I’m going to vote for this simply because ais’ re-reversion rather than raising a CfJ himself was such poor etiquette.

This should reject the Triumphs increase, rather than changing it in the opposite direction: currently there is an argument about whether the Triumphs are 7 or 8, and if a CFJ passes to reduce it by one there will then be an argument about whether the Triumphs are 6 or 7. (In other words, a CFJ should change the situation only from the hypothetical gamestate that you think is incorrect, not from both gamestates.)

The only problem with the sentence is that it uses the plural verb “credit” rather than singular verb “credits” when referring to an action performed by a singular subject. To me, this doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence at all. A comparable situation would be writing “an bounty” rather than “a bounty” – grammatically incorrect but the failure of grammatical agreement does not change the meaning of the sentence. In particular, it does not cause the sentence to become entirely meaningless.

Also likely in support of this, just for the sake of consistency (I don’t see a meaningful difference between graciously interpreting grammatical issues and graciously interpreting spelling issues, and we’ve already held that the latter isn’t something we’re doing during the folkowing CfJs)

@Josh: the reversion mentioned Gibberish which the rule clearly didn’t contain, so the reversion reason was clearly in error. I assumed that after being informed of the mistake, Brendan would agree that my action was legal, and thus there was no reason to call a CFJ. (Obviously, that assumption was wrong – Brendan apparently thinks there were two other grounds upon which my action was illegal. But they weren’t mentioned in the reversion reason, so I was unaware of there being any further controversy.)

In any case, with this current wording, the CFJ will (if you believe Brendan’s argument, which I don’t) set SingularByte’s Triumphs to 6 rather than 7. A pet hate of mine is people wording CFJs as though the values on the tracking page are correct, whilst simultaneously arguing that the values on the tracking page are incorrect.

@ais “Instead of repeatedly reverting and re-reverting a disputed alteration, however, Participants are encouraged to raise a Call for Judgement.”

@Habanero I see what you did, there.

Updated the text to suit your preferences, ais, although it’s clear you’re voting against regardless.

@Habanero: the difference is that (prior to the Gibberish rule being enacted) the use of a nonword in a sentence could be interpreted as a definition of the word, or as a dependency on a definition that would subsequently be added to the ruleset.

Meanwhile, a grammatical error doesn’t do that. Compare, say, “a hound” to “an hound” to “a yound”; the use of “yound” seems like it’s trying to access some context we don’t know about, whereas the first two are both formed of an article with the same meaning in each case + the same noun in each case, meaning that the meaning is the same – it’s just that a rule of grammar wasn’t followed.

As another example, consider a proposal “Add 1 Triumph to me and SingularByte”. Would you consider that meaningless? (The grammatically correct wording would be “Add 1 Triumph to SingularByte and me” – first-person pronouns come last. But this is a rule of grammar that not everyone has internalised and which shouldn’t make any difference to the meaning.)

@Josh: “Instead of repeatedly reverting and re-reverting a disputed alteration, however, Participants are encouraged to raise a Call for Judgement.” ← I’m aware (in fact I wrote that sentence) – but in this case I was unaware that there was a dispute, rather than a simple misreading of a rule.

Also worth noting: under the interpretation espoused by this CFJ, this dynasty never started – it would have been illegal to post a DoV in Clucky I due to its use of “a Olympian” in the DoV rule, making most actions subsequent to that point illegal.

I don’t think anyone would have considered the grammatical mistake to break the ruleset at the time, and it doesn’t in general make sense to consider it as breaking sentences – it isn’t like you’re introducing any new words that could potentially have a different meaning.

(Actually, that Clucky I ruleset also prevents, under the interpretation in this CFJ, unidling and registering – as such BlogNomic would be permanently stuck with no players, a state which would only be recoverable using a core rules scam.)

I don’t know if I agree with your “seems like” there. ‘Yound’ doesn’t seem to me to access a different context any more than ‘credit’ might be evoking some other made-up verb with an irregular conjugation. Both of these situations are equal in my eyes

It’s not that I’d consider either of the two meaningless; the take I think to be ‘most correct’ here is that in both the folkowing case and this case here we should graciously interpret what is a clear error when we look at the surrounding context. My vote for this is because (as you mentioned last time) in this particular dynasty the gameplay heavily revolves around the exact syntax and spelling of sentences and because I would like to hold consistent with what I see as a similar ruling earlier in the dynasty, even if I do not see it as the most correct ruling

I guess I forgot to clarify something earlier – my opinion is generally that we should try to extract as much meaning from the rules in question as possible, trying to work out the most viable possible interpretation of what is written.

In the case of “folkowing”, my position was that “folkowing” did mean something, and we should try to determine what – and eventually concluded that the rule in question was a definition of “folkowing” and therefore functioned correctly. In other words, my position was that the “folkowing” version of the rule did in fact have meaning. I voted for a revert to get the game into a known gamestate, but was under the belief that the “charactery” edit was illegal. (It is also the case that the scoring attempt that “charactery” was intended to block was also illegal, but that was caused by “folkowing” working correctly, not caused by “folkowing” not working.) My position was also that it was a distinct word from “following”, but the rule still functioned despite that.

In this case, we have to extract meaning from “a Mastermind credit”, which we can do by observing that these are three English words that each have a clear meaning in context, despite the grammar rules that normally prevent them being used in that combination – that’s the best way to extract as much meaning as possible from the rule, like we did from “folkowing”.

@Habanero: I had not considered the argument that the sentence might be trying to define “credit” as a new verb with an irregular conjugation; I’m not sure I agree with it, but it’s plausible. How many examples are there in English where a verb changes meaning due to being conjugated weirdly? The only one I can think of offhand is “hanged” versus “hung”.

ais, I think your argument is that verb conjugation and the choice of article in a sentence create exactly equivalent problems with the syntax of a sentence. I disagree, in part because a-vs-an is a complicated issue in English already, and in part because you’re comparing pronunciation to function. The latter is more important in a game that is entirely based on written language.

“An historic moment” and “a historic moment” mean the same thing. “The moose tramples” and “the moose trample” do not. Verb conjugation has a greater effect on syntactic validity than article ending, and that’s why this CfJ exists.

Now I’m wondering whether there are two different nouns that have the same spelling, but different pronunciations (one of which starts with a vowel sound and one of which starts with a consonant sound), thus the use of a/an helps disambiguate (like it does in the “moose” example).

I feel like the singular/plural issue possibly isn’t particularly important at BlogNomic because we normally know whether the the thing or things being referred to is/are singular or plural anyway (e.g. we still have lots of rules that refer to “the Mastermind” and use singular verbs because of that – interestingly, “Coregency” probably patches up those references, because it’s written as though it simulates a hypothetical singular Mastermind and then generalises, rather than just replacing the references, and I’m now wondering whether that was intentional to avoid bad-grammar-by-proxy).

In any case, I’m finding this discussion interesting – I had thought it was obvious, and although you haven’t convinced me to change my mind, you have convinced me that it isn’t as obvious as I thought.

OK, so there is one example where “a” versus “an” could theoretically disambiguate: “unionized” (the employment sense of this starts with a consonant sound, the chemistry sense with a vowel sound, and being an adjective it can be formed into a noun phrase).

However, the two words spelled “unionized” are so different in meaning that it’s hard to create a sentence where either meaning could make sense!

@Brendan: I don’t think you’ll have much basis for raising a second CfJ that the Bounty wasn’t actually satisfied. The rules (fixed or not) state that it’s up to each Mastermind to determine if the Bounty was satisfied or not. They are free to vote however they please.

The only way to actually require that the Bounty is unambiguously satisfied is to reword the Bounty rules such that the Masterminds are only allowed to vote FOR on the Bounty Notice if the Bounty was satisfied, like this:

If one or more enacted Votable Matters satisfy the demand of an Open Bounty Notice, a Mastermind may post a comment…

That above statement makes a requirement of the state, rather than a decision from a Mastermind.

  If we’re going to start demanding perfect grammar retroactively, there’s a whole lot of triumphs that are going to have to be revoked on the exact same basis.

Everything else aside, there seems to be no good reason to vote against this, as all it does is reopen the Bounty - allowing anyone to fix the rule, have the Masterminds resubmit their votes, and enact again without controversy.

@Josh: I agree that all this does is reopen the bounty – however, I think that doing so would create a mess, because it doesn’t settle the matter of which situations I can legally vote in. My against vote reflects my position that the vote (and thus) enactment was legal in the first place. If the CFJ is enacted, that will leave it ambiguous as to which circumstances I can revote in, and the bounty would probably remain unenacted for ages, given that nobody is likely to want to waste a slot on changing the rule to have correct grammar (especially as it almost certainly works even in its current form).

Passing this would be fine if “Unambiguously allow imperfect grammar” passes – that proposal would enable us to unambiguously revote and re-enact – but you voted against that for reasons I don’t fully understand (I understand Habanero’s against vote, but not yours).

For what it’s worth, I think that it’s possible that your vote on the bounty was illegal, rather than mine – I think that at the time you made it, you believed that the players you named helped to fulfil the bounty, but also that you didn’t believe that they did so using an enacted votable matter, and the latter part of the belief being wrong may have made your vote illegal. That could be a good reason to reopen/revote/reclose in its own right, but it makes it unclear what we’re voting on in this CFJ.

On the other hand – voting on a votable matter is typically legal, and the rule seems to just provide another way to do that, rather than replacing the existing way. (My position on the whole “if and only if” thing is basically “if it would otherwise be legal, you need an ‘only if’ to make cases not specified illegal – but if it would otherwise be illegal, an ‘if’ is sufficient to make only the case specified in the rule legal, you don’t need an ‘only if’ as well”. In this case, there’s no “only if” and voting would otherwise be legal – unlike other creatable matters, non-Masterminds can’t vote by default, but the Masterminds can.)

There’s a convention in BN that a vote becomes retroactively legally cast when the conditions permit it - see an idle player casting a vote that becomes valid when they cease to be idle - so it may be that our votes just stand as currently written.

I don’t think my vote is illegal - much like posting a DoV when it later becomes clear that you didn’t win, the thing that matters is the mens rea at the time of posting, and even a mistaken mindset meets the low standard of belief.

I’ll probably correct the grammer is no-one else does.

The situation this time is unusual because (as far as I can tell) you believed that the qualifications specified in the rule were met, but were mistaken about what the rule actually said. There is a difference there. If you believe you’ve won, and believe the DoV rule says that you must have won to post a DoV, then the DoV is legal even if you subsequently realise that you hadn’t won. But, say, if you believe that you’ve won a round (rather than the game as a whole), and believe that the DoV rule allows you to post a DoV if you think you’ve won a round, and then post the DoV, then I think the DoV is illegal – you didn’t think you’d won the dynasty. (In other words, the DoV rule is checking for “do you believe you’ve won”, not “do you believe the DoV was legally posted”.)

This is a similar situation; you believed the vote was legally posted, but were mistaken about what belief you would need to hold for the vote to be legal, and the requirement for voting using the mechanism in that rule was that you believe the requirement was satisfied using an enacted votable matter, rather than that you believed the vote was valid at the time it was made.

(I still need to go through the core ruleset and change all the actions that platonically fail based on the beliefs of the person making them, as they make the gamestate impossible to determine. My last proposal to do that failed due to other parts of the proposal.)

ais, I think you’re demanding a heretofore unheld standard. I’ve seen several dynasties where someone in a DoV made a comment similar to “I don’t think player X won, but I’d rather move on to the next dynasty than hold it up just because I disagree”, or “I’m not sure who is right, but I don’t want to argue about it forever”, and then subsequently voted in favor of that DoV. The rationale is expedience rather than correctness, but in the end, the vote itself is the final statement, regardless of intent.

Their intention was clear in that case: they didn’t believe or intend for that person’s DoV to be legal, but for their own reasons of moving things along, they voted in favor of the DoV anyway. How do you square that with your view that votes must match both belief and understanding? If you think this is truly the case, we’ve got a chain of illegal dynasties to go through, based on statements like these.

This idea that you can retroactively nullify someone’s vote itself via CfJ, based on what you think their thoughts were inside their head, feels like madness.

Is that the can of worms you want to open?

@JonathanDark: This is purely a rules wording thing. Most voting rules at BlogNomic don’t require you to vote based on belief. For example, DoV voting says “A Participant’s vote on a DoV is encouraged to reflect whether or not they agree with the proposition that the poster has achieved victory in the current Dynasty.” That means that if you vote contrary to your belief, the vote is still legal, because you are disregarding an encouragement, which is fine.

The Bounty voting rule said (before “believes”→“credit”) “If a Mastermind believes that one or more enacted Votable Matters satisfy the demand of an Open Bounty Notice, they may post a comment to that Bounty Notice with a FOR icon and the names of each Participant (other than themselves) who authored at least one of those Votable Matters.” This is a much higher standard than is required of DoV voting because it has an “if” condition on permitting the action at all.

In other words: I’m applying a different standard because the relevant rules are different, and it’s the rules that matter in a nomic.

(For what it’s worth, I consider basically every instance of “belief affects legality” in BlogNomic to be a bug that should be removed from the ruleset – the sentence is often meant as “this action is useful to perform if you believe X” but that’s different from what it says. But we have to go with the wording of the rules as written, or else change them. There are historical instances of DoVs being marked illegal early, ending the Hiatus, because the DoV author was considered to not believe they had won.)

Ok, that’s a fair point. Unfortunately, that makes Brendan correct. If we’re going to say that the rule applies the standard, the rule-as-written at the time says “Mastermind credit” which makes it impossible to determine what would permit any Mastermind to then vote.

In an earlier comment, you said “it doesn’t settle the matter of which situations I can legally vote in”, and you’re right. Someone needs to first correct “credit” to something actionable, and only after that, the Bounty can be either re-processed with the existing votes or re-voted on if that’s what is required, depending on how the existing rule “Bounties (Heists)” is fixed.

If we’re smart, we should agree to both fix “credit” to something more parseable and at the same time change the whole statement to allow Masterminds to make a judgement call more similar to a DoV. Having a higher standard for Bounties than for DoVs doesn’t make much sense, and I’m glad you pointed out the core problem.

My argument is still that I think the use of “credit” rather than “credits” isn’t enough to break the rule and prevent voting being legal. (It’s the same situation as if the rule said “If a Mastermind believe that”, which is bad grammar in standard English but legal in some regional variations.)

I would agree with you, but I think that even if we’re allowed to parse the rule as “If a Mastermind credits that one or more enacted Votable Matters satisfy the demand of an Open Bounty Notice”, it’s not enough. “Credits” and “Believes” may be synonymous enough for the Brains action that swapped them, because that action doesn’t require the resulting sentence to still retain the same meaning, it requires “some meaning”, having been changed some time ago.

I’m positing that while it has “some meaning”, it no longer has the “same meaning”, and that meaning as currently written is too ambiguous to mean the same thing as “believes” to permit a legal vote.

@JonathanDark: the rules at the time did require it to have the same meaning (the “some meaning” break came later).

However, “credits” is apparently an exact synonym for “believes” in this context: here’s the Wiktionary entry explaining, with an example that uses “credit that” exactly like “believe that”. (I picked a revision from before this dynasty started to prove I hadn’t edited it myself, but it’s still there in the current entry.) I wasn’t really aware of that usage until I saw it in the dictionary for myself, but it looks very strongly like an exact synonym.

CoV on account of this no longer being necessary

Likewise.