and one more time , the rules are as they are due to exploits that can occur from doing that, you messed up, you messed up, wait a little while and think before you repost and mess up again.  no immediate failing.

This would discourage a proposer from carefully wording eir proposal on the _first_ attempt. —-Why bother searching for loopholes which might not be there, when I can just self-kill and immediately re-propose?—-

Ah, yes. I am most likely wrong, and by continuing, probably shooting myself in the foot, but does the 3 proposals/day limit slightly check this? Until the precedence change of law 1.3 takes effect.

The 3 Proposals/day limit is a good point.  Perhaps we could pass this and then limit to 1 self-kill per day?

I like 75th Trombone’s idea. Is that the kind of thing that you repost as a new proposal?

So is part of the appeal of this game supposed to be that it works like the (failing, in my opinion) California Proposition system? We have this thing here that anyone can put forward a Proposition, get enough signatures, and it goes on a ballet. If more than 50% of the population accepts it, it goes in as worded. It takes an immense effort to get something onto the ballet, and we only have one ballet every year. There’s nothing that really allows people to explain what they didn’t like about a specific Proposal, and a lot of Proposals get accepted by a marginally higher than 50% vote.

The problem with this is that it’s almost impossible to negotiatiate on specific terms. Most of the time there will be a Proposal you really want to get through, but only if it didn’t contain this one subclause of some horrible paragraph that allows barbers to shoot people without penalty (just a joke, obviously), but you then have to weigh whether that would be rare enough of a situation that it would still be worth it to just vote FOR anyway and go with it.

(As you’d have to wait another year, probably another few years, for a better version of the Proposal to come out, there’s no reason to believe that that Proposal will actually be better, and in the specific case of the California system, reason to expect it won’t be, as it’s not like your opinion really got directly relayed to anyone about why you voted AGAINST.)

I’ve seen aspects of this problem already crop up here in the last day I’ve been playing: a single typo causing a good Proposal to get struck down, and now we have to wait another day or two before we can get a better version of it in place; people voting FOR something with a cavaet associated with it; way too many votes, both FOR and AGAINST, that don’t have any explanation of _why_ they voted that way (except sometimes a vague feeling).

Not sure how best to design a nomic-like game that didn’t have these problems and not entirely convinced that isn’t supposed to be part of the fun, but I do feel that this would be a less irritating way of handling the situation than what we currently have.

Elias IX: I don’t see why the precedence change causes the 3 Proposals/day to not still operate under this changed Rule. This rule doesn’t say that if a Proposal immediately fails that you get to post a 4th Proposal… care to clarify?

I _really_ wish I understood why Quazie feels so strongly that this will exploit the game. Has this happened before?

If that were a problem, then I agree with 75th that it would be good to add a self-kill limit. I’d state, however, that if you really felt that way, you couldn’t “pass this and then limit”, as there’s then no guarantee that people won’t renig on voting FOR the followup Proposal. So to answer AgentHH’s question, my opinion is that it would have to be done as a separate new proposal.

My vote is thereby blocked on understanding Quazie’s concern, as otherwise I think this is a good thing.

It’s not so much about exploits as it is a penalty for poorly-crafted Proposals. 

Also, as I think I just said somewhere else, there’s nothing stopping anyone from drafting on the Wiki and requesting comments, without involving game actions.

Oh, there was something else I was going to point out there and forgot (and relates to 75th’s comment) on that there was also little discussion on the one non-Proposal thread that has come up, so it will be interesting to see if that people actually comment on partially formed Proposals. I love the idea of using the Wiki, though ;P.

after thinking about it, for um everything everyone else said.

just a cruel point of curiosity:

how many people here actually read saurik’s long commentaries?

I read and apreciate them.

I would urge the new players to read some of this game’s history (and actually write parts of it, by parsing the blogspot page and rendering it into new dynasty record pages), before trying to change Proposal processing mechanics.

Aaron: I did.

My thoughts follow: <hr>

>The problem with this is that it’s almost impossible to negotiate on specific terms. Most of the time there will be a Proposal you really want to get through, but only if it didn’t contain this one subclause of some horrible paragraph…

I personally think that this is the beauty of the system. Perhaps it takes longer to change the rule text via proposals, but you are always free to re-propose the idea minus the offending text. Further, nothing prevents you from taking somebody else’s proposal, modifying it, and then proposing it yourself.

When I joined, all of my proposals were awkward and particularly lengthy (and so inevitably failed, usually with 1-*, with * some rather large number), but if the idea was any good, usually somebody would re-write the rule text and propose it themselves.

The great thing about Nomic is that you can play however you like. If you don’t like the way that the current ruleset handles proposals (or any other thing), you are welcome to propose a modification to it. It may fail, of course (see above)—just as you may propose whatever you wish, each player may vote in whichever way that pleases him / her.

>I’ve seen aspects of this problem already crop up here in the last day I’ve been playing: a single typo causing a good Proposal to get struck down, and now we have to wait another day or two before we can get a better version of it in place; people voting FOR something with a caveat associated with it; way too many votes, both FOR and AGAINST, that don’t have any explanation of _why_ they voted that way (except sometimes a vague feeling).

Personally, I think that this is how you learn to proof your text. I know that I still fail my own proposals from time to time, usually because I don’t read them as well as I should before I put them up. As for how the other players vote, I can’t really explain it, because each person has different motives and I don’t know all of them. =)

I like thoughtful commentaries like Saurik’s, but I’m having a hard time keeping up with the pace of the game lately, so I am resorting to skimming. I’d like to encourage using the <h ref=“http://blognomic.blogspot.com”>old blognomic site</a> as a place we can have longer conversations.

Ahem, old blognomic site

smith: What are the advantages of using the old site?...

I’d guess that it doesn’t create clutter on this one. Doesn’t seem like a great deal to me, one way or the other.

I realise my mistake now.

I did read some of the history of blognomic before making this proposal, and was particularly amused by Hatxxorations. I may have missed the parts that fixed loopholes in the laws of blognomic, and apologise.

Thanks to everyone.

No, this has been one of the more informative proposals in a while. 

Face-to-face nomic is about debate and addendums and revising things until they’re perfect.

However, doing that in an online nomic is /really hard/.  Allowing people to edit eir proposals brings up the quesiton of /how much/ they’re allowed to edit it, and if it cancels all pending votes. 

If it doesn’t, there’s serious exploits possible.  If it does, why nut just repropose anyway?

Among experienced players, few proposals fail due to typos or ambiguities.  It’s just something you learn to not have happen to you. Proposals still fail for being unpopular, though.

The other difference with the California proposal system is that /everyone/ gets, at a minimum, one proposal per day, on average.  Keeping one in reserve to respond to others can be a useful tactic.  The longest a piece of poor wording can be in the ruleset without having a response-proposal made to it is 36 hours, which seems acceptable to me.

  In slower-moving nomics, there tends to be more argument and revision and so on (Agora’s ruleset is measured in the /megabytes/).

Cool?

I’d like to point out that the #1 case that pops up in my head for proposals that have been struck down due to typos, the reason I said it, in fact, were 75ths attempts to get Storytime through.

I also don’t think anyone has advocated the process of editing proposals that people are reading and voting on. Did I miss that?