BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Missing an “if” after “FOR or AGAINST”, there.

Ta

I’m still unclear what is broken about the original wording or the core rules.

I cast DEF, Jumble votes FOR Lemon votes AGAINST

under the old wording, my vote arguably resolves to both FOR and AGAINST but is marked invalid, so doesn’t matter

under the new wording, my vote remains unresolved, and so as DEF votes are not valid VOTES, is also invalid

It’s definitely a niche quibbling-about-word-meaning kind of an issue. I guess we’re just closing down potential issues rather than entirely conceding that they exist in the first place.

I suppose there is a slight weirdness in the current ruling that two VETOs would render def votes valid without any clear understanding of what they resolve to. So might as well

An improvement, although (as a mathematician) I don’t believe “only if” implies “if” – it’s still a restriction, rather than a permission.

Thanks Christ we’re not playing a game based on coocoo maths logic then.

No, but we are playing a game based almost entirely on language.

If people disagree on what the words in the rules mean, that’s a problem – it tends to eventually boil over into people disagreeing about the gamestate and a mess of CFJs that make it hard to play the intended gameplay. It’s especially a problem when someone assumes that there’s only one way to read a rule, attempts to scam it, and then discovers that other people are reading it differently.

As such, it’s best to avoid using constructions for which people could legitimately and honestly disagree as to what they mean. (The only reason I know that you’re interpreting the rule as “…votes of DEFERENTIAL resolve to FOR or AGAINST if and only if…” is that the proposal wouldn’t make sense otherwise; this isn’t an interpretation that would come to my mind at all without the context.)

I think some of the most heated incidents come about when two people both think something is obvious and can only be interpreted one way (in the sense that they simply don’t see the alternative possible meaning at all, not in the sense that they’re rejecting it), and yet disagree as to what the obvious meaning is. So I thought that it was worth warning that the construction you’ve used is particularly likely to cause an incident like that – if anyone with a mathematical background sees the rule, the use of “only if” to mean “if and only if” is not going to be something that crosses their mind as even being a possible meaning. It’s comparable to people saying “if A, then B” to mean “B is true, even if A is false” (which hopefully seems as absurd to you as it does to me, and yet this is a common construction in some non-mathematical contexts).

I think this is technically slightly broken. If one Leader’s EVC is ”   “, and the other’s is ” “, then this makes s resolve to . That doesn’t seem like a big deal though.

[Jason] Note that your vote itself is now considered to be AGAINST, after all of those symbols.

oh lol