RE: spoon-discuss: RE: spoon-business: Proposal: No Kickbacks (Justice, Administered Piecemeal)

[Eric Gerlach <egerlach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Jonathan Van Matre wrote:

> > Well... no. If someone *attempts* to take an action which is 
> > illegal, it doesn't work (although more on this later). A CFJ 
> > doesn't need to *change* anything to prevent it from 
> > happening, because it never happened in the first place; a 
> > CFJ just establishes whether it was legal or not. Of course, 
> > if someone takes an action that's illegal, and no one 
> > notices, then the statute of limitations kicks in after a 
> > week, and it *becomes* legal.
> 
> Let's try some logic, shall we?
> 
> 1)  Any player action can be CFJed up to one week after it has occurred.
> 
> Therefore, *any* player action is potentially illegal for one week.
> 
> 2)  Assume, as you assert, that potentially illegal actions become legal
> when one of two things happens:
> 
> 	a) The statute of limitations kicks in, or
> 
> 	b) The action is CFJed, and the CFJ "establishes whether it was
> legal or not", deciding in favor of the legality of the action

That's not what happens at all.  Rule 10 reads:
"All game entities must always abide by all the Rules then in effect, in
the form in which they are then in effect. This Rule takes precedence over
all other Rules."

Since players are game entities, in theory it is *impossible* for a player
to perform an action which is against the rules.  However, since we aren't
perfect rule machines, then sometimes we slip outside.  When this happens,
in theory something should come in and say "STOP!  You can't do that!"
Unfortunately, the Adminstrator (also being human) will sometimes miss
those.

So now we've got another problem.  How do we determine that an action
really hasn't happened?  That's where the CFJ should come in.
 
> Therefore, *no* action is certifiably legal until either a) or b)
> occurs.  No change to the rule set or game state is real until it has
> gone unquestioned for one week.
> 
> This is plainly ridiculous.   It undermines the very fabric of the game,
> since the rules are being constantly applied to the current game state.
> They can't wait a week to see if the game state is real.

Not true.  Every action *must* abide by the rules.  That's Rule 10.  But
there are mistakes.  And those mistakes are where the CFJs apply.  The
statute of limitations is just to aviod TOO much confusion if someone
CFJ'd an action taken in nweek 1 (imagine the ramifications!)

> For example, if the rules say the player with the lowest score gets the
> Sushi, and the records show I have the lowest score, following your
> logic I can dodge the Sushi by claiming that my score isn't real until
> all actions which have changed it have lapsed unquestioned for one week,
> or been ratified by a CFJ.
> 
> As I said previously, actions should essentially be "innocent until
> proven guilty" -- real and legal, until found to be illegal in a CFJ /
> inquest / whatever you want to call it.

That's essentially what is happening (as I see it).  An action is
*assumed* to follow the rules.  However, if it didn't, then it couldn't
have happened (as per Rule 10), and so anything we thought was true about
the game may not be so.

After all, the game lives on without us... well sort of.

> You said yourself, an inquest is to find out what happened.  The inquest
> / CFJ establishes a course of events that took place in the past, as
> well as a decision on the legality of those events.  What it can't do is
> un-event those events -- a murder inquest can't un-murder a body, a
> Senate hearing on a political scandal can't un-publicize the scandal.

Again, Rule 10 says you can't perform an illegal action.  And therefore it
couldn't have happened.  It is impossible.  The "murderer" just reported 
the person murdered.

> Remedial actions are taken in the here and now.  When things can be
> undone in the same way they were done, they are (e.g. the Secretary of
> the Treasury embezzles $1 billion, so it is taken back into the Treasury
> from eir Grand Cayman bank account), and it is *as if* they never
> happened.  But in other cases, such as a very dead, very murdered corpse
> (or to offer a potential game example, a player has resigned the game
> due to the illegal action taken against em by another player), the
> correction cannot directly undo the course of events, so a suitable
> remedy is chosen (such as penalizing the person / player responsible).

Well, in the player leaving due to an illegal action example:  Eir action
of leaving was legal, and so be it.  All the "action never happened" thing
means is that the game is in a different state than we thought it was in.
If a player leaves due to a misinterpretation of the real game state, then
that's unfortunate.

The only clearly defined thing is the game rules.  After that, the game
takes on a life of its own, and it we interpret that incorrectly, then its
our fault, and we have to bring our vision in-line with what has actually
transpired.

> This whole mass-hallucination it-was-just-a-dream it-never-happened tack
> is the stuff of bad soap opera plots.

... and, by our current ruleset, Nomic.

Bean