RE: spoon-discuss: For discussion, before I make it an official revision

["Jonathan Van Matre" <JVanMatre@xxxxxxxx>]

> Still in violation of 204 because a Judgment is not a 
> revisable object.
> 
> The Judgment is given the same serial number as the CFJ (Rule 
> 128/2). CFJs 
> are assigned serial numbers "AS IF they were revisable 
> objects." [emphasis 
> added] (Rule 126/1).

The construct "As if A were a B" does not automatically mean that A is
not B.  

For example, I am currently addressing you *as if* you are a human
being, but under the rules of the game you *could be* a well-trained AI
program.  Just because I'm making that "as if" assumption, it doesn't
mean you're not a human being, only that you *could* not be one.

> And even if you can somehow slip the revisability of 
> Judgments through the 
> Radar, you're still in violation of 204 with the sentence 
> "All effects of 
> the prior Judgment on the CFJ will be retracted" because now 
> you're talking 
> about retracting *effects*, not just the text of the judgment 
> itself, which 
> is a change to the past game state. So if a judgment gave 
> someone points, 
> this would make the game state as if those points had never 
> been awarded -- 
> a 204 violation.

No, the past is not being edited, the present is being revised.  Those
effects were real for so long as they were in effect.  Basically, I
believe 204 can already be interpreted to mean what Bean spells out more
plainly in Prop 240: "A proposal shall not, by its adoption, have any
retroactive effect on actions, proposals, rules, CFJs, or game state. A
rule shall not change any actions which occured before its adoption or
alter any game state at a time before its adoption. However, a rule may
allow changes to actions, proposals, rules, CFJs, or any other aspect of
game state, so long as the point in time to be changed (if the time is
an interval, the beginning of that interval is to be used) is after the
time of adoption of the rule. "

--Scoff!