[r-t] Philip's new Decisions, including Wiki page

[Don Morrison]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Mark Davies <mark at snowtiger.net> wrote:
> 3. E(C) - the term "well-formed" seems to imply a value judgement! How about
> "symmetric" or "self-reflective"? Also do you need to say "symmetrical about
> two places made half a lead apart", isn't that implied by "same path if rung
> backwards"? Well I guess it's not quite - but accepting Good and Evil as
> Alliance methods instead of Hybrid would be a sensible thing to
> allow.

Worrying about "well-formed" being a value judgement was my initial
reaction as well, but on reflection I don't think it's been a problem
to date. No one seems to be taking it as an impediment to ringing
Hybrid methods, so in this case the implied value judgement may simply
be obscure enough it doesn matter. Partly, I suspect, is that the word
never really escapes the technical part of the decisions, not being
part of the name of a method, and thus not something Joe Average
Ringer hears. The word he or she hears is "hybrid" which doesn't have
so strong a value judgement feel to it: it just implies such methods
are unusual, which is true.

Re the "two places made half a lead apart" -- I believe that was put
into the current Decisions explicitly to say paths that reflect about
a row instead of a change are not "symmetrical" (where "symmetrical"
was rephrased "well-formed"), as I was fussing and fuming at the
Methods Committee a while ago that a method we were trying to ring was
an alliance method and not a hybrid one, and in consequence they
changed the Decisions to make them explicitly say what they all
thought, and with which I disagreed. While I personally would much
prefer allowing things like Good and Evil to be alliance methods, it
is really completely arbitrary, and perhaps not worth fighting about.


-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"Home wanted for friendly Labrador. Will eat anything - loves children."
                                -- advertisement posted in a shop window