The "tau" or "root" team will define the rules of changing the rules?
will define the code of the platform itself.
changing the rules is a mechanism to occur in all teams over tau.
Consensus means not contradicting with those rules?
on tau's scope, by consensus i always mean that all (or majority, depends on the case) of relevant participants agree on something.
The very first of those rules will be defined from alpha?
on our new design, all rules can be changed whatsoever in case of consensus, no matter whether they contradict an old rule or not. this is a deeper level of self-amendment comparing to the initial design. you can even replace the whole tau's code, the logic, everything.
let me paste some explanations i gave to someone few days ago:
our thing is more generalized than nomic. on nomic, the minimal building block is a rule. a whole rule. but i came into a conclusion that "the process of forming a theory always inevitably contains many non-theories", or what i call "pre-theories", which are simply theories with holes, to be filled by humans. can be seen as "questions". so if nomic is list of rules only, we'll have two lists per game: of partial questions with partial answers. then we converge into a proper theory, without even need to vote (!!!), using a new magic formula of mine.. anyway it won't be nomic, but goes deeper to the fundamentals of the process of theory formation.
we will have many nomic-like games. and we will be able to practically begin tau's specific root "nomic" from scratch at any point of time, without having to necessarily keep the history relevant (though it need to be kept for technical reasons).
to explain how it's possible without paradoxes,
consider the following two kinds of games, between two players, that want to agree on a contract that they both sign on:
1. they can either offer a clause to add to the contract, in every turn, and the other player can agree or not. then the next player offer a clause and so on. but then, what if they agree on a clause that contradicts a clause they agreed on before? there are many possible things to do when contradiction encounters, but they all seem arbitrary on this setting. that's like nomic.
2. or, they can offer a whole contract drafts on every turn, rather rule by rule. if we replace the draft by a new draft, we don't care about contradictions vs the old one. from tau's root point of view, we can always put a whole new tau code from scratch, without the need to modify it rule by rule, and by that avoid contradiction. ofc there's much more to say here, and rewriting tau won't be that easy, im just saying that we can bypass contradictions and make it logically possible.
my magic formula is better than those two options though.
Anyways.. I probably should hold my horses until the white paper will be released
more questions and thoughts are more than welcome!