BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

For reference, here’s a link showing the changes that this proposal makes: https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Ruleset&diff=15643&oldid=15628

Taking a liberty with the interpretation may be a little dangerous, though: if it isn’t legal under the current rules, this would be an illegal third proposal, so we’ll be left in some doubt as to whether it was legally enacted or not. If this proposal is popular, I suggest that we use a CFJ to uphold its enactment, because otherwise there will be doubt about which order the rules are in and that may cause future proposals to fail.

Oh wow, and I’ve just realised a deeper problem with the current implementation of cleanup proposals: it’s possible that whether a proposal is a cleanup proposal or not depends on the gamestate at the time it’s enacted. That means that determining whether this is an illegal third proposal or not requires evaluating a future conditional. (Imagine if the ruleset gets changed by CFJ before this proposal is enacted; does that mean it’s been an illegal third proposal all along?)

I think the “rewrite the whole ruleset thus” approach is not what was intended.

I think this is indisputably not a cleanup proposal because
https://blognomic.com/archive/coreappendix_defining_slotlessness makes changes to the non-dynastic rules and while it got self-killed it feels like we’re doing a lot of cognitive load on determining if something is a cleanup proposal by evaluating which proposals could in theory be enacted and then also evaluating what those effects would be to see if the end result is a cleanup proposal

I don’t follow

Hum, the future conditional is interesting. If I make a proposal to “remove the 749th word from the ruleset”, am I implicitly also saying “after applying all older pending proposals of course” (even if it hasn’t crossed my mind), or am I demanding that one edit based on how the ruleset looks now, with anything that happens between proposal and enactment being a mystery?

We could solve the problem by allowing unlimited Cleanup Proposals but only invalidating them if - when we come to enact them - it turns out they do more than just move text around. But really we could just say that if the Emperor says it’s a Cleanup Proposal (by tagging it as such), then it is.

Maybe Cleanup proposals should be able to be enacted out of order… Maybe Cleanup proposals should actually be Cleanup CfJs, if their main characteristics is that they enact out of order and don’t follow slots

@Josh lets say that ais hadn’t self-killed his proposal

Then I think this wouldn’t qualify as a cleanup, as it would potentially make changes to non-dynastic rules (if ais’s proposal passes)

I think the best solution is to narrow the scope of cleanup proposals so they are self-contained and not dependent on the passage of other proposals.

[Josh] Cleanup proposals really need to enact as part of the queue, if they’re making major changes to the structure of the ruleset. Enacting something this big at CfJ speed would invalidate most of the preceding queue, which will have been written in reference to the unorganised ruleset.

Yeah, that works both ways though!

Maybe Cleanup proposals are just an idea that doesn’t completely work, who knows

I guess a CfJ-speed Cleanup proposal could amend the pending proposals, if it was feeling ambitious.

But yes, the norm is certainly to accept that any given dynasty’s ruleset will probably be a mess, and that it’s easier to play on than to try and rearrange it mid-dynasty. A regular old proposal of “clean up the ruleset” is always legal, after all, but rarely actually happens.

In any case, looks like Post Hoc is going to pass so we can probably cautiously assume that this is legal, for now.