I’m not sure this is really necessary, but

eh

Half-hearted

Worth noting that this was proposed before, and failed due to core changes requiring full-quorum support at the time.

I find painting it as an ‘obscure’ change to be a little bit misplaced - it’s been voted on three times in the past three years, now this as a fourth. It is a clause that Kevan has been sceptical of since its enactment, but I find it to be an important clause, as it makes it clear that the Ruleset is validly the ruleset rather than the many, many other documents that also claim to be the ruleset (eg this one). While this is a largely aesthetic change at this stage, I worry about degrading what I regard to be a crucial protection for the game.

Oh, my choice of paint was out of politeness to you; it didn’t seem necessary to bring up the context that we’d nearly moved it back immediately, at the time, but that you’d changed your vote on the proposal instead of enacting it in order to illustrate a point about another rule.

What’s the degradation concern - that it will look less important in the Appendix, so might get thrown out a few more years down the line? Legally it’s actually a little stronger there, in that it gains precedence over Core.

Oh, I don’t mind that, my voting record is something I’m happy to own, situational rhetoric and all. I’m happy that I eventually got my way on another matter that I considered more important.

There is a rich history in this game for things being chipped at for the purposes of making them seem more unstable. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here but your own history of opposing this clause makes me worried about its position in the long arc.

I had to do a little backtracking for the history of this, but while doing do, I found this quote to be very interesting, even if the restriction has since been removed:

Kevan: I think if you can’t convince half the group to agree that a given core change is a good idea, it’s not the time to make that change.

https://blognomic.com/archive/majority_vote#comments

[Josh] It seems about the same level of obviousness-stating as something like “All numbers, unless stated otherwise by a rule, are in base ten”, to me. I’d always question whether anything like that really needed to be added into the ruleset, and would want to check that in phrasing common sense as ruletext we were getting it right, but I wouldn’t push to take something like that back out once it was in there and shown to be working.

I’m quite happy with the appendix being a dark storeroom of half-forgotten edge cases which occasionally get brought out when a new player has a weird theoretical question, to show that the dev team thinks of everything.

I don’t think moving it degrades it or undermines its legitimacy, just organizes the layout to have basic definitions at the top and edge case clarifications in the Appendix.