of telling whether
the translation claim is true. In this example, prior to the second use
of r699, there is no possible justification for these actions. If
Wonko's claim that he couldn't tell whether those actions were legal is
true, at that moment he could not possibly have understood the Game; but
his post indicated that he was perfectly coherent, and so there's no
possibility that the claim could be true.


> 
> ==== Historical tidbit ====
>    The second use of r699 is what it was actually intended for, btw: it 
> was put into place long ago when we had an object called the Cursed 
> Sushi of Babel. A player holding the Cursed Sushi of Babel was 
> forbidden from making posts to the public fora without first putting 
> the intended text into AltaVista's 'BabelFish' translation engine, and 
> translating it into Korean and then back.
>    To make sure this wouldn't stop players from being able to talk, a 
> clause was added permitting the holder of the Sushi to translate their 
> message into Pig Latin instead, but only if Babelfish wasn't working as 
> of when e tried to use it.
>    r699 was put in after one player (the Baron von Skippy, I believe) 
> sent in a message in Pig Latin, and claimed that Babelfish had been 
> conveniently down when e tried to use it. E also added that there 
> wasn't any way we could prove it if e were lying.
>    After much debate, the consensus was reached that if an action may or 
> may not be legal depending on external facts that can't be verified, 
> then it's assumed to be a legal action. r699 was proposed (by The 
> Voice) to formalize this mindset in the rules.
> 
> I mention this because it's a precedent supporting the claim that if 
> you can't prove that I could distinguish my actions from legal actions, 
> then we have to assume that any actions based on that are legal.

Zarpint
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