Monday, September 04, 2017

Can a Disputed Quorum be Passed?

This isn’t quite a call for judgement, but a preface to one.I hope for it to end with additional core rules being added. We have a rather interesting edge case here.

Once Card votes on the UN resolutions, they may or may not be popular, depending on a CfJ that will be made if the resolution is enacted. Pokes will apparently only enact the CfJ after the resolution is passed. Does he then have the right to reverse the proposal while it has a pending CfJ, or should it stay enacted until it fails? From the voting patterns we’ve seen so far, strategic voting could leave any CfJ dead in the water (not that I’m saying we would, but its an interesting case to consider). In this case admins could possibly be justified in an “edit war”, where proposals are enacted/unenacted and two branches of the game exist.

This is a bad thing. And it would probably violate “Fair Play”. But then who is guilty? does ejecting both admins solve anything? When is this state considered to have “started”? and is the proposal enacted or not?

I see a few ways out:
The proposal is enacted until the CfJ goes through, because to insist on the resolution of CfJ before passing is akin to intentionally delaying the game.
The proposal is not fully popular, and so is not enacted because its popularity is challenged.

In this specific situation:
We pass a CfJ that hands the issue over to a random roll.
We pass a meta-dynasty. 
Somebody leaves their block and agrees that the call for judgement has merit.

Any thoughts? I’d prefer to solve both the general situation and the specific situation.

posted by derrick at 04 Sep 2017 18:46:00 UTC Comments (6)

Comments

card:

04-09-2017 19:32:38 UTC

“Once Card votes on the UN resolutions, they may or may not be popular, depending on a CfJ that will be made if the resolution is enacted.”
I’m confused on how it “may or may not be popular”: a UN Proposal is wrapped in 3 layers of inheritance. It’s firstly a voteable matter, then a proposal and lastly a un resolution. All the rules of each apply, with the UN resolution rules overruling contradictions due to rule 3.3.6

For a voteable matter, it’s popular if either it is equal to or exceeds quorum or is older than 48 hours, has more than 1 vote and FOR votes exceed AGAINST votes.

For a proposal, it can be enacted if it’s popular, open for 12 hours and not been vetoed or self killed.

For a un resolution it is only Popular if it has a Support that equals or exceeds UN Quorum.

So the un resolution overrrules the default voteable matter rule, meaning that the only way for a un resolution to become popular is by having Support equaling or exceeding UN Quroum.

So if I had voted FOR those un resolutions, they would be popular and could be enacted at 12 hours if the votes didn’t change.

pokes:

04-09-2017 19:43:29 UTC

I’d like to think we could be cool-headed enough in this general situation to get to a point where at least one vote is swayed through some amount of debate on it.

When I read your title I thought you were getting at an even-nuttier potential situation here, in which a disputed proposal idles half of us, and we don’t even know which votes count or don’t, or what quorum is, while resolving that. I think we should have something that very strongly discourages changing the CfJ voting process, which would include strongly discouraging idling people en masse.

derrick: he/him

04-09-2017 19:44:24 UTC

That’s one interpretation. The other is that all conditions in all layers of inheritance matter. Its grasping for straws, obviously not what was intended when the proposal was approved, and so forth, but it may be intentionally read that way and become ambiguous.

If you had voted for the resolution.

pokes:

04-09-2017 19:50:24 UTC

@card: It’s not obvious to me the UN Resolution rule overrules the default rule, and isn’t just an addendum that’s also compatible with the existing popularity conditions. For example, say we had:

- A vehicle can go if it has gas in it.
- A car can go only if it has wheels on it.

I think the car still needs gas, even if it has wheels.

card:

04-09-2017 20:04:27 UTC

@pokes
How does it not override how the default voteable matter rule works?
It states right there “A UN Resolution is only Popular if” meaning that if it doesn’t reach that condition, it’s not popular.

So if it had 6+ for votes but not UN Quorum it wouldn’t be popular. Similarly if it had 1 for vote and reached UN Quorum it would be popular.

If it were worded “A UN Resolution can only become Popular if”, I would agree with your interpretation.

pokes:

04-09-2017 20:17:57 UTC

I disagree at the “Similarly” in “Similarly if it had 1 for vote and reached UN Quorum it would be popular.”

I’m basing this off the mathematical logic definition where “X only if Y” does mean that if it doesn’t reach condition Y, then we don’t have X. But it also means that having Y doesn’t by itself give us X. Conventional English seems vague on this point.

On searching for this I see many of the references on ‘only if’ are from LSAT prep sites, so the logic definition might also be the one used in American law. Not that that means it’s the same convention we have to use here, but a fun extra point.