I… I think that even in Blognomic, a word and a Word are accepted as potentially having different meanings.

I don’t think I agree with that! At the very least it’s a massive ambiguity that can be easily exploited

I agree that this is a problem. However, it isn’t enough that the proposal to define Upholding would have worked, everything that led up to the authorization for defining Upholding must also have worked (i.e. the proposal submission, voting, and enactment procedures must have existed and been in the state believed to be true (or close enough that it still worked)).

Also, I think it would be better to not rely on the definition of Uphold and just include what it means directly in the CFJ. I feel like the meat of this CFJ is saying “the gamestate is hereby set to what it would be if the ruleset had been <X> at <TIME>.”, and I think it would be better to just say that explicitly.

@Jason I’ve gone back and had a look at how proposals and enactment were defined at the very beginning; the Upholding proposal is definitely compliant. It inserting a definition into Appendix is also fine as the Appendix predates the ‘rule’ definition. I’m confident that Upholding is in the clear. (Cuddlebeam pressed me on this on Discord as well.)

I don’t want to set the current ruleset as legal as parts of it might not be; with Brendan’s dictatorship still ongoing and still under challenge it would be destructive to the current game to flatten it out with a brute-force direct imposition of the current ruleset.

Finally, I think that even if the Uphold keyword were discovered to have no meaning, the plain-English reading of the term in this context still does what we need it to do.

> @Jason I’ve gone back and had a look at how proposals and enactment were defined at the very beginning; the Upholding proposal is definitely compliant. It inserting a definition into Appendix is also fine as the Appendix predates the ‘rule’ definition. I’m confident that Upholding is in the clear. (Cuddlebeam pressed me on this on Discord as well.).

Great, and thanks for doing that so I don’t have to :).

> I don’t want to set the current ruleset as legal as parts of it might not be; with Brendan’s dictatorship still ongoing and still under challenge it would be destructive to the current game to flatten it out with a brute-force direct imposition of the current ruleset.

Sure, that’s fine. But I feel like upholding a ruleset from a few days/weeks ago in its entirety (except with the rule definition replaced) would be better than trying to uphold just the legal bits of the current ruleset.

> Finally, I think that even if the Uphold keyword were discovered to have no meaning, the plain-English reading of the term in this context still does what we need it to do.

Completely fair.

The troublesome “considered sections but not rules themselves” definition only dates back to August this year, so the two upholding rules mentioned came earlier, and are fine.

I’m a little uneasy with this CfJ’s reset point being yesterday (which locks in any errors made to the ruleset so far this dynasty) rather than the start of this dynasty (which still leaves any errors open for future reassessment).

@Kevan I feel like I worded the CfJ carefully to avoid baking any current errors in; that’s what the whole “that all of the data held within it is legal or not legal based on the understanding that a rule is defined as per the definition given in this CfJ” business is doing.

You’re upholding three things, one of which is “that [this edit] to the ruleset was a true representation of the ruleset at the time that it was made”. Doesn’t that stand alone and lock in that version of the ruleset as “true”?

I don’t think so; it simply asserts that those edits that took place to put the ruleset in that state actually took place, without making any judgments about their respective legality.

I didn’t have an issue with the current wording, and I still don’t. Sections can have sections internally, as in, “ate a piece of that piece of the pie”. I don’t use “comprise” often, but by every definition I can find it doesn’t appear that “It comprises five Sections” means there can’t be sections within those sections. And that’s all this unexpected interpretation is based on, as far as I can tell. The ruleset’s composition is already pretty clear.

> The problem is that “section” is already defined in Ruleset and Gamestate:

I’m not sure I agree with that. The fact that the rules are split into Sections doesn’t mean that a Section is defined to be only that high level group. The word “section” still carries its original meaning.

because I share the concerns Kevan has.

I guess I’m not AGAINST this, I just don’t particularly like the precedent.

per Kevan

[Josh] “it simply asserts that those edits that took place to put the ruleset in that state actually took place, without making any judgments about their respective legality” - I don’t follow that. If you’re saying that an edit to put a ruleset into a particular state was successful (even if it was working from an invalid copy of the ruleset), then that’s now our ruleset. A later CfJ or DoV arguing “but Brendan altered something illegally on December 5” would be up against the December 7 ruleset being “a true representation of the ruleset”.

Are the AGAINST votes on this all content that this CfJ failing renders the substantive issue dealt with or inert? (Ty aside, who overtly choses not to recognise that there is a problem.)

For what it’s worth, I won’t; I will continue to consider the word “rule” in the ruleset and proposals as essentially meaningless, so I’d encourage one of the AGAINST voters on this to consider actually fixing the problem; probably Kevan, as he appears to have motivated the AGAINST votes on the whole.

So would fixing the definition of Rule and making a simple “uphold this wiki edit: https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Ruleset&diff=17996&oldid=17977” (being Brendan’s ascension) do the job from your perspective, if we’re happy that the bad definition of Rule came in after Upholding and DoV-Upholding had already entered the ruleset?

It raises the question of whether any subsequent changes to the ruleset were legal, as any proposal that said “add (or amend) a rule” shouldn’t have had any effect; you could uphold all votable matters today as having been correctly enacted but at that point you might as well just uphold the current ruleset

Oh, true. So also “consider all game actions this dynasty to have been made under this new definition of the term ‘Rule’”?

It feels like you’re getting pretty close to my wording in this CfJ, but if writing it out your way gets your vote then sure, I’ll vote for it.

> Are the AGAINST votes on this all content that this CfJ failing renders the substantive issue dealt with or inert? (Ty aside, who overtly choses not to recognise that there is a problem.)

No. I agree that there’s a problem.

i’m torn between the genuine problem this presents and the concerns raised by kevan. i think i’ll vote to balance the votes out a bit. if this CfJ fails, could we have another that’s a lil more solid?

[Josh] Yes, I think we’re on the same page except for which historical moment of ruleset to canonise. It can be written more succinctly now that we know the problematic rule definition post-dates Upholding rather than pre-dating it.