I suppose this is the place to bring up my own concerns regarding Emperors (which I recently expressed in Slack): I believe Metadynasties have been being declared for years without formally deposing the previous Emperor.

The relevant rule says “If there is no Past Memory, the Dynasty is a Metadynasty”, but doesn’t necessarily state the reverse, namely that “If the current Dynasty is a Metadynasty, there is no Past Memory”. And the proposals bringing about the last four Metadynasties (IX, VIII, VII, VI, of which No. 6 actually also introduced the aforementioned rule for Metadynasties) all use a variation of the phrase “Begin a Metadynasty”, without saying anything about the Emperor. It’s only precedent that makes us think the Emperor is deposed when a Metadynasty is declared. This state of affairs has presumably been approved by the DoVs ending the respective Metadynasties (except the current), but the situation remains anomalous.

I think we might usefully flip the rule to something like “If a Dynasty is declared to be a Metadynasty, then there is no Past Memory”; the current rule seems to apply more to idling Emperors than anything else (though it doesn’t, thanks to the exceptions in the rule “Idle Amnesiacs”).

Oh, I think there’s a Past Memory at the moment (albeit idle). This proposal will depose the Past Memory if it passes, though.

Note that there has been a Metadynasty with an Emperor (the fourth). Here’s the proposal that created it: https://blognomic.com/archive/compromise_mark_4_again/

[ais523] That’s… weird. Then again, many constants of the current ruleset were not yet set in stone at the time. (I didn’t go back further than Metadynasty VI because that’s when the current rule was written; Metadynasty V actually stipulated “Start a new Dynasty with no Leader. This Dynasty is named ‘The Fifth Metadynasty.’”

Regarding the idle Emperor, who would be deposed by this proposal, you are absolutely right. I wrote my own comment above without acknowledging this, but it’s plainly obvious.

[Publius Scribonius Scholasticus] A word of advice: if you can help it, it’s often useful not to vote on a proposal straight away (within the first two hours of its posting), because that way its author can still make corrections and improvements on matters which might otherwise doom the proposal. Once voting has begun – or the two-hour period has elapsed – this is no longer possible (see “Official Posts”).

Thanks for that reminder; I try to do that, but I miscalculated the time.

If you’re wondering what happened to start the fourth metadynasty: Rodlen was winning, but there was a secret rule known only to the Emperor which reversed the victory condition. Unfortunately, it did this by placing a requirement on every player to update a particular gamestate variable at a particular time (and the rule was not revealed until after that time passed). This caused absolute chaos, with widespread agreement about whether requiring someone to do something at a particular time, but not telling them that the requirement existed, would cause the action in question to perform itself or would have no effect.

The actual solution, a metadynasty with an Emperor who couldn’t veto proposals unless they were self-killed, was a compromise between the people who wanted Rodlen to win and the people who wanted a metadynasty.

(and by widespread agreement I meant widespread disagreement)

Some questions:

- the new rule will force to signal also that there’s no no Past Memory? Currently, it seems the statement is added by hand only for this metadynasty.

- “the Past Memory [...] must edit the rule “Dynasties”” What if the Past Memory is not an Admin?

There’s no way to start a metadynasty without using a proposal or CfJ. So recording the name of the new emperor (or rather, the fact that there isn’t one) would be the responsibility of the same proposal.

Anyone has the technical ability to edit the record of a rule; it’s just that you’re only allowed to do it when the rules tell you to. Rules have allowed non-Admins to edit them in the past.

Can’t a “Metadynasty” section can be explicit added, with info about what is a Metadynasty and how can be proposed?

It could be, and it was once.

We removed it because we thought it would be confusing for new players and it didn’t apply most of the time.

Then we added it back a definition, but just as a single sentence, as a compromise; now, metadynasties are defined, but (to save space in the ruleset) the process for starting one isn’t. The hope is that whenever we need to create one, the proposer will remember what the process is. (It seems to be a somewhat optimistic hope, though, given that the last four all got it wrong.)

Well, the process is pretty simple in itself: pass a proposal replacing the DoV. If there was a miscalculation, it was in trusting the rule to do its job.

Anyway, provisional FOR, but I’d like to see what the others think about this particular method of solving the problem.

Am mildly uneasy of the instruction “to update its specification” as permission to edit core ruletext with a fair degree of freedom. The sentence “Currently, there is no Past Memory.” will have to be reworded if it wants to name a player - giving the enacting admin freedom to make a mistake (if they forget the “player named”) or write something weird when doing so.

Do Story Posts actually mean anything at the moment? They’ve been a weird ouroboros for years, and the current ruleset is just defining them as “a blog post in that category” (which anyone can make at any time anyway, I think).

I agree with Kevan; this doesn’t feel like a really necessary “fix” (falling as it does under the catgeory of things that ‘just work’ on BN that would be unacceptable on a more legalistic nomic) and the free-text injection aspect makes me nervous. 

(Also in that category: every archived previous-dynastic ruleset starts with the line “This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Amnesiacs shall obey it”. WHat makes the actual ruleset special and gives it priority over the archived versions? Some of those versions don’t have Fair Play prohibitions on core rules scams. Best not to think about it.)

Arbitrary text injection is a real dealbreaker.

I think we do need to pin this down so that we can agree who the Emperor is at any given moment, but we should be able to do that by looking at past DoV/mantle/metadynasty posts (if we formalise mantle passing and metadynasty creation as requiring blog posts). Or maybe by making the “Xth Dynasty of Whomever” blog title into a formal piece of gamestate.

per Kevan

I suppose it’s the inter-dynastic Hiatus (though technically part of the new dynasty) that complicates things a little… The blog title and the green-red tag by the Emperor’s name are updated at the time of the Ascension Address, when it’s clear who the new Emperor will be and what theme they will adopt; this saves us meaningless trouble, but basing the “current Emperor” value on that will cause temporary inaccuracies whenever the Mantle is passed (if we adopt the DoV as the cut-off point) or until the new dynasty gets going (in which case we keep the old Emperor until that point). Neither is terrible, considering that dynastic actions are verboten during Hiatus (leaving “Mentors” as the odd rule out to rely on the Emperor), but it’s also not ideal, and I’d guess it’s part of why ais523 didn’t propose such a solution.

Anyway, this is too messy. 

([Josh] Other than being on the page found from the blog by the link “The Current Ruleset”? Maybe nothing. But this could be a modern-Western-democracy-level kind of “it just works”. How do you know which version of a constitution is correct? Does it state that you follow the text that is placed in a particular archive? No: you just follow the paper trail of your country’s legal institutions.)

[Duke] We could formalise the whole process: say that the Dynastic Status (which could be a single-string blog template in EE, and presumably something similar in Wordpress) tracks the current state of the game, and it can be “The Xth Dynasty of Y”, “The Zth Metadynasty”, “The Ascension of Q” and whatever other situations we need to track.

@Josh: The previously-archived versions are inaccurate records of the current Ruleset via their own provisions (as they would have cleared their own dynastic rules upon observing an Ascension Address), so by the “follow the actual rules, not what the Ruleset page says” principle, they want us to follow the current rules, not the rules as of the time the snapshot was taken.

Sure, we follow what we believe to be the gamestate, and that both gives force to, and receives it from, the current Ruleset. But how does one deduce the gamestate other than relying on people’s interpretation of how it has evolved from their, well, previous interpretations of the gamestate? If we suddenly decided to clone the current Ruleset and have two concurrent Rulesets, that would be illegal not because the old one would be a “better” representation of the gamestate (which we can only make educated guesses about, anyway), but because the Ruleset forbids us from having more than one Ruleset anyway (“This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic”), and since that is the Ruleset we’re meant to obey at any given time, we can obey no other Ruleset until this requirement somehow ends. It’s a self-sustaining system.

It’s a bit like the days of the week. Today it’s Monday, right? (Here, anyway.) Why? Because practically everyone says so, and everyone knows the simple rule that governs the succession of the seven days, and basically because yesterday was Sunday. Is there a benchmark by which to legally set which dates correspond to which days? Maybe so, but people don’t generally need it, and it’s not the original anyway; if we have one, we set it after the fact, confirming the existing order rather than defining it anew. The days of the week are a timekeeping system that has worked perfectly for well over two thousand years, through several different calendars, from a time their modern names hadn’t even been imagined. We have no idea exactly when they started, and we care little about the authority by which they came into being or the reasons behind it. It’s just there, and we accept it, and it’s self-perpetuating through our acceptance. If any alternative systems exist, they don’t matter until we decide they do, but for them to acquire legitimacy, the old one must lose it first.

CoV to move the queue along; I see valid criticisms and think we can make a better solution, but I also don’t want to hold up the dynasty on a core rules proposal.