[barmar]

If you have a he-said-she-said situation, the TD and AC don't really have much to go on -- they have to guess which of you to believe. That's presumably why L21B1b was put in: it specifies a default way to decide these cases if both players seem credible.

But it has that "absence of evidence to the contrary" clause for a reason: we only want to make the default decision as a last resort. And it seems like the system card and supplementary notes are exactly the kind of evidence this law is referring to.

There is certanly the possibility of gaming the system. System notes are not currently registered anywhere, we depend on the pairs to volunteer them. But a pair is only likely to do that if the notes support their cse.

[gnasher]

barmar, on 2013-October-10, 05:26, said:

There is certanly the possibility of gaming the system. System notes are not currently registered anywhere, we depend on the pairs to volunteer them. But a pair is only likely to do that if the notes support their cse.

I don't think that's true. Most people are honest. If you knew that your notes described the actual agreement, would you really pretend that you had some other agreement?

In any case, you couldn't keep doing this. If you used your system file once in support of an argument, in a subsequent ruling you couldn't claim that you had no written notes.

[barmar]

gnasher, on 2013-October-10, 05:47, said:

I don't think that's true. Most people are honest. If you knew that your notes described the actual agreement, would you really pretend that you had some other agreement?

In any case, you couldn't keep doing this. If you use your system file once in support of an argument, in a subsequent ruling you couldn't claim that you had no written notes.

You don't have to claim that. You just have to show up at the AC hearing without them. What are they going to do, get a subpoena?

[gnasher]

barmar, on 2013-October-10, 05:55, said:

You don't have to claim that. You just have to show up at the AC hearing without them. What are they going to do, get a subpoena?

The failure to produce notes that were known to exist would in itself be evidence. I expect that this would lead the Director and Appeals Committee to assume mistaken explanation.

[mycroft]

Continuing with the "him" in my example above: Yes, he's going to bring the system notes to show that his belief was correct. In the other case, he'll bring the system notes (because everybody knows they have them), but he'll point out that they're 8 months old (and, since they're timestamped in a way that is effectively tamper-proof, that could be believed), and we'd agreed to change *that*, not the other thing, a couple of months ago, at the last regional.

I don't want to throw them out of hand; I do want the AC to have a healthy skepticism; I want the AC to make the final judgement about how much weight to put in the system notes, given guidance by the LC and the TD as to the way that judgement is expected by the SO to be determined.

I have seen "oh, it's in the notes, that must be right" when it was clear to anybody with any skepticism that "the notes are a year old, all they say is that that *used to be* the agreement"; I've seen "system notes aren't worth the paper they're printed on", even though they're posted on the web with "unfakable" timestamp of "just before this tournament", and archive.org (or subversion) shows the change from two months ago.