Re: [s-d] Prop: Brevity Incentive

["Peter Cooper Jr." <pete@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 10, 2015, at 1:23 AM, comex <comex.k@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> If a rule titled "Awarding Prop Points" exists, amend it by replacing:
> {{
> * The Player that submitted that Proposal receives 3 points.
> }}
> with:
> {{
> * The Player that submitted that Proposal receives 3 points, unless it
> increased the size of the ruleset by at least 500 characters.
> }}
> [[ Maybe I'll think of a more interesting prop tomorrow. ]]

On the contrary, this prop has several interesting aspects:

First, the term “ruleset” is used but not really defined. I’ll note that Rule 3-1 listing the Eras of B as well as teucer’s “The Reset Button” prop also do this, but in those cases any reasonable definition of “the set of rules” work just fine. Where you’re counting characters though, it’d be nice to know if “ruleset” includes things like Section Titles and Rule Titles.

Second, counting characters has a bit of ambiguity as well. Is this including whitespace characters? Are newlines two characters or one?

I might try to phrase the bullet point as “The number of non-whitespace characters within that Proposal is less than 500.” (counting the Prop rather than the rules it may make), or “The number of non-whitespace characters within the body of all Rules after the Proposal Passed is no more than 500 characters more than the number of non-whitespace characters within the body of all Rules before the Proposal Passed.” But as you see, brevity isn’t my strong point here.

Third, the scoring system incentivizes breaking up larger props into several smaller ones. This is true to some extent with the scoring system without this prop (as you get points per prop), but here it’s even more emphasized. Presumably 100 props that each change or add one word will just be voted down, but breaking my “Language” prop into 5 or 6 reasonable pieces could still get voted in. We may want to establish a Prop Limit before we get too much further with scoring rules.

-- 
Peter C.
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