[blml] Clarification...

[Eric Landau]

On Jul 19, 2007, at 9:40 PM, richard.hills at immi.gov.au wrote:

> President Bill Clinton once said, "Abortion should be safe,
> legal and rare."  My interpretation of the criteria laid down
> in the WBF Code of Practice is that, "Psyches should be unsafe,
> legal and rare."  A particular rare psyche should not be made
> safe for partner by a player _always_ perpetrating that rare
> psyche.
>
> That is, in my opinion, a player's general permission to
> deviate from his side's announced understandings is limited to
> those cases when their partner has no more reason to be aware
> of the deviation than have their opponents.
>
> In my opinion there is no general permission to _repeatedly_
> deviate from announced partnership understandings, since such
> repetition leads to implicit partnership understandings which
> then form part of the partnership's methods and must be
> disclosed (if legal) or refrained from (if illegal - such as,
> for example, a banned HUM method of automatically opening 1H
> with 0-4 hcp in third seat).

The danger here is in trying to address two rather different kinds of  
understanding without distinguishing them.  I apologize to the forum  
for allowing my previous attempts to explicate this point to get lost  
in the interminable debate over the "Herman 1H".

Partner makes a call.  You might or might not "know" (i.e. "have more  
reason to be aware of... than [your] opponents") the probability that  
he is psyching.  And you might or might not "know", if he is  
psyching, what he is likely to hold.  These are two different pieces  
of knowledge; you may have neither, either or both.  Whatever  
knowledge you do have must, of course, be disclosed, in accordance etc.

But it is only in the context of the latter that it makes sense to  
talk about awareness of partner's tendencies transmuting into a  
systemic agreement about which we can judge, for example, legality or  
conventionality.  Where I disagree with Richard is that I do not  
believe that my partner's bidding can legally be restricted or  
constrained *just because* I am aware that he will go home unhappy if  
he hasn't had the opportunity to perpetrate two or three psychs over  
the course of the evening.  If a particular call in a particular  
situation meets Richard's criterion that "partner has no more reason  
to be aware of the the deviation than [do the] opponents", its  
legality or illegality should not depend on how often I psych in  
general.

I may be wrong about that.  But I am convinced that we will not be  
able to deal with this issue satisfactorily if we try to apply a  
single set of principles and protocols to this conflation of two  
different kinds of knowledge.  Pretending they are essentially the  
same thing just won't work.

Brian has shown us the path to getting this right, but it will not be  
an easy one.  We need to push the discussion of psychs onto the stack  
until we come to a far firmer understanding of what an "implicit  
agreement" is and what it implies.  As long as that concept and its  
logical adjuncts remain vague and ill-defined we will lack the  
conceptual platform from which to deal with the psych issue.


Eric Landau
1107 Dale Drive
Silver Spring MD 20910
ehaa at starpower.net