spoon-discuss: Re: spoon-business: A future proposal

[Eric Gerlach <egerlach@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Rob Speer wrote:

> I submit the following proposal 6 days from now:
> 
> __Someday We'll All Look Back On This and Laugh Nervously__
> {{
> Create revisable object 129/3, which is identical to 129/1.
> [[ This undoes uin's proposal, and puts back what Wonko's intended to do
> to 129. ]]
> }}
> 
> [[
> I must make another reference to Godel, Escher, Bach. Uncle P, if you're
> dying to know why your proposal will never work, the chapter
> "Contrafactus" sums it up (it involves Tortoise and Achilles watching
> their Subjunc-TV, which shows exactly what would have happened at
> various stages in a football game if certain contrary-to-fact events had
> occurred.)
> 
> Since we have no Subjunc-TV, we have no way of looking at the
> counterfactual version of the Nomic, where (for example) the proposals
> were numbered differently. Is it a version of the game where one of the
> proposals with conflicting numbers didn't exist? Or a version where
> those two proposals had each other's numbers? Or where all the numbers
> were different? Or a version of the game where a highly efficient but
> silly bunch of players encodes everything about each object in a
> three-digit number, which could be the same as another object's
> three-digit number, and these numbers are then uniquely identified by
> multiple paragraphs of text?
> 
> The rule gives no way to determine this; it only says "what they now
> would be had the statement been true at the time it was made", as if
> there is any deterministic way to tell that.
> 
> If we do not undo this proposal, the game WILL die.
> ]]

(Normally I snip, but doing so in this case could prove bad)

There's only one problem with your logic... the admin is our one view into
the game state.  What he says, we assume to be true.  Therefore, why not
make it true?  (There's also one problem with my argument, in that I
haven't yet read GEB, but that doesn't apply to the next points)

There have finally been flaws pointed out in Uncle Psychosis' proposal
(after all the empty bickering).  Going back to 129/1 isn't going to fix
anything.  It was equally broken, perhaps moreso.  If you're going to do
anything it should be to move in a forwards direction, not a backwards
one.

My Nomic philosophy is: "If it's not *critically* (i.e. not fixable in one
nweek) broken, but it does some good, vote it in and fix it the next
nweek."  I think that's good advice, and we'd do well to follow it.  We've
done that with Uncle Psychosis' version of 129.  It's better than its
predecessor, but not perfect.  *SO*, instead of taking a step back, lets
continue to fix problems.

Not to mention, don't we trust the admin?  Sure he's human and makes
mistakes, but there are many eyes in the game... don't you think we'll
catch it?

Oh, and we've got plenty of time to save the game from "death".  No rush
on this.

Bean