Can someone explain to me what is actually at stake in the debate over the conventionality of simultaneity? I always assumed that the conventionality of the distant simultaneity relation was necessitated by the relativity of simultaneity, but it seems this is not actually the case. As John Norton said:

>"Contrary to most expectations, [Malament] was able to prove that the central claim about simultaneity of the causal theorists of time was false. He showed that the standard simultaneity relation was the only nontrivial simultaneity relation definable in terms of the causal structure of a Minkowski spacetime of special relativity.”

I figure Malament's theorem will make more sense if I can understand what the debate is actually about in the first place. What is a nonconventional simultaneity that is nevertheless relativized in the sense of Einstein and Minkowski?