Detail: http://zenith.homelinux.net/cotc/viewcase.php?cfj=2846

===================  CFJ 2846 (Interest Index = 3)  ====================

    I can cause the Rule enacted by Distributed Proposal 6808  to
    amend a rule.

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Caller:                                 coppro

Judge:                                  ais523
Judgement:                              FALSE

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History:

Called by coppro:                       27 Aug 2010 08:24:28 GMT
Assigned to ais523:                     28 Aug 2010 00:08:44 GMT
Judged FALSE by ais523:                 03 Sep 2010 10:35:46 GMT

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Caller's Evidence:

On 08/27/2010 01:32 AM, Ed Murphy wrote:
> Proposal 6808 (Purple, AI=1.0, Interest=1) by coppro
>
> Super Robot Powers
>
> Enact a new Rule reading
>         The Robot can, by announcement, cause this rule to amend any other
>         rule of equal power, provided that it does so in a message
>         of at least 1000 words.

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Judge ais523's Arguments:

First, we have to deal with a potential bug in the proposal itself; it
attempts to create a rule, but does not specify its power. However, it
seems reasonable to assume that the rule is created at power 1; although
nowhere in the rules is a default power implied for rules, we know the
rule has a power of at least 1 (rule 2141) and at most 1 (rule 2140).
The only alternative is that the rule was not created at all, which
seems implausible.

The major issue here is the referent of "The Robot". In order for coppro
to be able to use the rule, I think e needs to unambiguously be The
Robot (rule 1586, which the scam depends on, states that the rule refers
to "the entity" with the given name). What the most plausible reference
for that particular title is depends on which forum and context you look
at; on a-b, it may well have been coppro, who asked that people called
em by that name although they mostly refused, but in different places,
and different contexts, it would mean other things. For instance, at the
time the rule was enacted, comex was using the nickname TheRobot on
##nomic on irc.freenode.net, an official Agoran discussion channel;
looking back, comex was the only human I habitually referred to by that
name (due to my usual habit of using someone's IRC nick to refer to them
on IRC, so as to alert them in a discussion). Sgeo created a ruleset by
that name purporting to have once been a nomic ruleset; whilst pretty
useless as a nomic (its only goal was to lock its ruleset into an
unchangeable state), "The Robot" would have been the logical name to use
to refer to that particular nomic. There was a distributed proposal
whose title was "The Robot"; although its name was, at the time,
"Distributed Proposal 6796", due to rule 2161, the term was used
informally to refer to the hypothetical rule the proposal would have
created if it passed, and to the hypothetical entity that hypothetical
rule would have defined. I imagine that on various non-Agoran fora, the
phrase would have other referents, although that is of lesser concern
when establishing a meaning for an undefined phrase. (The mathematical
or legal meaning takes precedence, but there doesn't seem to be a
mathematical or legal meaning of the particular phrase in question.)

I note in passing that looking to the rule itself for clues, it uses
"it" rather than the more usual "e" to refer to The Robot, thus giving
strong circumstantial evidence that it isn't attempting to refer to a
person (or at least not a first-class one; what's the usual pronoun for
second-class persons? We haven't had one in a while).

Thus, I don't think the rule has a referent unambiguous enough for any
entity to take actions under it; it would gain a meaning if a rule
passed defining The Robot to be something in particular, as rule 1586
has no effect here due to failing to specify a unique entity to bind the
meanings in that rule to. So I judge CFJ 2846 FALSE.

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