Re: [s-d] [s-b] ais523's Refresh Proposal

[Ed Murphy <emurphy42@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ais523 wrote:

> Agora doesn't have any easy way to get out of emergencies, but a lot of
> ways to prevent them occurring in the first place. The main ones are:
>       * Many important reports are automatically ratified (= Approved)
>         after one week, the others are ratified by hand every now and
>         then. (This solves nearly all retroactivity crises; Agora's only
>         one like that was the Annabel Crisis, and that was before the
>         rules in question were introduced.)

There was also the Quantum Crisis (major economic revamp turning
out to have failed due to a bug in a vote-affecting ability).

Annabel was a player who, a couple years after leaving the game,
admitted to having actually been a sock puppet of another player;
thus, that other player had left the game, invalidating their
subsequent actions (including processing lots of proposals).  That
was eventually patched by ratifying the legal fiction that Annabel
had been a separate person during the time in question.

>       * It's platonically impossible to make it impossible to get out of
>         a mess, unless that rule is specifically repealed or overruled.
>         (Anything which would make further arbitrary rule changes
>         impossible just Does Not Happen. I don't know that that rule's
>         ever been invoked, though; however, it would protect against
>         stupid things like accidentally repealing the proposal
>         mechanism, or all the offices.)

Anything which would make them impossible within four weeks, in
fact (one of the Terrible Proposals from Nomic World was to make
voting periods last for decades).

>       * Things which could cause a lot of unknown gamestate if they
>         stalled or went wrong, such as assigning CFJs (= Oracularities;
>         this matters because judges can't judge for a while after having
>         a case assigned to them), and setting voting power, always
>         succeed whenever anyone attempts them; trying to do this when
>         not allowed to is very illegal, though, and would carry a high
>         punishment. (This is called 'pragmatisation', my RP tries to add
>         it to B's Clock, and it would solve the current
>         can't-turn-the-clock-on crisis.)

This is not quite absolute; for instance, supine (= non-Ordained)
players platonically cannot be assigned.

There's a criminal judgement of UNAWARE for good-faith errors.

>       * There's a mechanism known as "deputisation" which allows most
>         brokenness in offices to be fixed; if an officer (= Minister)
>         hasn't done their job on time for any reason, anyone else can
>         step in and do their job instead with 2 days notice. This both
>         fixes for nonexistent and unknown offices, and also officers
>         unable or unwilling to do their job. (This would fix all the
>         Ministry problems that B's been having.)

And vacant offices.

>       * Many rules specify fallbacks in the case that they don't work;
>         for instance, if there are ever no usable Public Fora, it
>         becomes possible to send public messages by sending to all other
>         players. (This is possible anyway but inconvenient so rarely
>         used.) Likewise, there are fallbacks for things like voting
>         limits, and the rules are worded to discourage creating rules
>         without sane fallback behaviour (because it's harder to use many
>         of the definitions in them in that case).

A couple of old Public Fora have also been retained as backups, and have
been used on a few occasions when the main ones temporarily failed.

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