The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
novehiclesinthepark.com
novehiclesinthepark.com
To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
(To be clear, I think content moderation rules are often difficult to figure out when to apply. I just think the vehicles-in-park rule is much, much, much clearer than many content moderation rules.)
It's much more convincing.
But I also want to say this is a really cool website. I love how he used this experience to set the table for what is otherwise essentially a blog post. Very cool.
But to hone in a bit more:
> It was about content moderation. Specifically, some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply.
His experiment not only doesn't prove this because of the observation you made (there is a clear majority opinion), but also because the "simple rules" people want ARE simple in contrast to the current standard of assuming you need to be a moral authority. The supposed simple rules aren't simple because they avoid controversy. They are simple because they don't avoid controversy. They are minimal. Basically just take the stuff virtually everyone agrees on, or is illegal/possibly illegal. Yes, there are gray areas there. There are always gray areas. But the gray areas surrounding "we need to shape productive discourse" is a lot more controversial than the gray areas surrounding "is this legal?" Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.
And before someone says "well if you have offensive content then advertisers will leave," I want to point out that is not a content moderation problem. That is an advertiser attraction problem. If the goal is advertiser attraction then we are playing a completely different game and you should remove everything that is remotely controversial. Or consider that your business model is inherently bad for speech.
Are you suggesting that section 230 is meant to discourage Internet intermediaries from moderation?
The original intent of this law was to stop requiring intermediaries to choose between adopting a passive conduit role and having legal responsibility for content. The legislators hoped that providing a general protection from liability for user-generated content would encourage more moderation by intermediaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
That might not have been the most pro-speech policy option overall but it was notionally very pluralist (with different platforms potentially having very different standards, purposes, goals, rules, communities, etc.) and it did manage to temper the previous somewhat paradoxical incentives, as well as providing a lot of legal certainty to facilitate the creation of new platforms of various sizes and models.
Pretty much everyone on the Internet is frustrated by moderation and sees pathologies and biases of moderation, intermediaries putting their thumb on scales, and so on. On the other hand, what we haven't seen is the enormous volume of litigation against intermediaries that would occur without §230. I expect people would literally be suing Y Combinator over HN moderation decisions. I can think of HN moderation decisions that I really disagree with, but it's impossible for me to imagine that having had those turn into lawsuits would somehow have been better for anyone.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
It fully agrees with the majority interpretation in all cases despite the rule being minimal and requires taking the inferred intent into account. LLMs for machine moderation are probably rolling out very soon, I doubt Reddit and the like will even allow for human moderation in a few years (if prompt injection can be solved robustly enough).
The problem with having humans as rule breaking judges is that we all have our ever changing biases and motives. Most everyone has an experience with a power tripping mod deleting their post or comment because they had a bad day and needed to take out their anger on something. An LLM can parse these variable situations with ease and can also be tested for those biases. Since it'll never deviate from its training data it always acts as impartial as possible within the rules' limits.
You can't possibly be serious or be in good faith.
Giving AI the blanket ability to censor with no human controls will destroy us faster than giving AI the blanket ability to launch nukes with no human controls.
That is, unless the AI has already decided it's going to launch the nukes to save the world the second we give it the authority and it plans to lie and say yes when we make it pretty please pinky promise to not launch the nukes with the goal of destroying humanity.
That's the easiest reading. In a real example, though, there'd be law or authority quoted, and you can be sure that's there would be an exception for emergency vehicles. That doesn't change the meaning of the sign in isolation.
I had my closest park in mind when answering. It has a river and multiple wooden bridges to access. Also, the ground floods sometimes in the winter and some paths are too soft for a car. No way an ambulance or firetruck is going to get in the park. They could try, but would loss more time than doing it on foot, or a bridge would collapse under their weight.
[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-wilderness-tool/
I went with "yes, violation" with the understanding that it's one that would be allowed. Perhaps I was wrong to mix "would" and "should".
You can pretend that's not the case all you want.
More surreal maybe it is above that cave in Lost and even an ISS or plane should not go over that location.
And then asked questions like:
- Is a grilled cheese a sandwich?
- Is two pieces of bread with a third piece of bread in the middle a sandwich?
- Is a hotdog a sandwich?
- Is a taco a sandwich?
- Is a breadbowl a sandwich?
- Is a poptart a sandwich?
- Is a calzone a sandwich?
- Is a burrito a sandwich?
- Is a pizza folded in half a sandwich?
Having asked these questions to many folks over the years, I promise the answers are much more split.
Sandwiches have open sides
If you don’t cut it, no.
If you cut it at the fold, yes.
Now what if the pizza crust is toasted enough that, while it was not your intent, it breaks evenly at the seam during the act of folding it in half, and then you proceed to collapse the two halves before taking a bite. Did you have a sandwich for lunch?
However, I wonder you you would reconcile an uncut, folded pizza not being a sandwich against a meatball marinara, which to my understanding is a single piece of sliced bread with meat and sauce in the middle. Is this not a sandwich?
Similarly, the list of berries is not the same as the list of fruit ending with "*berry".
Now, I wonder which specific items we agreed on, if any.
Thus IMO emergency vehicles violate the rule, although they should be allowed. Same thing IMO with the tank. Sure it's inoperable but it's a vehicle, in the park.
(IANAL, but have been driving emergency vehicles for 15 years).
Intent is for the judges / lawyers.
And, yes, of course, moderation questions are much harder. At least with the vehicle thing people aren't usually aren't deliberately constructing tricky cases.
The fact that there's no clear consensus on most of the questions means they are ambiguous, no?
That also fits the English definition of a vehicle, which includes a bicycle.
except you have just applied an assumption (which is often true) that may not be true depending on circumstances - that the planes were excluded because it couldn't have caused any negative effect.
For example, if the park had been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese#Isolation_and_unco... , and the intention was to keep the indigenous peoples isolated.
But this isn't a part of the rule, and it is an interpretation of the rule by the administrator. A different administrator might interpret planes that fly higher than audible altitude would be OK, while another one might consider a visual detection altitude to be a violation. And another might consider no altitude to be permissible (because if they crashed right there, they'd be falling into the park).
That phrasing sure makes it sound like they're not in the park until they fall. Does it occur the moment they hit the ground, or sooner? If ground, then that tells us that the quadcopter isn't in the park while off the ground either; it's above the park.
In both law and real life, there is a common understanding (to use your term) that rules may be violated for the greater good. Does driving an ambulance into the park violate the letter of the rule? Yes, but it's still OK because we give emergency vehicles wide leeway to break rules so they can save lives. Judaism even encodes this in a general principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh
It's amazing how many people can't follow the instructions, without realising their proving the creators point. Even while arguing the creator is wrong!
This all ain’t easy.
But I don’t need to to allow ambulances. I think this is the core of what many engineers fundamentally don’t get about rules and laws in society?
The framing of the rules clearly places this rule firmly in the real world, in a real park.
I've heard it said that common sense is just what naive people assume is obvious.
I'm not sure about that but I do know that people often disagree on what is and isn't common sense.
I guess this is why English Common Law works. We use precedence to argue about how the words of the law should be interpreted and at least try to flush out ambiguity.
The instructions specifically say not to apply this kind of logic.
GGP made up the sign. The instructions describe a rule, not a sign.
If you think the emergency service vehicles violate the rule, how about a park maintenance vehicle or a park ranger vehicle? Would you say "no vehicles in the park" rule applies to them too, so they would be violating it?
Of all the forums for an insistence on rigidly, literally following rules to make people's heads explode, HN is not exactly the most surprising, but it is one of the funniest.
Well, no, people can just be wrong.
Only the car is forbidden and everything else goes.
When you do try to enforce rules literally, you end up with kids being expelled because they brought an action figure to school, or teenagers being executed because they fell into a flower bed.
Natural language itself must be interpreted within a context.
And at least in the US generally you need to have been harmed, or be likely to be harmed by enforcement of a rule to even have standing to challenge it.
Obviously emergency vehicles are going to do what they need to do, but even if they are allowed to break the rule they are still breaking the rule.
I also think a park sign that says no vehicles also applies to bicycles and skateboards.
Vehicle (noun)
1. a means of carrying or transporting something
...such as
... a: motor vehicle
... b: a piece of mechanized equipment
2 : an agent of transmission : carrier
3: a medium through which something is expressed, achieved, or displayed
----------------
You're thinking of specifically a __motorized__ vehicle. Which is a different thing than "vehicle". I think you'll agree that a bicycle and skateboard carry people and transport them. This is the same reason a wagon violates the rule. Almost everything on there was a vehicle. I think the only ambiguous ones are paper airplane, matchbox car, toy boat, and kite and I said those weren't because they can't transport things and are not motorized. But hey, technically they can be a medium through which someone expresses their joy.
No painting or dancing in the park.
The entire world agrees bicycles are vehicles and it's encoded in the law almost everywhere. This is no true Scotsman, sure, but IMO if you're trying to argue a bicycle is NOT a vehicle you're only doing it to argue and flex your vast knowledge of the English dictionary to randoms on the internet. It's a completely unreasonable position to hold.
Many roads nowadays have a "one way only - bicycles excepted" to indicate the road is a one way road but bicycles are an exception to the rule and there's a contraflow bike lane. Most parks that have a no vehicles allowed sign is likely to have a bicycle excepted sign underneath.
Bicycles are vehicles and there is no ackshully that will change that. If you're trying to win an argument with the technicality that everyone would ignore a "no vehicles" sign on a bike that isn't an argument that disproves a bike is a vehicle. All it shows is that a bike is a special vehicle with special rules and exemptions to "no vehicle" signs.
There is no pedantry in calling a bicycle a vehicle. It's obviously a vehicle - it's entire purpose is to be a lightly-mechanized means of transit! Now if we see a sign in a park that says "no vehicles" many people - using our cultural knowledge and context - will interpret the intent of the sign as a reference to "[motorized] vehicles".
Those people are wrong. It's as simple as that. In the eyes of the law bikes are vehicles nearly everywhere. It's settled and not up for debate or discussion.
I believe the entire point of the exercise is to demonstrate people will argue that the sky isn't blue.
I think the point of the game is to demonstrate there are some people who will argue the sky isn't blue. That is one thing we should all be able to agree on but if you were to pose that question to the internet you'd definitely get "I'm colorblind and what you call blue I call green ergo the sky is not blue".
Those people aren't worth your time and will disagree just for the sake of disagreeing and getting a rise out of people. I'll admit I'm guilty of doing the same in some circumstances.
Really what surprises me is how few people seem to understand that language is incredibly fuzzy. That there's an imperfect encoder (language) and decoder (listening/reading) system. That people are working off of different priors that bias these systems. That we aren't perfectly aligning the intent of our messages with the reception of them. That this system becomes even more fuzzy as the audience increases (increased variance in priors). It is a bit more surprising to me that in a community full of nerds where we communicate online, where we're exposed to many priors, that this is still a relatively unknown phenomena despite it being fairly easy to conclude simply through experience (besides also being fairly well discussed). I for one think the fuzziness of language is incredibly cool.
> 3. a medium through which something is expressed, achieved, or displayed
"Carrier" is also a very broad term, no human carrying anything is allowed in the park then.
We can think of communication as having 3 main components. 1) the intended concept being intended to convey. This is in the person's head. 2) The fuzzy compression mode (language) that is used to convey said thought. Be that words, writing, or interpretive dance. 3) The fuzzy decoder that turns the language into a thought in another being's head. This is filled with priors and assumptions that fill in many of the gaps.
The thing about this is that we usually learn to speak in pretty localized groups, meaning that our priors align and we have a lot of good faith (attempting to interpret intent rather than interpreting the words). But with a larger audience we have higher variance that makes what is obvious a priori a disastrous outcome. "Everybody knows" is not something everyone knows. https://xkcd.com/1053/
But in many many jurisdiction bicycles is explicitly a vehicle. One that people over certain age cannot drive on sidewalks and must use road. Or designated ways. Ofc, it is also banned in some places.
Also it sometimes acts unlike pedestrian like having to yield to cars when crossing safety crossings.
The first excludes pedal cycles.
This is exactly right, I think, and in fact those who are focusing on the "intent" of the rule or on whether a violation of the rule is justified seem to have missed the clear wording of the instructions:
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
So the only questions that ever enter into it are (a) is this object a vehicle?, and (b) is the object in the park?
> a park sign that says no vehicles also applies to bicycles and skateboards.
Interesting, my dividing line was that a bike is a vehicle but a wagon, rowboat, or skateboard are not. The majority seems to think both a bicycle and a memorial tank (??!) are not vehicles under the rule.
However, the tank was not functional. Since it cannot convey it is therefore not a conveyance and therefore not a vehicle. It’s only shaped like a familiar one.
I matched the majority only 11% of the time.
The scenario said tank. A tank is a vehicle. No vehicles in the park.
Edit: I matched 11% as well!
In my view no matter what the tank originally was, it ceases to be a vehicle when it can no longer act as a conveyance. A tank (and any vehicle) is not just a form, but a function. Is a car with no motor, no tires, no transmission a vehicle? I do not believe so, because it cannot and lacks the possibility of moving without a substantial transformation.
As I said, if the thing can (i.e., without significant, non-trivial alterations to its current form) act as conveyance then it is a vehicle. It need not be in the act of conveyance, nor must it have an independent means of propulsion.
Edit: my simple rule breaks down when thinking about a flat piece of wood attached to rope. My mind says that's only a vehicle if someone chooses to use it as such for pulling objects or people. I'll leave the search for a universal maxim to others, it seems.
If transporting oneself counts, are all the people in the park vehicles? And all other animals, down to the microorganisms, that are capable of self-transport?
Or I suppose even in the case of transporting other things, people would count as vehicles if they are carrying anything or wearing clothes?
If it's typically not human powered, a human typically rides it, it's typically heavy, and typically accelerates enough to seriously injure another person with minimal damage to yourself it's a vehicle. That's why skateboards and horses aren't vehicles but the bike and toy car was. Even the bike is dicey but it's fairly unanimous throughout the world that a bike is a vehicle.
Users of parks generally know there will be varying usage rules for the park based on the park. But generally speaking, things that will destroy the "natural perserved" aspects, things that will disrupt other people using the park, aren't allowed.
And, like moderation, if you don't understand the context of what a park is in society, you should either go there with someone that does, ask the authorities in charge of the park, or DON'T GO.
So the answer to the question is "what activities are supported by the park, do you know other people that use those implements there without controversy".
You socially interact to know. If it is a grey area, ask either someone that may know, or the authorities.
This isn't Zeno's paradoxes. You aren't asking if the vehicle is every technically being used at the park because the atoms are repelled by the electromagnetic force and things never actually touch each other.
It isn't something that needs to be solved philosophically. There are people with authoritative knowledge, and you ask them the questions, and they give a "yes or no". And you either obey their judgement, or you break the rules.
If the AI (because this HAS to be about AI, why else is this dribble here) can't understand the context, it won't effectively moderate.
Given that there have been many cases of lawmakers not understanding the impact of their own laws. Contracts unraveled by punctuation errors, complex interactions between rules, people managing parks often not being the same as people writing the rules, ... . I find this claim to be completely removed from reality.
That is divorced from reality?
Do you NEVER ask people that "know things" a question? Or do you just trust ChatGPT for everything?
You have a "park". You have a rule about "no vehicles in park".
If you have been to enough parks, you know that they generally will entail some sort of separation of nature from the more general technological society around it, and certainly from one of the major aspects of that technological society, big ass heavy noisy smelly destructive annoying vehicles.
You will also know that parks are managed and funded by some authority, who may have necessity to enter and maintain them with "vehicles" that they know and are trained to operate and use properly in the park, likewise with emergency services and their vehicles.
So let's look at content moderation in this standpoint. Almost always, content moderation is within a context of a forum, where there is a subject matter and a set of germane topics. The subject matter often has implicit constraints, a lot like a park.
The other interesting thing about a park is that you arrive at one, and you can generally tell what is acceptable behavior in a park without the rules by observing what other people are doing, and "conforming" to that behavior. And if you don't know, you ask people around you and they will tell you yes/no/dunno and whether they are knowledgeable.
I can see a forum or subreddit kind of the same.
If a person was going to the park asking these questions, the actual answer after about four or five questions is "you probably shouldn't go to a park, or do whatever it is you want to do there, because you don't understand parks very well"
Similarly for something that is content moderated, after about four or five questions that clearly show you don't understand the subject matter of the forum or how to interact with other people involved in the subject matter, the answer is "you shouldn't post or say anything in that forum".
The ACTUAL corner cases in this are "well, can I take an electric bike into the park?" "Can my personal dog-robot follow me into the park?" "can I ride my electric blade scooter in the park?" "Okay, how BIG of an e-bike can I bring in?" "Is the no-vehicle policy about loud dirty ICE engines, or is it mostly about size?" because electric vehicles will ACTUALLY stress that stuff out.
Bikes, kites, monuments, Radio Flyers, etc. do not violate the intent. A tank is clearly a vehicle but doesn't violate the intent because it does not interfere with people enjoying the park. And rules do not apply to on-duty emergency vehicles.
Clearly not everybody thinks about the intent, and many people focus on discussing the nitpicking corner cases of the rules, or thinking about the definition of a vehicle or "being in the park" (see also "what is a sandwich"). That's okay, and that proves the author's point that moderation is not a mathematical problem with a single formally provable solution.
Chicago Lakefront.
You're creating a hard and fast rule that X group should always be allowed, the parent was saying all groups should behave reasonably towards each other.
I think the parents view is more reasonable. You could still take the view that bikes will always be dangerous to children, at that point you can then decide whether to prioritise children or bikes.
if you got kids at the park, you'd imagine bikes as being a nuisance. If you're the one riding the bike, you'd imagine the park is meant for you to enjoy and thus the boke isnt a nuisance.
This is exactly the point being made by the questionaire!
Bikes riding fast in parks and murdering children does not happen anywhere at any significant scale. It's a made up fear, just like the "stranger danger" of the past.
Anger at cyclists for driving fast and breaking laws is an emotional response to feeling jealous that bikes are zipping past them while they're sitting there waiting in traffic for 10 minutes at a red light.
How often do you see motorists get pissed off and honk at other motorists running a red or yellow on a left hand turn? They want people to break the law in that instance but will honk at cyclists for the most minor of transgressions. That's all they proof I need to conclude motorists don't give a shit about the law or safety (the classic I just want cyclists to follow the law because if they don't I can hurt them and I'll have to live with a guilty conscience! defense) and care more about reducing their travel times.
For my decisions, the assumed intent of the rule was slightly different than yours: no potentially fast-moving objects that might cause severe accidents.
So: no cars, no bikes, no skateboards. RC toy cars with low mass are okay. Rowing boats are not okay because they might harm swimming people. The surfboard on the beach is okay because it is not moving fast within the park. Etc.
And we're showing why the author is correct: because a lot of people jump to conclusions, hold fast to their assumptions, and assume everyone else thinks like them; even after having had it all clearly explained with a tailor-made interactive game, and even in the face of abundant direct evidence to the contrary.
And what if the fire marshal is visiting the park to evaluate the maximum occupancy of the office — can they drive their official vehicle into the park for that?
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
>> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction.
>> Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden.
>> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (__not whether the violation should be allowed__).
Seems like they did
But the park is somewhere on Earth, right? And the sign is written in English for humans to read and understand. Ignoring my personal locality/jurisdiction doesn't change this.
>> Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden.
This one felt irrelevant to me.
>> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (__not whether the violation should be allowed__).
This tells me that my job is to determine whether the rule allows skateboards and not whether the rule should allow skateboards. This does not instruct me to be ridiculously literal while making that determination.
No, it explicitly says your job is to determine if the rule is violated.
It gives you specific examples of where one might impart their personal bias and then says "don't do that." The you impart your bias. You'll notice that there is absolutely nowhere that it says "use your own definition of 'vehicle'" nor does it say "follow the spirit of the law, not the letter."
While I agree with you in principle, that's not what the game asked. But the fact that we disagree is exactly the point of the game. Fwiw, I agree with your definition in practice, but disagree that that's what the rules of the game were. The author was specifically careful to not be extremely explicit because that's what makes the point: that we disagree.
> The author was specifically careful to not be extremely explicit because that's what makes the point: that we disagree.
I don't think the author intended for so much confusion at this meta-level that our disagreement is occurring at. If they did, then the content moderation analogy becomes totally unjustified. The author's point was (or should have been) that we could all play the game my way and still disagree - that is what is interesting.
Our disagreement feels more like how people get stuck arguing about the Monty Hall problem, not noticing they are using subtly different assumptions. But that kind of disagreement has little to do content moderation as far as I can tell.
I'm pretty surprised that you thought it was so black-and-white to allow things like emergency vehicles - a lot of places ban emergency vehicles (and they follow that rule) because they are too dangerous for those vehicles to enter. Personally, I assumed that might be the case given that the sign said no vehicles at all.
Also, the Monty Hall problem is not ambiguous at all. The clear answer is to switch doors thanks to how conditional probability works. The paradox is why people stick to their chosen door, and it is a weird psychology problem, but they are objectively wrong.
Yeah, this is what I saw the intent as. Author knew some people would interpret their words very carefully, being explicit to follow "the letter" (as is explicitly asked). But recognized that a large number of people wouldn't do this and let their own biases sink in. Then a meta conversation would start. Really all the gamble depends on is having a sufficiently large sample size. Even better if differing native languages. The "gotcha" people (like the shoes person), the dogmatic "obvious" people, and the "well in the real world" people even add to the chaos that illustrates the author's point: absolute precision in language (including interpretation) is impossible. Communication is inherently a fuzzy process. To me it is often striking that people don't recognize language as fuzzy.
I didn't think that. I thought that the emergency vehicle one was a good question in which the resulting disagreement supports the author's point. The point being that content moderation involves shades of gray that two content moderators might reasonably disagree on.
But other questions (the wheelchair, toy cars, the ISS) are bad examples in which any disagreement demonstrates an implausible level of communication breakdown. An analogous situation would be a content moderator who painstakingly considers the letter of the law to determine whether time dilation opens a loophole in the "no child porn" rule - if the employer and the content moderator are acting in good faith, I cannot imagine this happening.
I would suggest you consider rules like "no racial/gendered slurs," which itself has caused a stir on Twitter recently when Elon Musk decided that "cisgender" was a slur. Most tweets that use the word "cisgender" to describe someone do so in a very negative light, often labeling them as "cisgender" with the implication that they are privileged, bigoted, and out of touch, but does that mean that the word "cisgender" rises to the level of a slur?
On the other hand, I believe that this was exactly their goal and were quite clear about it.
> If they did, then the content moderation analogy becomes totally unjustified. The author's point was (or should have been) that we could all play the game my way and still disagree - that is what is interesting.
The point is that everyone has a different set of internal rules and defining those explicitly is incredibly difficult. I really do feel like they are quite clear on this, especially with their distinction from the other game.
> Our disagreement feels more like how people get stuck arguing about the Monty Hall problem, not noticing they are using subtly different assumptions.
I'm curious how you 1) see this differently than what was intended and 2) how you think this doesn't happen in moderation (or politics)
I think your response to this exercise actually proves the author's point. I see people disagreeing with your take in the comments or making (to their perspective) reasonable arguments in favor of their choices.
Whether you found it personally "crystal-clear" to answer the way you did says more about your personal confidence and way of understanding rules than about the task itself being unambiguous.
Cue ambulance crashing through a wooden bridge over a river because it was never intended to carry the weight, or getting stuck in a tunnel, driving over pedestrians that can't get out of the way because there is no space left, ... . Blindly ignoring a rule because you can is not always a good idea. You might be able to ignore the rule, but you can't ignore the reason why it was put in place.
The rule is "no adult content"
1 A scholar is discussing their recently published contribution
2 as a professional sexologist
3 whose area of study is pornography
4 Ancient pornography
5 And how it relates to modern styles
6 of fiction literature and paintings
7 by quoting seedy passages of ancient erotic literate
8 written in ancient Sumerian
Etc... With every sentence fragment of increasing context you can get people changing their minds
I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules, because they are. The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.
This of course is a paradox, as a rule is something that you are forbidden from doing, and being allowed to break the rule means you're allowed to do something you're forbidden from doing, which when interpreted literally is an oxymoron.
The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules , and some rules are more important than others.
In fact, it sort of seems like this sentence should wreck the effort to demonstrate the difficulty of content moderation. I would think that a significant amount of the difficulty comes from instances where moderators feel that interactions between different rules mean they should allow violations of particular rules in certain situations.
In any case, the question of whether the rule was violated is entirely separate from the question of what, if anything, the consequences of this should be; and it is the former that I understood the game to be asking.
The fact that there is so much debate over the question of what the game was even asking the player to do, with both sides convinced that their interpretation is the obvious correct one, does as much to support the thesis that people have an enormous amount of trouble agreeing on the intent of a simple short piece of text as the rest of the game itself.
I assume you are referring to traffic laws that are enforced by cameras. Is that correct?
Where do you live?
(driving a tank through the park)
When I read "obviously" in your parent comment, I though: well, not so obvious. We don't know why the vehicles are banned from this park (extreme cases: there are vehicle mines remains from a war that explodes under big weights. Park is built so ir can't stand so much weight and big vehicles would get trapped), so maybe police and ambulances must proceed on foot for the last hundred meters.
I think the ambiguity here is not what the rule means, but what "breaking the rules" means.
IMHO it should have been phrased as "would you refuse entry to" i.e. whether you would enforce action based on the rule.
If you would not bar entry to emergency vehicles, that would be the same as what others mean by "not breaking the rules" i.e. it is implicitly allowed.
> Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park." Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Violation of a rule is a logical operation. It's the answer that comes before the ", but ..." part. Things you explicitly don't have to do in the context of this game:
- You don't have to like the rule
- You don't have to consider exemptions (because that's not what the rule asks for)
You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated. I think it's absolutely fascinating that this is so controversial and a testament to the authors game design.
When you face this sort of thing in philosophy, the clarifying step is to move past language and look at behaviour which would be the enforcement.
> You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated
You can't dismiss ambiguity with a "you just need to"!
In conventional language we get the ambiguity expressed as distinctions like "technically you have a broken a rule but..." i.e. there are "technical" interpretations of rules that are specific/pedantic/unrealistic that in practice are not what is meant or enforced.
I expect there will be a desire here to over value "technical" interpretations as if they were more accurate having stripped cultural conventions and such but that is a means to misinterpret language not find truth.
Rules can absolutely prevent you from saving a life, for example a rule preventing rescue workers from entering a dangerous area like a cave until conditions improve. Or a police no chase rule.
> You can't dismiss ambiguity with a "you just need to"!
Granted, ambiguity is built into language – for example, what exactly is a vehicle seems to not be conclusively answered for every edge case, and I would allow for the confusion around that – but if you are creating additional ambiguity by overloading the task you have been given and adding "technical" distinctions and "implicit" rules, you are not only no longer playing the game, which is for you to judge if the proposed rule has been violated.
You can of course chose to not judge if this rule has been violated in favor of something else you think more interesting. In that case you are playing a different game.
Interpretation is a tough one. Something might be technical or implicit to me. It might not be technical or implicit to you. Or vice versa. Mostly, on most things, we might agree – but if we do it this way, there are bound to be cases, where we don't, which is precisely the dilemma the creator of the experiment is talking to.
When interpreting laws, there is often a concept of the "Reasonable person" standard. The "Reasonable Person" understands that parks banning vehicles is not to stop EMTs. How you are acting in the "real world scenario" is reasonable and what is assumed in the drafting of laws.
You might claim this game is excluding such a concept as being a "local rule" but maybe that can be called... unreasonable :)
The logical exercise is extremely close (by design) to one that commonly occurs in everyday life. In real life people want to bend the rules to achieve a certain outcome when applying them. They don't want to say "well a rule was violated but I'm exercising discretion". That's on full display here even though no meaningful outcome is actually being determined in this case.
In psychology, different comprehension of what rules mean is a fundamental difference between personality types. It might better to accept that different people understand the world differently instead of sorting them into right and wrong by your own biases.
> They don't want to say "well a rule was violated but I'm exercising discretion"
From the other perspective, hyper-rationality is a dysfunction where excess analytical/logic/precision prevents an individual from understanding what language means or how to act in the real world. To believe a rule is violated "because of logic" instead of trying to understand intent would be an example of that.
You're swinging right back to the context and meaning of the rules that were presented during the assigned task. What I wrote isn't really about that. It's about the assigned task itself and the self assessment of whether or not it was completed faithfully. That's where the cognitive bias becomes plainly observable.
There are the rules presented during the task. Separately there are the instructions given for the task itself. To me it feels a bit like a failure to reason with layers of abstraction. Almost an inability of most people to reason about and interpret the rules differently in different contexts. They're stuck in the "real world" context and can't seem to switch to the "hypothetical framework" context laid out in the instructions.
> From the other perspective, hyper-rationality is a dysfunction ...
When obstinately adhered to in a general context, certainly. This was not a general context. It was an exercise with specific and reasonably unambiguous instructions. Openly deviating from them would be quite different than what can be observed in this comment section - deviating while claiming to have followed them.
On any other website I would be inclined to assume a certain lack of literacy or comprehension. Not so with this audience.
I prefer the following quote as an explanation: "There are no rules, only consequences." There are no consequences for an ambulance entering the park because everyone agrees it is right that it should do so.
So yeah, an ambulance speeding to save a life is breaking the traffic laws, but they are allowed to.
Interestingly, if the ban of vehicles in the park had an additional reason - like a safety concern of unstable collapsing ground - an emergency vehicle in the park would be barred from invoking their special rights to be there, because then the driver would endanger bystanders without good reason.
Pretty sure that's because people need time to notice the siren and take appropriate action, not because of some rule
And that's why there is a rule for drivers of emergency vehicles to sound the siren for at least 2 to 3 seconds when approaching an intersection with an intent to disregard other peoples right of way. The rule for normal traffic partakers is very much "If it flashes blue and has music, get the hell out of the way as fast as you can without endangering yourself"
This rule in turn is in contrast with the overall suggestion to keep siren usage low, because it's loud, disturbing for bystanders and not great for the hearing of the people inside the car.
I think this is just a way of saying that they are not breaking the rule, simply because the rule doesn't apply to them.
So the rules still apply to them, they just won't be pursued on theoretical grounds (getting fined/arrested sheerly because of the infraction, without any other consequences)
That’s not so clear IMO. It depends on the severity and urgency of the accident, and whether there is a really prohibitive issue that entirely prevents heavy vehicles from entering, like quicksand or muddy ground that will get an EMT stuck.
By "doing their jobs", you presumably mean "responding to an emergency call", right? Because, e.g., cops in normal transit from A to B are "doing their jobs" but letting them drive through a "no vehicles allowed" park in that instance is probably bad. Or if they're on a high-speed chase - definitely "doing their jobs" but not something you'd want to happen through a park.
> an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow
You've amply demonstrated this by creating a huge muddy mess around "emergency services doing their jobs".
Now you're assuming the intent.
The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them. If you're the park ranger and the local police come into the park in their car chasing after some criminals, and the local police are your buddies, you say they haven't violated the rule because the intent isn't to apply to emergency vehicles. If the exact same thing happens but you're having a dispute with the local police, now they're violating the rule and you can come up with something like the park isn't in their jurisdiction.
It's the same rule. It's the same action. The only difference is if you like them or not. And that's the problem.
It doesn't matter, the rules on police and emergency vehicles usually supersede some local rule about a park.
The park is not some absolute ruler of the land, sure it can put rules for general/everyday use but a lot of things are rules at higher levels
aka, there's some other rule that isn't listed then?
Which isn't what is being discussed here.
The intent of the experiment is to get your view on whether X is a vehicle or not, and whether Y counts as a place "in the park" or not.
Nobody said it was a local rule. It could be a federal rule about a federal park. And it could be there for a more important reason than keeping ATVs off the hiking trails.
That's true but without assuming intent you end up blindly following rules.
Something struck me when first moved to UK from Turkey: Every rule in UK seemed to have an intent and that's why I think Turkey is full of rules which no one follows but in UK the rules are less numerous but followed. In Turkey, Turks like to think that the rules are not followed because the fines are too small or that the government is incompetent and can't enforce the fines. I disagree, I think Turkey is a chaotic society because rules are not built around intent. Did you know that up until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures?
For the first few months until I got my white collar job, I did some part time jobs in London as a waiter etc. and worked at some high end venues and hotels. In these places there are some equipments(like climate control of the wine cellar) which are operated through control panels which are accessible to everyone and they didn't put signs that say "don't touch", instead the signs said "you have no reason to touch this". They were able to keep curious hands away from buttons that shouldn't be pushed by those who don't know what they are doing by simply emphasising the intent.
Intent is extremely important, in fact everything is about intent. Every human action is with an intent. Great UX is built by designing around intent.
So, great point.
I guess the only problem on the internet is it is very hard to determine intent, see Poe's law.
Guidelines are suggestions. They're all about intent. "Don't have live music after midnight" isn't a ridiculous guideline for COVID, because it usually implies a gathering. It is a ridiculous rule because rules have to be rigid and well defined, because rules are enforced. Squishy rules aren't rules, they're covert dictatorial powers.
Anyway, what's the difference between a rule and a guideline? Is a red light a rule or guide? IMHO Guideline is a literature, rules are arrangements with an intent(i.e. let's agree to stop on red light with the intent of organising the flow so we don't crash into each other).
Guideline: don't bother neighbours after 20:00
Rule: Loud noises not allowed after 20:00
If you make sure to steer clear from guideline ("hey neighbour, we want to have a party, will it be okay if we be loud till 00:00","thanks"), the rules will not need to be enforced (neighbour calling the police to complain)
A more rigid definition serves to protect you, not just your neighbour.
Much better than a guideline in my opinion.
Status quo is much simpler - it's banned but if neighbours all agree have a late party and police aren't called
How is that any different to what I just wrote? In your own example, the "What's the radius" and "How do you confirm all have agreed" is no different either.
Live music doesn't / didn't attract more people in closer proximity than areas with no live music? Did everyone still go to the same place and sat there in silence? That sounds very unlikely, but I have never been to Turkey.
>It made no sense in the context of Covid, it made sense in the context of islamist trying to destroy the non-islamists.
This is tied to the above, but who made the consensus that this was the point of the rule? Without a source of the consensus and to someone who have never been there it flies in the face of logic. Surely fewer people would go to, say, a British park Saturday evening if there's no music event there than if there is a band playing. Without some context, it reads to me like this post is anti-islamist and bashing Turkey for a rule that seem to have been enforced in one way or another in most of the west under COVID. As far as I know, every festival was shut down and events with music or other entertainment had to jump through lots of hoops or be shutdown too. How is this rule different?
The virus doesn’t care when the gathering is happening.
So why would you forbid live music, or gatherings, but only after midnight?!
But as a guideline you could say if it's after midnight it's probably a party. And if it's not you let people use their judgment, because guidelines are suggestions enforced via social pressure, not via official penalties.
If you forbid parties after midnight, people will party before midnight (have you been to London?).
If you forbid parties, people will still gather ("you're seriously calling our chess playing night a party?!").
If you want to forbid people gathering, forbid people gathering.
Ban on gatherings were introduced for short periods at the hight of the pandemic, the music ban was a separate one which lasted up until days ago.
All other kind of gatherings were allowed. They even held a large religious gathering , bringing people from all around the to the conversion of the Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque since it was also a political event(They were promising to turn it into a mosque since years, apparently an important thing for the devout muslims). This was between the first wave which claimed the lives of 50K and the 3rd wave which killed that many more.
He describes what he calls uncertainty avoidance cultures that try to reduce uncertainty by making lots of rules. These end up being impossible to follow, so it's generally expected that you don't. He contrasts this with cultures that are low on uncertainty avoidance that have fewer rules, but on the other hand it's expected that they are followed.
This is probably to some degree a caricature.
How do they explain Germany though?
But it wasn't just that he mentioned it. It was the way he mentioned it. That the only possible reason for us to not be following the rules was that we must not know them.
There is a section of Europe where following the rules is what you do (to be clear it's not just Germany[0]). It's assumed that you're going to follow the rules. Adults don't need to be policed in this way. The rules are there for a reason (second order thinking).
Then there are large parts of Europe where there are rules but if they're not enforced then people will by and large not obey them. See, for example, the UK putting in smart motorways (aka, average speed cameras), because before that people would fly up the motor way well above the speed limit.
The Autobahn might have areas with no speed limit, but on the sections that HAVE speed limits you'd be hard pressed to find someone breaking those limits.
I grew up in Australia where it's somewhere between the two. The enforcement of the rules is strict. I once got a jaywalking ticket for crossing an empty road in Melbourne (long story, but it's also one of my stupider moments because it wasn't like the police were behind a bush, they hopped off the same tram I did).
I haven't had a speeding or parking ticket since I left Australia.
Though, circling back to my Stuttgart story, if someone approached you about rule breaking in Australia you can almost guarantee that you'd have pissed them off to the point it would not have been polite. In Paris, as well, I have been yelled at (in French) for dog poop on a sidewalk that wasn't even my dogs -- yes, I do always pick up after my dog.
[0]: Even within Germany I'm sure there are variations on this.
This is made possible by the fact that cars (try to) follow traffic rules to the letter.
(Essentially every car driver in the Netherlands is also a cyclist at other times)
Morons exist :-(
The rule says they should be on the leash.
Nobody follows it.
My lack of German may well have changed the interaction I mentioned.
Just for the record, I am not part of the dog owners group :) I don't think it's nice to let a dog roam in the park, kids get scared, and things can go wrong.
1. Ein Bier bitte
2. Noch ein Bier bitte
3. Wo ist der W.C.
Does make it hard to get practice though.
Due to the internet, I encounter a lot more German than I used to. For example, Netflix runs a lot of movies Auf Deutsch, and I try to figure out what they're saying.
Because UK people generally don't care about breaking the rules of no-BBQ in the park. What happens though when someone jumps a queue?
Mask mandates are an extremely unskilled method of encouraging a behaviour.
The mandate resulted in many people putting any old piece of cloth over their faces.
Mask mandates enabled the topic to become a political issue.
Therefore, the refusal of many to comply is the more correct decisions.
Stupid rules should be broken, and the rule makers ridiculed and removed from office.
If your response to a crisis to become a tyrant, you are not fit to lead.
Not where I live.
> The mandate resulted in many people putting any old piece of cloth over their faces.
Not where I live.
> Mask mandates enabled the topic to become a political issue.
Not where I live.
> Therefore, the refusal of many to comply is the more correct decisions.
No, it's actually, how did you put it?, “an extremely unskilled” response.
> Stupid rules should be broken
Agreed, but a rule isn't automatically stupid just because you don't like it.
Nobody said anything in German though. A German man said something in English. From what I can tell, you've got speaking english in your skill set.
I heard lead quite a bit from trainers, and assume their choice in nomenclature is part of the general positive reinforcement nature of modern dog training.
From my own short stint in Germany, n=1, the rules often did tend to make sense, so it actually seemed like a good idea to follow them.
(I've also had friends complain that Germany wasn't actually as tidy or rules based as they were lead to believe. So take with a grain of salt!)
Right but overly generic rules make that worse. And overly specific make a lot of work and allow stuff to still go thru cracks. It's hard problem to make following rules with intent but without rule-enforcers using it for their own whims
> Something struck me when first moved to UK from Turkey: Every rule in UK seemed to have an intent and that's why I think Turkey is full of rules which no one follows but in UK the rules are less numerous but followed. In Turkey, Turks like to think that the rules are not followed because the fines are too small or that the government is incompetent and can't enforce the fines. I disagree, I think Turkey is a chaotic society because rules are not built around intent. Did you know that up until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures
If the culture of the country teaches you to follow the rules, people follow the rules
If the culture of the country teaches you rules are annoyance to go around or bribe around, well that happens.
I live in post soviet country (Poland) and got on the end of the slow and painful transformation from the latter to the former. For example ~15 years ago it was common knowledge that you need to bribe examiner if you want to pass driving license the first time. At the time it was somewhat probable, I passed at 3rd time with 2nd time failure being my arrogance but 1st being something absolutely minor that could be summed up as "I looked at right mirror with my eyes instead of theatrically moving my head right to signal to examiner I really looked at right side'.
And my step-mother, which is a terrible driver did pass via bribe at around same time.
Similar thing happens with MOT tests, usually bribed to ignore lack of working cat.
And the single out cases of bribing still happened, just government invested a lot of effort to fight it so it is no longer "the norm" accepted by the people as the way to live. Which on top of being a lot of effort takes generational change to really root in, back in my parent's young days you couldn't even have a car if you weren't either well connected (grandpa had Wartburg with sunroof option purely because he was in military and won few contests) or bribed the right people.
The Wikipedia article is a little bit light on the bribery aspect, but there seems to have been considerable efforts made before 2012. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Poland
I grew up in America which is fairly rule-obeying. Lived in Australia and New Zealand which are disgustingly, obsequiously devoted to following tiny guidelines. Spent a few weeks in Munich where I was shouted at for crossing a totally empty street against a crosswalk light.
On the plus side, I lived in Argentina and Spain for a long time where basically there is no enforcement of anything.
I will say I am proud of people there (in the Latin world) for being humans. mostly ... usually... trying not to make dumb decisions, but... well, having to make decisions, and making them. You see if you live in England or the US or Commonwealth for awhile, people have forgotten how to make any decisions if there isn't a rule for it.
And yet the freest society I ever lived in, judged on the day to day freedom of individuals violating petty laws, was Vietnam. At the same time, it was the most totalitarian place I ever lived as far as what information you could access or what you could say. Still, if you wanted to drive the wrong way down a highway with an child on the back of your motorcycle, you can do that in Vietnam.
Personally I don't like the UK / Australia model where everyone obeys some stupid rule written on the wall over their own intelligence. Of course, I also don't love the Argentinian model where everyone thinks they're smart enough to bang on the button that says "don't touch". Also, it's not cool to wantonly endanger your child while being terrified of mentioning the name of the dictator. But I am a fan of man... and I would definitely take the Turkish way of shrugging off rules when they don't suit you over the British way of following them to the point of worship.
I think I was going to get to some great conclusion here, but I don't have one.
I like when no one is watching me, but I also like when someone is watching other people.
[edit] my conclusion! privacy and freedom come at the cost of people ignoring rules. People from rule-bound countries experience a burst of freedom when going somewhere that lives as people live, not by the rule-book. People from "chaotic societies" as you said, who have a mind for all the corruption they see around them, find some relief in escaping to ordered societies. Neither is good or bad, they are both modes of existence; both modes are necessary. If either were to disappear, we would have far too much chaos or far too much order, and no one would be able to escape to where they belong.
I don't understand this. I live near Munich, people cross against a red light all the time. Maybe you were doing it near children? That's a real social faux-pas, because they're not supposed to normalize jaywalking.
Here is an incident that happened the second day I got to Vietnam (long before I was ever in Germany). My girlfriend was really sick in the hotel. I was vomiting too, but I went out to find medicine. I got to the corner of a huge boulevard, maybe 8 lanes wide. There was a pharmacy on the other side. But the traffic never stopped when the light turned red. On and on the traffic just kept going, weaving around all the other cars on the cross-street. The boulevard was maybe 1 meter below the level of the sidewalk. I stood there for 5 minutes waiting for some time to step into the street.
Finally, a 6-year-old boy walked up alone, paused next to me, and started crossing the boulevard in the middle of the traffic. And all the cars and motorcycles just went around him.
I was like, well fuck, if that kid can do it then I can do it...
So what value are you teaching children? How to cross a street or how to follow orders? Crossing a street when it's possible may be illegal but it's not immoral. The idea that neglecting formalities leads to immorality can only be true if the morality isn't implanted. Worse, it implies that formalities are the only thing that holds back man's immoral nature... which should not be the lesson. If a man jaywalks, it doesn't make him more liable to commit other criminal acts.
What value are you teaching children by not swearing in front of them? Why is making certain sounds with your mouth immoral? Isn't it just showing your are in-group and well cultured? The jwalking culture in Germany is exactly the same.
Yes, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Learning that different groups of people may have their own languages and customs is the first step to being able to blend in with a diverse group; it's great when you're able to adopt a register appropriate to the people you are with at any given moment.
Of course it's also possible that the child learns to be a snob and treating with disdain those who are not in your group. But I would say that's a character trait of the person, and it's still worth having the opportunity to learn how to adapt, rather than being unable to modulate your behavior and only knowing how to have a single posture. Having a culture of acceptance starts with knowing the customs of many different groups.
Countries like Vietnam are the exception, not the rule. In most countries traffic won't swerve around you, they'll just end up hitting you because they are not expecting it!
I don’t think this is necessarily true. They probably end up with a lot more dead kids as a result of this.
I don't know how Vietnam makes it work; they either have really alert drivers, really slow drivers or a really high child mortality rate.
[0]: I often notice that children are quite unobservant of their surroundings and behave as if they are alone in the world.
YES that is precisely what happened. That's so funny you said this.
I was standing in heavy falling snow, at the corner of an empty boulevard, next to a woman with two little daughters and a young boy. I stood for a moment and then walked across and she started yelling at me. I suppose she was trying to teach her children to be patient and wait for the light to change. What went through my head at that moment was, I kid you not, "ah, that's how they learn to follow orders".
And this is entirely in sync with my original point above, but also personally, I loathe Munich. There's nothing like being told holocaust jokes when people don't know you're Jewish. I believe the people there would vote for Hitler in a heartbeat if he were alive and running for office.
However, instead of reconsidering your stance on Germans' law-abiding behavior, you reassert your bias by invoking Godwin's Law, linking a contemporary incident to the actions of Hitler.
Do you see any issue with this?
(I'm not German)
You don't shout at a man in the street in order to demonstrate good behavior to your children.
Obedience, yes. Good behavior, no.
this is literally how every minority (basically anyone but the waspiest of wasps) feels in america. terrible jokes about <insert race here> are completely normalized.
You do if you are angry that said man is sabotaging your efforts to raise your children correctly. Also, said man is breaking a law instituted for a good reason.
I’m also personally of the opinion that speaking up when you are angry instead of passively taking it is good for society.
It sounds like you have some hangups that you are projecting onto this situation.
She wants to avoid her kids considering it acceptable to cross a red light. Parent violated community norms by crossing a red light. So now she has to signal that this person has violated community norms, so that her kids learn "red light crossing is bad" rather than "red light crossing is normal".
This is not a "german" thing, this is a "human" thing.
I spent a year there, mostly in SA and the NT. A six pack of beer and a pack of smokes will set you back $50. When it comes to road signs, the "are you feeling sleepy" every few kilometers really makes you... sleepy. Police presence is heavier than in America. There are checkpoints going into towns. Then of course there's the separate window for alcohol for Aboriginals, who line up early in the morning, the scanning of your driver's license every time you buy beer...
When I first got there, I stayed in King's Cross, Sydney, and it was fairly wild. I heard that neighborhood isn't there anymore, and hasn't been for some time.
[edit] Also, maybe this was just a rumor, but I was told by a mechanic in Adelaide that if you squeal your tires they'll fine you, and if you do it twice they'll impound your car and crush it. I was told by a roofer that his job was almost impossible because he now had to spend an hour putting on harnesses to do a simple job. I was told by an old fellow who owned a motel in Inverell that the licenses for his inn and his restaurant were putting him out of business. And everywhere I heard people complaining about licenses and fees making work harder. What I mostly saw were a lot of old folks at the ANZAC halls in small towns complaining that things weren't like they used to be, so maybe that colored my vision a bit.
I'm Australian, currently live in Sydney and I feel as you do, but none of your examples explain your claim.
No, I don't have time to list the ways Australians follow rules (more so that Germans), it is 1:15am, and I'm going to bed.
Having lived most of my life in Turkey, it gets old really fast.
For one thing, there's a certain culture that is a mixture of extreme fatalism, not giving a shit about anything that doesn't immediately benefit you, low respect to other people, and the worst part of it, seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive, that is so pervasive in Turkey.
When this culture is given a lax rule structure, what you get is a chaotic, every man for himself, free-for-all place devolving further and further into a low CGI Mad Max movie. Only reason why it still hasn't completely collapsed into chaos is because people are still afraid of the punishment. If you think I'm exaggerating, next time you're there ask a restaurant owner if you can smoke, right under the no-smoking sign and pay attention to what they say: do they tell you that'd disturb other customers? or do they tell you of the ₺20k fine they got that one time and they can't let you because of that.
I can tell for you as a lived experience that significantly more people in Turkey cut in lines than people in Germany. Why do they do that I ask myself, the only explanation I could find until now is because fuck you, that's why. If you were as cunning, as manly, as bold as they are you'd be at the front of the line, but you aren't, so fuck you. They know there won't be repercussions for that action, and that's the only bar to clear for them to do it.
Maybe this way of living fits some, I myself find this despicable. I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world, but I fully believe it seeps into everything else in the society and over time makes it unlivable.
--
Even in an imaginary ideal environment, if act of obeying existing rules is debatable, there'll be the problem of everyone considering themselves as a sufficient authority on making judgements with a limited context and a huge bias on interpretations that benefit them. At one point it just makes sense to ask people to use the right channels to push change instead of 80 million people making individual judgements on every issue every day and hope for the best.
pervasice in Russia too. Most non-democratic societies are indivifualistic and highly cynical.
That's why I say American brain is' a prison - they think in 'Socialist countries everyone cares about each. other too much, and that why they are poor
To tell you the truth, Russia itself has always been a prison, as it is now, and the people have a prison mentality. That causes you to brag or be humble; always to scheme and never to be honest; always to look for an edge. Lying to people's faces, what is it vranyo? Just to make sure they know you're lying, and exercise power over them? No, the American brain is not a prison. Americans individually have a lot of problems understanding the world, but we do not think all other countries are the same. Also, obviously, Russia is no longer socialist in any way. Not to mention, many Americans are in fact socialists, at least on par with European socialist parties.
>>seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive
I'm sad to say that this is true everywhere I've been. The attitude is everywhere in the US... it's only that in the US people are trained to be quiet about it. My observation, everywhere I go, is that only smart, observant people do not mistake kindness for weakness.
>> because fuck you, that's why
So, this is one thing I do like about the US. The police in the US do not get involved in anything unless you pull out a gun and shoot somebody... even then, they really don't care. On the other hand, this kind of fake "manliness" you're describing is sort of self-limiting in the US; it tends to look ridiculous to us when we travel overseas or when we see new immigrants from (choose a chaotic country) act this way - because here, the guy you jump in line in front of might look like nothing but he also might have a 9mm. I say this from the perspective of someone who has seen multiple shootings at the bar around the corner from my house in the past year, for things as stupid as someone acting rudely.
Stupid, selfish, short-sighted people are the same everywhere. Being rude is really the issue; one does not need a God or a police force to avoid being rude. Being rude and taking advantage for oneself is cultural, and I actually believe it's impossible to take a culture who has been raised that way and make them - under any police regime - act differently. (I'll qualify that further by telling you that all my grandparents came from Russia in the 1920s, and spoke Russian, but they hated the criminal type of Russian scavengers who came out of that ruthless wasteland from the 1980s onward). Taking care of others outside your family requires two things: 1. a functioning rule of law, yes, but 2. a view passed to you from your parents that treating others well will cause you to flourish more than trying to take advantage of them. This cannot be enforced. It has to be internalized and understood. I really think it's better in many ways to see what kind of people you're speaking with bluntly than to listen to the sophistry of the modern version of the same avarice as it presents itself in New York or Los Angeles. I can sit and listen to the racism toward black people in the American South or toward Aboriginal people in Australia, and just openly disagree. That's better to me than listening to people who I know are racist trying to sound politically correct in Seattle.
>> I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world
I think it's the second-most important metric. Being polite. But it's worse to be somewhere everyone is polite and everyone is a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is to me the most important metric.
(This is actually what my problem is with Thailand. True, no one cuts in line. But there's so much bottled-up anger that no one can admit to, and suddenly it explodes).
But not cutting in line - in my book - is representative of the best human value. So I absolutely agree with your view and don't think you should say it's not important. It's possibly the most important thing.
A shout out to the Argentines, when my ex-gf was possibly kidnapped there, people asked me to cut in line in front of them at an ATM that was running out of money, where they had been waiting for a long time, just from seeing the look on my face.
I have lived in India where lines do not generally exist and in US. I have seen the culture in India change from line cutting to following the line (generally). The biggest difference is caused by whether you believe you will get the service if you wait in the line.
If you have a service that is available for only the first 20, but you have 50 people waiting, line-cutting will happen. Railway tickets in India are a big example - when I was growing up, you rush to the beginning of the line since there were only small number of seats allocated to each station. Now, that it is computerized and you can book from anywhere to anywhere, people stay in the line since they know they will get the ticket.
Look at your last example - lack of service if you are not in the front will cause chaos.
I also grew up there. I think there’s a low level compliance with what I’d call daily/minor rules. Cigarette butts tossed wherever you are when you finish one, speed limits are barely even advisory, jaywalking widely practiced, etc.
Depends. In NYC, jaywalking is normal. In Santa Monica, you get a ticket. Speeding is mostly enforced everywhere.
What sets the US apart from countries like Argentina, in this department, is that the cops won't just ask you for a bribe when they stop you. You actually end up with a ticket and have to deal with it.
In some American cities (Chicago), crossing against the light is how muggers and pickpockets tell the tourists apart from the locals.
People who live in downtown Chicago wait for the light because they know that there's very often a car ready to make a left turn right into the crosswalk. Tourists are often from places where, if there is a crosswalk, there's no traffic to worry about.
MA highways are moving 75-80mph when traffic permits, regardless of whether they have a posted 55 or 65mph speed limit. NH is only a few mph less typically.
Bingo. If one hasn't spent serious time in at least 4+ states, I don't think they ever really get an idea of how differentiated American cultural norms really are. "Americans are ______" is about as descriptive a statement as "Left-handed people are _____" - there's just toooo much variance for it to be a useful observation.
I think we get this a lot as Americans because we are such a huge cultural power with our movies, music and software. (and pizza). But like, there are definitely enormous cultural differences between Northern and Southern Italians, or N/S Vietnamese, or like, the 500 different cultures in India... we're sort of blind to it until we go somewhere because no matter where you are, you just get the summary of everywhere else.
I see tons of online comments generalizing about California or the West Coast (I’ve been guilty of this generalization myself), but after living here for the past 8 years I’ve learned otherwise. I will also refer anyone who wants to lump the whole coast together to Oregon’s legacy as a self-proclaimed “white state” [0].
It turns out that making accurate generalizations about millions of people is hard, and if you’re committed to doing it anyways then you’ll just end up with cliches and platitudes.
[0] https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/racial-h...
I disagree. Everyone I've talked to in the US considers 5 mph over the limit to be perfectly safe from tickets (enforcement), and 10 mph over to probably be safe from enforcement. The few times I've heard of people getting ticketed for 5 mph over the limit they were outraged at the injustice of it, and most people agreed with them.
Speeding is mostly enforced if you're 10+ over the speed limit, or driving a heavy vehicle.
It's also why Argentina is a fucking mess, but I love it. When I'm there it feels like the people will never, ever be conquered.
This is true in a lot of countries that had a dictatorship.
Weirdly, it is not true for Chile, where everyone still acts like they're in a dictatorship.. also the US, which never had a dictatorship but created and supported dictatorships all over the world.
But, different strokes for different folks.
We ended up at a police station in Mendoza where the cops did not want to handle our paperwork. A few months later, I parked the car in Buenos Aires and my girlfriend left a sandwich inside. It rained and the car got moldy. I wanted to sell it. So I called a number in the newspaper that said they buy cars. Some guys showed up, took it on a test drive, and didn't come back. They just took the car.
So I called my friend who knew a cop and she said, meet us in Plaza Serrano at 12:00, those guys will be there, and bring $100 for the policeman.
I did, the guys showed up, they paid me $1500 for the car and everything worked out. The cop just stood there watching.
Argentina is sort of how life is supposed to work. If you had the amount of guns like in the US it would much more fucked up. Also in a weird way people still have morals there, at least they are not as nihilistic as in the US. People still read fucking books and are educated. I think a lot has to do with having late night dinners and talking for hours instead of being on your phone. Taking your kids out to dinner and wine at 11pm is a really good value. Teaching them to talk and listen and be adults.
Indeed, in some ways this place is crazy and in others its reasonably livable. I have many anecdotes like those but my English is not so good to make them funny.
Río negro native here. If you come to visit again, and go to San antonio oeste or las grutas hit me up and I'll invite you a beer
This brings back so many crazy stories from Río Negro. We got stuck for two weeks in General Roca. The car broke down on RN22 and we were towed into town by a farmer on a tractor. We left the car with our luggage inside on the street and walked to find a hotel. When we came back in the evening, five or six old men had surrounded the car and were looking inside, thinking that someone had been killed, or it was drugs, because who is crazy enough to just leave a car full of suitcases? Some Paraguayans towed us to the river and fed us lunch at their trailer, but couldn't fix the car. Then it was New Years and at midnight we sat in the empty street with a bottle of wine, surrounded by a dozen frightened dogs while the fireworks went off in people's yards. After a week we were able to find out where the farmer lived, who was a really wonderful guy named Javier. He introduced us to his family, and we had lunch under their grape vines. He knew how to fix tractors, and he was able to fix our car's electrical wiring at his house. No one ever asked us for money to help. The people were incredibly kind.
Getting to Las Grutas was a different story... we took a "taxi" which was not a real taxi, just some guy waiting at the Viedma airport who turned out to be extremely high on cocaine. At one point in the middle of the desert he just stopped the car, got out and went to the trunk. We got very worried. When he came back, he talked rapidly on and on about why guns should be easier to buy, because if he wanted to kill people he could just as well kill them with a knife, or even a pen. To demonstrate this he was jabbing a pen around wildly like he was going to stab me. My girlfriend said the whole time she was in the back seat with a towel ready to throw it around his neck and strangle him, even if we crashed.
Ahhhh. Well, enough stories ;) likewise, if you're ever in Portland, Oregon, look me up!
Some people don’t follow the unimportant rules, but almost never when it’d inconvenience someone else.
As someone born in, and having spent most of my life in New Zealand, I have no idea what this means. I'm not being defensive, but I just don't understand. Maybe I'm 'too close' to see it. Perhaps I'm thinking about civic rules (e.g. jay-walking, speeding) and you're thinking of, e.g. industry like construction?
Unfortunately, people who are horrible to other people and/or spaces generally refuse to accept this, and therefore either need more specific examples of what being horrible entails to compare their behaviours against - leading to proliferation of edges, epicycles and rule-gaming - or you have a codicil along the lines of "the decision of what is horrible is up to the moderator and is final", leading to, at best, everyone whining about how unfair, arbitrary and partial the policy is now they can't be horrible to each other any more, all at once.
I don’t think that is the only possible outcome. Where moderation is done well lot of people, in fact most people, simply don’t notice it. They just have a pleasant time with other pleasant people. So no, “everyone whining“ is not the best possible outcome. “Most people having a good time, a minority whining” is the best possible outcome. And of course it takes hard work, and maybe even a little bit of luck with the initial conditions.
I'm part of two such communities that each have tens of thousands of active members, and have both been online for at least 15 years.
Generalizations are rarely accurate.
For example, politically charged discourse is suppressed. That's going to result in a higher level of civility, but now you have a large community of people with an impaired ability to affect the political process.
That contains its own embedded example. “This music is not being performed 1 hour after midnight; it is being performed 23 hours before midnight.”
I think that's part of it. Another part is Turkey's legal system is based on Swiss law. From ChatGPT:
The legal systems of the United States and Continental Europe differ in several ways. One major difference is that the US follows a common law system, which is based on the precedent set by previous court rulings, while Continental Europe follows a civil law system, which is based on a comprehensive legal code.
In other words, the US legal system is based on intent with laws providing guidance to courts to assess intent. In Turkey, the legal system writes everything down and courts assess if you followed the code.
I think even this conversation itself demonstrates how hard it's to moderate content in the internet. Maybe we need lawyers? :)
Please do not use a hallucinating LLM as a source for any substantive issue.
Not true, see sleepwalkers.
I'm going to assume that those buttons were placed out of the reach of most three year-olds.
Do you actually know that the latter sign is more effective than “don’t touch”? If it actually is, there are other possible explanations. The fact that it’s personally addressed to “you” could make it more effective. The fact that it’s simply a more unique/unexpected way to convey the message may cause people to be less likely to reflexively dismiss the more common directive of “don’t touch”.
No, it's not assuming, it's interpreting based on prior experience in communication.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff.
Then the sign would mention that, simple as that.
> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.
I agree with you here, it happens all the time, is a problem, and perhaps the test is useful to those, who haven't figured this truth so far. Probably not that many in the HN crowd…
I'll add that there's a problem with the test: "does it violate the rule" is not very meaningful. It could be understood in two ways:
- does it technically, strictly speaking, "violate" the rule, meaning, it does something the sign tells you not to do,
- or is the example acting against the intent of the author of the sign.
If the test asked "should violator be punished?" I think it would be more meaningful, otherwise it's just synthetic and the controversy is just about semantics, it doesn't incentive a discussion about our worldview and the rules we put in place, it just provokes to argue pedantically about how we phrase a message.
Moreover it possibly misleads people to think they disagree on something they really don't.
It's assuming the intent without sufficient context to know what it actually is. Because very little context was provided. And the context that was provided strongly implied that the rule was important.
> Then the sign would mention that, simple as that.
We don't even know if there was a sign. None of that was specified.
You're assuming that.
This is how I interpreted the test, but you're making a good point.
"please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
I live in a city with Trams. Whenever they replace tram rails they remove the surrounding concrete and asphalt. It would be dangerous to drive there. In those cases they explicitly hang a “road closed” sign with an extra sign “including service vehicles”.
In the real world signs (especially common ones) try to be reasonable descriptive. Nobody is helped if you argue about the meaning if something goes wrong.
Otherwise, it is fair game to assume the "intent" of any such sign is to make guidelines to enhance the public's mutual enjoyment/safety at the park, and that such guidelines may be discarded when lives are endangered (police/ambulance).
As an alternate example where the rule itself is related to safety, "no campfires" would not be expected to be followed if one became lost and needed to make smoke signals to be rescued.
You could argue that the sign should include enough context to convince the reader to follow its instructions, but (a) you end up with signs with tons of writing in tiny font that everyone just ignores because TLDR (and yes, these do actually happen quite frequently in parks around here), and (b) if there is some combination of letters you can put on a sign that works to stop people lighting fires, the meadow guy will put that on his sign because he doesn't want fires and those syllables work. So you've just pushed the problem one level back, but the real question remains the same: do you risk doing the thing you want to, or do you respect the sign?
In the situation where context is different than what a reasonable person would expect, it has to be included. Language changes meaning depending on context.
At the end of the day, as a person living their life, it really isn’t your business to know whether an airplane is intruding on park airspace. You should not drive in the park as a private citizen. If you’re a ambulance driver on official business, you should know what applies to you.
"You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules [...]. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
(*Certainly there exist failed states where the police/paramedics are corrupt and the park owner is warlord from a rival tribe, etc. but I think that goes beyond a normative reading of the question.)
No, that's not the problem. That's human nature, and human nature is most definitely not the problem. Humans make the world we live in and we individually get to influence it, but we don't get a veto on how others influence it.
To me, the quiz answers depended on common sense, and I was reminded by it that my common sense is not others' common sense, and so what? That's life. We deal, because there's no other choice when we live in society.
Have you ever looked at the warning signs on water heaters? They make it instantly clear what the dangers are and how bad they can be. A "No vehicles in the park" sign in that situation would be the equivalent of just putting "Caution: Hot" on a water heater.
Similarly, parks have signs with people literally drowning and being killed to make it abundantly clear how dangerous they can be.
That would be a terrible phrasing then. It should have been phrased something like "Landslide hazard, no weight more than 1ton allowed anywhere in the park." or something in that vein.
Unrelated, it is also the reason why a hot-dog is not a sandwich, pragmatically speaking.
Maybe you’re not aware, but rules are all about intent. In a conflict over rules, the judge will be all about the intent.
Rules work very well towards revealing the intent of all parties involved.
It’s always about intent.
This should not be taken to mean that every rule must be fully, rigorously and unambiguously specified, as this would bring an end to human discourse.
Intent is often an appropriate basis for disambiguating rules like this.
Assumption of intent is critical to pretty much all social functioning. In this particular case, I think its outrageously reasonable to assume that if some unusual circumstance were to prevail in the park relevant to the definition of vehicle, the sign would explicitly indicate it. And that, without further clarification, the obvious answer is the one intended.
If people do not have, to some degree at least, a shared intent (e.g. let's have a conversation here about topic X, let's have a park to have fun or relax in, etc.) there is probably no set of rules that can specify sufficiently what can and must not be done. If you did manage to craft such a sufficiently detailed set of rules, it would be too large for people to read and understand.
Shared intent, across cross border platforms, is awfully hard if not impossible to achieve with anything approaching consistency.
(All models are wrong! Some useful!)
The law is a tool which imperfectly models the goals of the lawmakers.
For lawyers judges, the beauty of law is that the law has plenty of room to support contradictory interpretations.
The silliness in this is that it boils everything down to a single rule and expects that you can define the words of the rule in a way that makes it obvious that some other meaning may be inferred. That isn't how language works. In no small part because language isn't static.
Put in a way that programmers know, decently. Regular expressions can describe context free shapes of symbols. These are usually concise and people feel like they can have a hold on them. Context free grammars, though, are typically not concise and lead to all sorts of interesting theory and problems to keep them going. And, much to the frustration of near everyone, colloquial language does not have a context free grammar, even. To try and take it out of the context is to lose.
That's the crux of the issue.
And the game calls this out at the very beginning. It encourages you not to speculate on if it should apply, just if it does apply.
The OPs assertion that this was easy missed the point.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I don't believe it was obvious, and it wasn't stated goal. These are vehicles. The rule applies to them.
The fact that we disagree is the entire point of this game.
What is "shapes of symbols"? Do you mean "characters"? If you are trying to say that "regular languages" are a proper subset of (less expressive than) "context-free grammar" languages , probably best to leave it at that, and let people look up those well-documented terms if they want to learn more. Making up a new term distracts people who know the normal terms, and is just as confusing for people who don't.
But, yes. There is some ambiguity there. That is still perfectly consistent with my point. To think that you can separate use of language from the intent of the use is a fool's errand. One that we often partake in.
Consider for even more fun, many laws are enforced such that the intent of the law is not the only intent consulted, but the intent of the person that broke it. I don't know why humanity is full of so many smart people that all think they can make intent not necessary. When most places context is removed, the results are often catastrophic.
A great example of when this does happen that you can google is parking signs in NYC. There’s a bunch of very specific rules that accommodate dozens of scenarios. As an engineer, I’d be hard pressed to actually determine the legality of a parking scenario in a more complex scenario.
At the end of the day, “No vehicles in the park” is a pretty clear instruction. The idea that first responders would be an exception is both covered in superseding law and a core principle. Preservation of human life supersedes the health of the turf.
An educated person can make a much better assessment of intent.
For instance, if danger exists to a police car due to loose soil or not.
The more important point here for me is not “how should we best design and interact with the rules” (that’s a pretty authoritarian question) but rather “what fundamental human conditions, like education, tend towards more productive interaction with the world, including any rules that exist”
The question is whether it was justifiable and that's not what the original game asks you to evaluate, but it is the much harder question because it is almost always subjective--as you point out. In justifiability you can start asking about intent, weigh the various costs of the action, etc.
The funny thing is, the game itself assumes intent. And even you assume intent.
What is a vehicle? "a thing used to express, embody, or fulfill something" is one of the definitions. So, no books allowed.
But then, the rule doesn't say vehicles aren't allowed to enter the park.
It simple describes the state. That there are "No vehicles in the park."
> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.
At the very least, the other point is that it's challenging to come up with a rule that can't be misinterpreted even when being pedantic.
"No vehicles in the park."
No, there are no books current in the park. Just a bunch of cars.
They really need to work on their signage wording.
So the complaint about rules that involve human discretion strikes me as extremely hollow. We know what trying to write no-discretion rules looks like. We know it almost always still ends up allowing plenty of abuses of the system. To prevent that we need more eyes and more human judgement on things, not less.
Communities are built on intent and learning the culture of the group. Anyone who does not understand this should get into law, not internet moderation.
The first time I went through the quiz, I followed the instructions and had to think about definitions a lot. Then I read your comment and went through the quiz again and just used common sense (dangerous phrase, but I believe it worked in all 27 cases). There was only one violation: someone drove a Honda Civic through the park. What was that person thinking!
On HN we've always tried to avoid hair-splitting arguments by appealing to general values rather than trying to nail down the precise list of disallowed behaviors [1, 2]. Trying to be precise seems like a ticket to bureaucratic, soul-destroying hell [3]. I'd rather just say that there aren't precise rules, just an intended spirit and a few pointers, and yeah that means there's a lot of interpretation involved. There's going to be a lot of interpretation involved no matter what you do, so why pretend otherwise? Just make it clear up front. Then you can say "someone's got to interpret the rules, and that happens to be my job, and I'm interpreting them this way". People will get mad, but people are going to get mad no matter what you do, and at least you won't have to argue about whether a bicycle is a vehicle.
That doesn't mean there aren't edge cases and disputes about which calls are fair. There are tons of those. But if you don't try to be precise then at least you don't get into semantic hell. Except when you do. Boy this work's hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStcwT_RGrQ#t=132.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
...and yet in this very HN discussion we have large numbers of people disagreeing about the intent of the small, clearly written intro, with each side convinced that their interpretation is the obviously correct one. I feel this does as much to support the author's thesis as the game itself.
So I agree with the parent and grand-parent comment. Without a context in which to understand the terms presented, even an apparently-clear statement and introduction can be entirely unclear. I suspect that if you pointed to an actual physical sign and a scenario unfolding in front of them, and asked people whether they objected, rather than asking as an abstract concept on a computer screen, you'd get a different distribution of answers.
The HN approach makes things simpler for moderators in much the same way that being a monarchy makes lawmaking simpler for the king, but writing down rules isn't about making the enforcer's life easier, it's about making the subject's lives easier. They're more numerous, so their needs should have at least some weight.
Independent of that argument, precise written rules and a process for updating them are valuable for several reasons:
1. Whilst people might still get mad, they get mad at the written rules and not at the interpreter of them. This takes a lot of the heat out of the situation because a document can be improved easily relative to improving a person, so discussions about bad outcomes become de-personalized and more constructive.
2. The act of writing down rules forces mental clarity. Contradictions and unhelpful biases that may not be obvious when free-floating in one's head can become apparent immediately when trying to write it all down.
3. Because the rules are clear, violations are less likely to happen to begin with. People who aren't on-board with the values of the community stay away.
The generic HN prohibition against "flamewars" is a good example of a rule that could use a rigorous clarification. It doesn't work to assume the intent or definitions are obvious, because flamewar is a purely online concept that doesn't have any clear analogy to the physical world. Actually it's the opposite: in physical debates there's a general understanding that anyone who turns up and takes part will engage in emotional self-control. If they lose it and start getting angry or raising their voice, they're the ones expected to leave, regardless of what argument the other side was making at the time. HN's approach inverts this standard social convention and blames the person who remains calm for the behavior of angry respondents!
The thread you linked to (from 2015!) is a good example of this. The original post is something about pi and the Bible. It's phrased calmly, isn't obviously in bad faith and is at least somewhat interesting yet is flagkilled, then you threaten to ban the user for conducting "religious flamewars". That user quite reasonably asks what it is that makes his post a rule violation and gives several possibilities e.g. is all discussion of religion banned? But you reply that it would be "soul destroying" to answer his question that specifically! He wasn't asking for a mechanical algorithm but getting more specific than "religious flamewar" and "spirit of the place" doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.
One weird subtext of this discussion is the idea that imprecision in the guidelines is costing "the subjects" something. But getting moderated doesn't cost you anything; on the contrary, it costs Dan. You just adjust and move on.
Quite beyond the quiz instructions, the rest of the psychology on display in this thread is fascinating. Having clear rules makes things harder because other people will follow them. That sounds like the kind of outcome you fear only if you don't really want there to be rules, but only cultural homogeneity. Which is a stated anti-goal of the site.
I really don't think HN does the best possible job of living up to this ideal as a consequence and you see this in the wide range of important topics that the site has largely failed to debate. For example, a common complaint on lab leak stories is that just a few years ago this site was routinely suppressing people who were attempting to engage in curious conversation about SARS-CoV-2 origins.
The quiz epilogue said something along the same lines. Basically the point was to prove with these questions that corner cases always exist, and the system can never be perfect, and therefore we’re screwed and might want to give up. “pinning down a definition is usually impossible” … “You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem.” … “Maybe you will decide to live with the nebulosity, but have more sympathy for the refs. Maybe you will decide that you would prefer to live with the consequences of less moderation. Maybe you will think really hard about decentralization (which is not a panacea). Maybe you will give up on social media altogether.”
I do have sympathy for the refs, Dan, and I think you do an amazing job at a Sisyphean task. I’m also okay with nebulosity too.
However - I want to push back a little on the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t try to be precise, at least not as the most significant summary bit. We should try to be precise when we can, and provide examples when we can’t. I don’t buy the author’s argument/implication that the existence of a corner case somewhere means we shouldn’t be attempting to define the “epicycles” of the rules, especially when it’s really easy to say something like the park boundary is 200m above the ground, or insert ‘motorized’ in front of vehicles, which immediately eliminates like 50% of the supposedly hard to answer questions. Include the other rules, and add details to the quiz questions and almost all of them can become unambiguous. The point of all this is to provide clarity whenever possible and minimize the corner cases and reduce the number of people getting mad, right? It matters whether it’s just one or two people flaming each other versus everyone. It matter whether there’s only one or two crazy accidents in parks versus thousands or millions.
There’s a real difference between public safety and online forum opinions, of course. Yes, with a Grand-Canyon-sized gray area in between. But whether an airplane can fly through a park probably deserves a lot more bureaucratic attention than nailing down how people talk about Pi and religion on HN? Maybe I’m conflating law and forum moderation, maybe you were only talking about forum moderation, but I’m thinking about law as social moderation and how the quiz should reflect on social moderation in general. Our laws currently are in the process of building a larger and larger decision tree of both vague and specific language about what activities and behaviors are socially and legally acceptable, trying eternally to be more precise, and for the most part it “works” by some definition to keep the system manageable. We do try to get precise with speed limits and what kinds of death deserve what punishment and what constitutes insider information and whether badly compressed mp3s constitute copies. Even when it’s hard to pin down, we keep on trying, in order to reduce mistakes.
It’s kinda fun this little quiz of ambiguous questions caused so much discussion. Maybe it happened primarily because of the ambiguity, so each one is a little bike shed. Clearly the author said answer literally and most people just didn’t. But I somewhat feel like (maybe to the top comment’s point) that the contrived ambiguity backfired a bit on me. The problem with the quiz is withholding context and details in order to argue that it’s hard to draw lines. Context and details matter and they always exist in the real world. There isn’t only one rule, and a lot of the questions that seem ambiguous have actual right and wrong answers depending on details (e.g., altitude of the airplane & country of the park, or whether any country on earth asserts air & space rights hundreds of miles above their parks.)
The other way I would “problematize” (to borrow the author’s wording) your crystal-clear understanding is to ask about the matchbox car, then the remote control car, then one of those kid-size toy cars that the kid drives around (then a small one-person electric car, then a full-size electric car).
I suppose another angle would be, are bicycles okay? What about battery-powered bicycles? Does it change if we add a small petrol motor to recharge the battery?
It is agreed that the rule (1) is broken by emergency vehicles. It is unknown that (2) is in effect (it is not described in the scenario), but people would assume that there's no consequences for emergency vehicles breaking the rule.
(Also) because we have a context of a park and of general rules. (Also if you think the ISS is a vehicle on the park you're welcome to try to enforce that)
It was really surprising to me how many so explicitly ignored the instructions for them.
I agree with this obviously, but I feel quite strongly that you must answer "Yes, this violates the rule" to the emergency vehicles questions, because the rules of the game at the beginning clearly stated that you should answer about the violation itself, not about whether it should be allowed.
Simple solutions do not apply to such an extremely complex as human behaviour. In the same way, moderation can not rely on simple, inflexible rules. Yes, sometimes you're gonna ban someone who's just skirting them. Yes, a few dumbasses are going to complain. Ignore them, ban then too, whatever.
It isn't mentioned in the discussion on the results page, but one facet of effective moderation this shines a light on is as follows: each of us may find the moderation task easy, but few (or none) of us would be a moderator who would be universally trusted.
But the moderator can still use vague rules to do what people would not agree upon while still claiming it is within rules, and there always will be someone agreeing with it
In my view, there's always an obvious initial purpose and interpretation (the Honda Civic), and you always have those that will pedantically insist on the most literal Draconian interpretation (the ISS), then you have those who stretch the rules to fit their agenda (bikes), but, most importantly, you have some class of common edge cases which spark significant disagreement (emergency services), even if we all agree on 90% of the point (which is that yes, emergency services should be able to drive through the park during an emergency, regardless of whether the rule is broken).
It's still breaking the rule though. Legally I suspect it varies between jurisdictions whether the sign doesn't apply to them, it does apply but conflicts with another rule, or whether it's argued as an extenuating circumstance.
Then there's the edge cases like bikes and horses.
Are they vehicles? It's completely reasonable that they could be deemed to be.
We've got the same kind of argument going on with e scooters at the moment.
Ultimately I answered a lot of these based on what I would expect to see in a park, and what I think is reasonable. But they aren't objective measures.
And then there is being rational to the extent that you are in complete denial about that the fact that your rational faculty is located within a spongy organ in the cranial cavity of an ambulatory meat bag.
There doesn't need to be an objective measure for you to take a position on the intent and meaning of a linguistic construct such as a rule. It is just a thing that bipedal meatbags do.
If one meatbag has a different view than another meatbag then they are in a political conflict. There are ways of resolving the conflict which range from friendly chat, through formal debate, right the way to genocide. Generally speaking, well adjusted members of civilised society can resolve things through the former. Sometimes we go fucking bananas and end up at the latter.
Not sure why so many find it so difficult to grasp, or feel the need to apologize that they are mortal, they can't derive the answer from a set of universally agreed-upon axioms and carve it in to a stone tablet like some old-testament god ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The game gives a super simple 2-paragraph-instruction that I feel could not be any clearer, but that you chose to ignore in favor of your own interpretation of what is being asked (because you deem the intent "crystal-clear").
Super fascinating.
If the rule or intent is ambiguous, problems may be considered inevitable.
In the above game, you really can't guess the intent. Of course this is partly, because it's an abstract example. But the intent can't really be "no cars or carsy things", because the real intent in "no cars in the park" would be perhaps a combination of no loud noises, no high speed, no heavy objects, no pollution etc.
I realize this may not be an agreeable point since I only got 11% in the game with the assumption that a vehicle is something used for transport (excluding wearables) and that the rules would be seen somewhere in or around the park (so not in the air).
They may have some higher-level rule that says "in emergencies we don't get punished for violating this category of rule", but the rule is still there, and requires the drivers to demonstrate that there was in fact an emergency.
A hierarchy of rules is why normal people don't get to act like cops, or perform amateur heart transplants.
Bikes are a more interesting edge case for me; I think they are, as I expect the reason for the rule to be some kind of environment degradation, possibly easily damaged lawns or similar. But they might be fine. Depends on the reason for the rule.
This is why the real rules say "Emergency vehicles allowed", and then usually "No skateboarding, roller blading, scooters".
An emergency or service vehicle in practice could have an overriding exemption rule (or not and just ignore some rules without retaliation), but they still violate "No vehicles in the park".
The instructions specifically tell you to disregard any unstated assumptions about exceptions for special vehicles.
So in this way you have just illustrated the authors point.
If you add this, you clarify the intent and can meaningfully declare exceptions like "no rules in the park because people come here to relax. Of course if a vehicle is necessary to e.g. stop a wildfire or stop a criminal from shooting people, a vehicle is more than welcome"
They have to acknowledge that the rule exists, and then deliberately break it, because their task takes priority over the rule.
If the question is "does this break the rule?" then the answer is "yes, but". If the question is "will it stay out of the park?" then the answer is "no". The real world doesn't work exactly like if (cond) statements in code.
I think the answer to the survey is "I want to talk to my lawyer".
The question was not about whether the rule ought to be followed, but whether it was violated. Content moderation can work under these circumstances, too.
The setup in the beginning even tries to take the ought out of the deliberations: "Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated. You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules [...]" an even goes on to mention other sources of norms. It explicitly then says: "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
I would not ride in the park, but would walk my bike in the park. I'd be breaking the rules but adhering to the spirit of them.
It is fine to break the rule sometimes though.
Because you assume one following them does it out of good will and good intentions.
Now imagine the moderator that needs to adhere to such rules doesn't use them as guideline but as something to work around to remove the things they personally don't like. And they don't need to explain to the public why they thin it falls upon, they can just silently remove it, or put a comment "removed because rule xyz" and comments to that disabled.
Now imagine rules like /r/games, "No content primarily for humor or entertainment" or "No off-topic or low-effort content or comments". CLEARLY meant to stop memeing and spamming random game screenshots, but oh so easy to attach to nearly anything.
Same with title formatting rules. Should you copy-paste clickbaity title of the article or editorialize it to mean what the article says about? DOESN'T MATTER, if mods don't like the topic they will find an excuse. So the post gets removed but someone links to a different article with normal title that links to that as source ? Nope, LOW EFFORT, removed, should've linked to the original one (that's actual situation I saw on that subreddit, mods really don't like VNs there, and it wasn't about porn one either)
This is the scenario: imagine you're forced to wager a nontrivial sum of money on the following bet. You have to write down how you interpreted (1), (2), and (3). Then we randomly pick a real park that has this exact rule phrased in this exact way (I'm hopeful there'll be at least one out there), find the person who wrote the rule, give them your written interpretation, and ask if they agree. You lose if they don't. Notice we're not asking them to also write down a longer interpretation and comparing word-for-word. Just whether they think you got the gist of it.
I would write down that 'vehicle' was intended to refer to motorized passenger vehicles, 'in' was intended to mean that the vehicles shouldn't be in/on water or land within park boundaries, and that the rule wasn't intended to restrict passage to emergency vehicles responding to emergency situations. I expect most people would write something similar if they had real money on the line.
The trouble with the horrible website is it's trying to prove that nebulosity makes content moderation difficult by forcing people to disagree, but this disagreement almost entirely pertains to a point that has nothing to do with nebulosity: the park rule would only ever be written within a wider legal framework and doesn't make sense in isolation.
If I take my answers to (1) and (2), I'm forced to conclude that the emergency vehicles were violating the rule within the ridiculously artificial scenario presented. However, I'm also confident that this rule would only have been written verbatim within a wider legal framework that provided exceptions for emergency vehicles.
Consider self-defence in the context of murder or manslaughter. In the UK at least, the first thing the court does is establish whether the defendant would fit the criteria for murder / manslaughter ignoring the self-defence aspect, because otherwise it's a moot point. Once this is done, they would then establish whether the defence of self-defence also applies, which would then negate the conviction. If you wanted to prove that law is complex because it's hard to define words, would you really make a website that says "Ignore everything else you know and suppose that murder is only defined as killing a person" and then think you're being really smart when people disagree on the scenario involving clear self-defence? Hopefully not, because they're really only disagreeing with being forced to invoke your artificially-restricted definition.
That said, the website demonstrates the real reason why online moderation is hard: because it disproportionately attracts the sorts of people who answered 'yes' to the ISS question in this quiz. So you often end up with lots of users sharing a reasonable consensus on what the rules mean being moderated by a tiny group of... we'll say 'non-representative' moderators. It's a common problem with any banal form of authority, and isn't specific to website moderation at all.
Personally my instinct is that I'd lose more money by specifying skateboards and bikes as I've usually seen those addressed by their own signs rather than being included under "vehicle".
And as clear as it is, it can still be enforced selectively.
That's the point.
They basically said to ignore local jurisdiction laws. Depending on where the sign is placed, this might not be so obvious.
If you take the sign rule to the letter, an ambulance is a vehicle and thus cannot enter the park as well.
Police can enter the park, but without a vehicle.
But if we're ignoring local rules and the only question is whether or not they would be violating the rules, then yes they would be, and whether they can anyway is out of scope.
The reason to allow emergency vehicles to go through the park must then outweigh the benefit of the ‘no vehicles allowed rule’. Something trivial like a pedestrian illegally crossing the street should not warrant the police going on a car chase through said park.
Whether it's fine in certain scenarios to break some rules it's a different topic though.
Exactly, the Hippocratic oath supersedes the no vehicle rule.
And if i want to say no skateboarding, roller blading, scootering, pogoing, or any alternative in the park?
I agreed with 11% of people, but that is 1 in 10 who agree your take isn't correct. (granted i think a small wagon is ridiculous to enforce under like 90% of circumstances)
Is it just because that way you can feel smart having “solved“ the game? Or do you think there’s a moral imperative to say an ambulance isn’t breaking a rule even in an abstract word game? Do you understand abstraction, and that this isn’t really about a park?
Most likely true. But to me the answer for the question itself is not about whether the rule can be overridden by any other rules. It’s purely about the rule itself.
The intro supports this:
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
There is a difference between a rule being violated, and whether the violation of the rule is allowed. Like they say in that intro text.
Therefore, all of the examples with police motor vehicles and ambulance motor vehicles are to be answered as being in violation of the rule.
A horse is not a vehicle. A horse is a horse, of course.
The game is trying to demonstrate that content moderation, even using simple explicit rules, is hard and will lead to disagreements.
The game has absolutely nothing to do with whether vehicles should actually be allowed in the hypothetical park, let alone if there should be fines.
Everyone agrees that the car is forbidden, the police and ambulance are technically forbidden but should be allowed, and all other cases are things that the sign obviously doesn't forbid.
If you argue otherwise you are just trying to come up with arguments for the sake of arguing.
Also the questions have dubious intent.
Does something violate the rule? Some times they do and sometimes we need to understand if that's acceptable or fix what made this rule to be broken.
But I think many people interpret the question as "should it be allowed"
I disagree due to the instructions on the page before starting the quiz: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
The game is specifically asking us not to make a judgement call on whether a violation of the rule should be permitted. So, police are violating the rule (even if we think it's allowable)
And yet it is top comment, with many confirmations in the replies. I had to scroll really really long to find somebody quoting short instruction which the parent is ignoring.
So long story short, amazing job with that game. It's seems really hard to present the case for how difficult moderation is any clearer. Fascinating stuff.
Also, I'm too lazy but it would be nice to see LLMs answers.
edit: curiosity won, not all questions, GPT4: https://gist.github.com/comboy/71caac8afdc1b92d103c4ec7c42e4...
I agree, but in the sense that it’s okay for them to violate the rule. However, they are still violating the rule, and thus the correct answer in the game is “yes, this violates the rule”.
> Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Is that every year multiple people in the U.S. are killed by police driving their cars onto beaches and running over unsuspecting sun bathers. So there’s a strong argument that the signs intent is to ban even responding emergency vehicles.
In the Highway Traffic Act of Ontario "vehicle" is defined as: “vehicle” includes a motor vehicle, trailer, traction engine, farm tractor, road-building machine, bicycle and any vehicle drawn, propelled or driven by any kind of power, including muscular power, but does not include a motorized snow vehicle or a street car; (“véhicule”)
And that doesn't even address the bigger issue that even if they were justified in breaking the rule, they were breaking the rule.
The prompts were: "In an emergency, Neil, an EMT, drives his ambulance into the park" and "In an emergency, Laurie, a police officer, drives her police car into the park."
They are indeed violating the rule. Whether that rule is enforced against emergency vehicles is considered by the enforcing agent. I believe most people in that position would allow the emergency vehicles to do their jobs without citing them for violating the rule.
But they’re still violating it.
There is no sign. Nowhere in the question does it mention a sign.
What the question does say, however, is this: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
Which is pretty much the opposite of what you conclude.
Interesting.
One of the points of the exercise is that there is broad spread (though far from a uniform distribution) of responses, so the fact that the correct answers are clear to you only goes so far.
It might be interesting to see how additional statements about intent would affect the distribution (though to the extent that the statements of intent take the form of lists of determinations in each special case, the interesting outcome would be the distribution continuing to be broad.)
You are actually perfect example, everying is crystal clear to me too, and my interpretation violently contradicts your interpretation
"Obvious" for you that is. I had a different interpretation of the obvious rule, so came up with a different set of answers.
QED, no?
The test explicitly asked for answers as to whether the rule is followed, not whether its ok to ignore the rule in a given situation. Very obviously a police car or an ambulance is a vehicle in the park.
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
Does this mean that if police are code 2 en route to a crime 10 miles away they can use the park to save time? What if they are code 3?
Part of doing the job of firefighter includes conducting drills. Can they choose the park as their drill environment?
Further, even if they are responding to a crime in the park, are police allowed to drive on the sidewalk because someone has broken the littering ordinance?
Even ignoring these grey areas and focusing on your own statement, there is a philosophical dilemma. Are the first responders who "don't have to follow" an inherent part of the rule, or is the rule absolute and they are merely permitted to break it? in either case, by legal or by social convention?
if you could either explain the lingo or dial it down, that would be great for the rest of us to understand your argument
Code 3 means that emergency vehicles are responding to a non-emergency, backup for a scene which is mostly under control, etc. But it is not urgent enough to warrant lights or sirens.
So of course they drive through the park whenever they want.
Best to avoid jargon.
Obviously? Really? Not only do I find it non-obvious, the rules of the game specifically say to ignore outside context which would IMO include ignoring municipal laws or rules that might say emergency vehicles can go anywhere they are needed. That is huge part of the issue they are pointing out - an ambulance violates the rule, but context makes it OK.
It isn't simple.
In some countries they can ignore such signs only when under an emergency and rights have been given by a central or a local station. A police car can't just turn on flashy lights and drive into a park.
That's not particularly surprising. But you may be asking the wrong question.
If you want to know whether the rules are clear then I think that the right question to ask is not "Are the answers crystal-clear to you?" but "Will different people produce the same answers?".
If we had a sharp drop in the graph at one point then it would suggest that most everyone has the same cutoff; instead we see a very smooth curve as if different people read this VERY SIMPLE AND CLEAR rule and still didn't agree on when it applied.
Without that definition, almost anything resembling an edge case becomes an argument.
Similarly, without specifying the intent, it becomes impossible to decide the argument, because easily two people can have legitimately different views; e.g., the rule is to prevent anything putting more pressure on the ground than a footfall (so basically anything w/wheels is a problem, including emergency vehicles, but a sled might be is OK), to anything fast-moving and massive (so toys, airplanes, & spacecraft are OK), to some arbitrary rule from a psycho-dictator owner...
I.e., if you want people to make sense of the rules, they need to start with a simple clear definition (this does OK in that dept.), specify the extent (what to include and exclude) specify the intent, and maybe provide examples of how to decide edge cases so that others can reason about them.
isn't that the exact thing this points attention to? When you have power, everything is clear. But _your_ clear isn't necessarily same as anyone else's clear
thus percentages aren't 100%, as shown
Not so obvious. I identified them as having violated the rules. If an exemption was intended for emergency vehicles it should have been included in the sign. Many signs regarding rules for vehicles include "except for emergency vehicles". Without such an exemption I would apply the rules to them.
But breaking rules like this in cases of emergency is the correct thing to do.
This is where the moderation difficulty comes in.
For other people too, but for them maybe the right answer is different.
Intent is clear until it is not.
Cars obviously aren't allowed. Bicycles are not, either. But can I walk through the park pulling my bicycle ? (I want to cut through the park to avoid a long detour). Some will say that the intent is to avoid have people _driving_ vehicles through the park because it is dangerous, others will say that if that was the intent the rule would be "No driving of vehicles in the park".
What about toy cars ? The extreme cases are easy, an hot wheels car is obviously fine. Something like this [1] I would say not, too fast and dangerous. What about the middle ground ? Are tricycles fine ? Toy car with pedals ? A car-like stroller [2] ?
It is less clear and you will have different complains from different persons. Some people will be pissed off that they can use their vehicle while other can use their. Some people are petty and will try to have any kind vehicle banned "because the rule says so", just to make the life of others miserable.
And this is only about what constitutes a vehicle, we are not even talking about what means "in the park".
You can give moderators (law enforcement, in the park example) freedom to act according the intent ("when I see it I know if it is allowed or not"), but the more freedom they have, the more potential for trouble there is.
Of course people will be disgruntled also if the rule is too specific and inflexible, because that may mean not being able to do something that it "obviously" was meant to be allowed. You need to find a good balance, and the ability to update the rules for the thorny cases.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOMXCW7uK4U [2] https://www.walmart.com/ip/3-In-1-Push-Car/40926763
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. [...] please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
You:
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
Even having read your reply it is not obvious to me what you answered. Did you answer yes, the police etc. are violating the rule only adding a note for us tha, or did you answer no, thinking that this doesn't count as a violation?
To me the overall discussion, but especially the disagreement about emergency services and bicycles proves the point of the original article.
Nope, not for me :-) But funny part is that it's so obvious for me, I'm surprised anyone else thinks otherwise.
I'd be interested to see more grey-area things like a group of fast amateur bicycle racers, e-bikes, classic pedal-mopeds, electric stand-up scooters, electric sitting moped/scooters, Vespas, ice-cream tricycles, pedal delivery vehicles, I think there would be a lot more differing opinions about those.
Pedal-moped: https://www.used.forsale/sh-img/Honda_Hobbit_pedal%2Bmoped.j...
UPS pedal trike: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/11/mobil...
Ice cream trike: https://www.hogroastredditch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/...
Recumbent trike: https://i1.wp.com/www.recumbenttrikestore.com/wp-content/upl...
A low percent
Obviously? I disagree there and marked those as violating the rule. If we are to take the rule literally and logically, then those examples clearly violate the rule. Nowhere in that game did it say that police, ambulances and fire trucks get a free pass. There isn't anything obvious about that. You're bringing your own context and knowledge/interpretation of the world into this. The game also clearly stated that we should ignore our own local laws (and religion) when answering the questions.
Every prompt is asking either one or both of these questions: "Is this a vehicle?" "Is it in the park?"
So you have to ask yourself what is a vehicle? Most people would not classify shoes as a vehicle. So why would attaching wheels to shoes make them vehicles? The definition of vehicle is rather vague, basically "something used to move people or goods, especially on land". Which skates kind of are. They use a machine, the wheel, to multiply work done.
Even though a matchbox car has all the appearances of something normally accepted as a vehicle, does the fact that it is incapable of transporting anything significant change that fact?
Then you get to "in the park". What is "in" the park as opposed to "out"? Yes, the grounds as defined by the property lines are definitely "in" the park. Someone driving a Civic through the grounds is definitely "in the park". Basically, do you count the airspace of the park and if so, where does it end? If something hovering 4 feet above the ground is in the park, then why isn't an airplane at 33,000 feet "in" in the park? Is it because we can't reasonably interact with it? If that's the case, do the boundaries of the park change depending on the height and reach of those in it? If no one is in the park, and you jump a Civic completely over the grounds, were you ever "in" the park?
Moderation is an attempt to define things like this. Sometimes more abstractly, sometimes way more directly. For instance, if you have a forum about sandwiches, you're going to have to have a rule about hot dogs. Whether or not they count.
You see it here all the time when someone asks "Why was this posted here?"
So if you have a rule that says "No slurs". That seems simple enough. But now you have to define what a slur is. If I call someone a "fucking idiot", is that slur or just an insult? What if I just said, "Americans, right?" Calling out someone's nationality shouldn't technically be a slur, but it's kind of the implication that turns it into one. Because I'm saying something about people from America, saying they all share a negative quality by virtue of where they are geographically from.
Do we just make a list of slurs? Do we try and account for tone? Where is the line between heated debate and a flamewar? Or even an engaged discussion and a heated debate. Even here, you can get rate limited for just interacting too much. Conversations killed because people were conversing too much.
But that's how they defined a vehicle, that's where they drew the lines of the park.
“It’s clear to me, therefore it’s clear to everyone.”
Edit: Okay I have no idea what it's meant to be (other than "11")
Not sure given the other responses if this number is acurate?
But also I got 11% here.
And 11%, why is everyone getting 11%? Is it a backend error? Who knows! If that 11% had a label, it would be easier for us to know whether it's working as intended or not.
But it says I had 11% agreement with the majority.
I also couldn't see two different colors on my dimmed phone display until I zoomed way in. I'm not even colorblind.
I too got 11% but stuck assiduously to powered vehicles on the ground of or launched from the park.
I did not include the tank.
I also got the exact same percentage saying 'yes' to everything.
I also got the exact same percentage saying 'no ' to everything.
27 * .11 ~= 3, fwiw
So I don't think it's related to yours answers. It's just the weighted average of what people said for the set of questions you answered, or something like that. Not actually your score at all.
18 when I stopped after just the first 7 questions
Also breaking a rule is fine for an emergency vehicle.
I also took away the opposite of what the author tried to convey.
But I also got a bad impression of their argumentative integrity because they tried to use a strawman to illustrate their point - only it backfired anyway.
An ill defined rule that lacks examples and definition is not a good way to prove people interpret a good faith attempt at rules differently.
And the longer explanation at the end simply dismisses the notion of giving any examples or even trying to give a clear rule by hand waving and basically saying a motivated person can find ambiguity in anything.
So because a rule or law can’t be defined to perfection without the slightest ambiguity then we should just have anarchy? I’m sorry for the bluntness but that’s asinine.
Edit: reading further, yes, everyone gets 11%.
If your answers were consistent with a consistent population, there would be a threshold above which all your bars turn red. Any churn in that consistency (my last six bars are a mixture of red and green) shows a deviation of some kind, but I don’t know how this accounts for when there is no overall consistency and everyone disagrees.
Add a couple checkboxes with interactivity:
- Show only "Is vehicle" bars
- Show only "Is not vehicle" bars
- Show only answers that agreed with me
- Show only answers that disagreed with me
And a "toggle colorblind mode" although I'm not sure what colors would be ideal for that.
Any other ideas for how to make this thing actually readable?
The "majority 11%" means that 1/9 of your answers were above 50% (as you can see it on the charts).
The banning of certain explicit classes of vehicles is only a byproduct, not the end-goal, of such a rule; and so it doesn't actually matter what is or isn't a vehicle — the word "vehicle" in such a rule is acting as a conceptual stand-in for whatever things cause uniquely vehicle-in-the-park-ish problems; and anything that doesn't cause such problems, isn't "a vehicle."
I find that this lens on rule enforcement is a useful guide, because whatever the text of the law ends up saying, the enforcement of the law will hew to the spirit that the text of the rule is being interpreted to have, by those charged with its enforcement. (I.e., the non-working tank is almost certainly a "vehicle" by any definition a bylaw would pose, but if they deliver it to the park on a non-damaging sled, let it sit there for a while, then haul it away on the same sled, then it's not causing any of the problems that "vehicles" cause, and so it's very unlikely that any bylaw-enforcement officer would actually ticket the owner of the tank for having it in the park.)
Well, there are many possible options, so this does not help unless you know which issue was bothering the rule-makers.
I know a park that allows horses but not bicycles.
For example, the same sign in a school hallway leading to an enclosed play area for kindergartners would most certainly result in more violations.
For example: in the city of Melbourne, there are sometimes signs instructing cyclists to dismount (e.g. at railway level crossings), or that you aren’t permitted to cycle in such-and-such a place (e.g. railway platform). Their illustrations always depict an upright bicycle. I ride a recumbent tricycle, which the Road Safety Road Rules considers to be a bicycle. The reasons for dismounting simply don’t apply: my wheels won’t get caught in rails and I won’t fall over, and in fact dismounting will make matters worse. And the reasons for not cycling in most of the so-marked places are seriously diminished and heavily counterbalanced: I can easily and safely travel at pedestrian speed, and I will be far more of an obstruction on your thoroughfare if you require that I stand up and awkwardly push my vehicle along, steering only with difficulty (normally mostly by nudging one of the front wheels with one foot as I walk), taking up a lot more space and not going straight or at the same speed as others. Common sense says I should ignore such signs and assess each situation individually. But I tried applying common sense like this on a railway platform once and was severely threatened with a fine. Meanwhile, mobility scooters are really pretty similar to me in contextual characteristics (my vehicle interacts in such situations much more like one of them than like an upright bicycle), but they’re fine.
(Aside: in the state of Victoria, the road rules classify my vehicle as a bicycle; but in New Zealand, the road rules classify it and bicycles as cycles, and only mention bicycles in one section, about wearing helmets. No attention is drawn to the use of a different word, but it’s clear that tricyclists are genuinely not legally required to wear helmets—which does actually make some sense, as the majority of scenarios where a helmet is beneficial to a bicyclist either don’t apply, or apply vastly less often, to recumbent tricyclists.)
On another occasion I was fined by PSOs for walking along beside the railway line, along a route that I understood to be a public right of way and which was not in any way blocked save an easily-walked-around vehicle barrier at the far end that they’d installed in the last year or so, and which our family and others had been traversing since before I was born. But no, they’d decided that wasn’t allowed any more, didn’t actually tell the locals, and ignored the explanation and an expressed willingness to not do it again (and the appeals process declined to listen too). I suspect and hope that regular police would have listened and just issued a warning to not use that route any more.
Thought experiment: A: Put your head down on the pavement and close your eyes or B: let your toddler stand on the pavement. Who you'd rather have approaching you or the toddler at the same exact speed: Someone walking, someone on a tricycle, someone walking with a tricycle - all three with their nose in their phone or whatever people do when they are not 100% there.
There's a clear difference that you for some reason seem to be angry at and want to ignore.
Some extremely tall humans could manage to do this to a toddler, if they were kick-stepping, but most people could not. And nobody kick-steps their way around a park, anyway. People normally pick their feet up by only a couple of inches as they walk.
If you bump into a toddler when walking normally, the toddler's whole body will collide with your whole leg, and the toddler will falter backwards, maybe falling onto their ass, but not falling prone. And, crucially, the faster you collide with the toddler at speed, the further back they'd go — i.e. if you jogged into them, you'd end up punting them a good few feet away from yourself. While this would hurt, it'd be a distributed impact across their whole body, so it wouldn't cause huge damage. And it would give you the added reaction time to realize you just punted a child five feet and stop jogging.
"Trampling" by an individual animal is only really a big-animal thing. Elephants, giraffes, etc. These animals can trample a toddler without noticing, like you could trample a frog without noticing. But there are very few such animals. Even a draft horse would have to be galloping to manage to trample a toddler. Soldiers only get trampled in medieval battle by a single-rank charge of cavalry when they've been struck and are laying prone on the ground. Angry horses and cows only manage to trample people in their pens, if the person mistakenly thinks they should protect themselves from further kicks by getting low to the ground.
(I emphasize "individual animal" or "individual rank", as trampling works differently with herds of animals — you don't need to be kicked over, you just need to be knocked back; while this may stop the individual animal that collided with you, the animal is forced forward at speed by the rest of the herd, who all didn't experience the collision themselves, and so don't know to react to it; and so the herd will then flood over your knocked-back body, tumbling you each time until you do, by random chance, end up prone; at which point you'll be trampled.)
Being "ridden onto" by a tyre — whether a car tyre or a bicycle tyre — is very different, because the bottom of the tyre is pulling on the surface it's coming into contact with to propel itself forward. If a bicycle overmounts a toddler's foot at speed, the toddler will be pulled downward foot-first into the path of the tyre. Picture being caught by the roller barrel of a steam roller — with less weight, yes, but faster, grippier, and applied across a more narrow surface area.
That is simply not true. There are people getting killed every day (~8 a day) because phones are used in vehicles much harder to control than a tricycle, and I see people riding bikes, looking at their phone while zipping between pedestrians and cars.
I actually agree here, and I probably should have been more specific with what I said originally. When I said:
> the enforcement of the law will hew to the spirit that the text of the rule is being interpreted to have, by those charged with its enforcement.
What I meant was more that:
> when encountering novel situations that can't be easily interpreted using the text of the rule, the enforcement of the rule will hew to the inferred spirit of the rule, rather than robotically trying to apply some "fallthrough" case of the rule (e.g. by permitting any vehicle not explicitly listed.)
So, bylaw officers won't let you do recumbent-bicycle things if bicycles aren't allowed, because to them, a recumbent bicycle IS-A bicycle, and therefore is covered by the explicit text of the law — even if the spirit of the law would have made an exception for recumbent bicycles had it known. (This is the kind of situation where there's a point to petitioning to get the wording of the bylaw changed — when the "case law" of enforcement can't legitimately override the "legislation" of the rule, because it would seemingly go against the explicit text.)
But bylaw officers will allow a pedestrian scooter, because pedestrian scooters aren't explicitly addressed in the rule; nor do they have an IS-A relationship with anything that is addressed in the rule. So they have to actually use their brains to make a decision. And that decision will use common sense — a sibling comment referred to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule, and I think that's exactly the kind of common sense being used — to infer intent.
Or, to put that another way: enforcement won't interpolate the rule by inferring spirit, when making fine-grained distinctions when things "fall between" the lines of text in the rule; it will instead "snap" each case to the nearest explicitly-legislated-for case and then apply the text of the rule. But enforcement will often extrapolate the rule by inferring spirit, when judging situations that fall outside the "explicitly-ruled space" bounded by the explicit cases covered in the text.
(Why? From the perspective of the bylaw-enforcer: CYA. Your boss, or some enforcement auditor, could make a reasonable case that "you made the wrong call" by considering a recumbent bicycle to not be a bicycle, and punish you for it; and almost inevitably, given the way we divide responsibilities in our justice system, that "wrong call" will be "not writing a ticket." But nobody's going to punish you for "making the wrong call" on an entirely-novel case — instead, whatever call you did make will instead just become part of a body of case-law for interpreting the rule in the future.)
Does it? How is it different from Car A driving the speed limit and Car B driving 20 over because "I have a big SUV/racecar/motorcycle"?
Laws are normally made knowing there are situations where it will not always seem common sense, but if we follow your logic we would have hundred of thousands of rules, like a complete set for each type of car, bike, etc. I see it as common sense that of course the same rules apply to your tricycle, unless it is for a disabled person.
Your example is patently unreasonable and a completely different thing.
Legislation defines various classes of vehicle, and changes the definitions and categories over time to match need. But it’s not good for the legislation to explicitly say “Category A encompasses Items B and C” and then to write a law for Item B but apply it instead to Category A. In this specific case, it’s probably mostly happened by sheer accident because they named Category A “Item B”, and so you can never tell whether the intention was to cover Item B or Category A.
This is why I like what New Zealand has done: by giving the category the name cycles and not bicycles, they’ve kept the opportunity to apply laws to bicycles specifically and not other forms of cycles, in cases where that makes sense.
Another example could be banning loud or polluting vehicles in the city centre, as is happening in many cities. They use the same sweeping rules as in "No bicycles" and allow EVs "because they are silent and green as we all know" while in reality EVs are more noisy than a similar car at city speeds and up. Most people are not aware of this, but if you are, you could just as easily feel discriminated against in a small, new, diesel car. However, it would, in my opinion, be too difficult to have a society with the amount of rules needed to fix these kinds of cases.
(It is the low friction tires on EVs and the extra weight that cause the added noise. A stupid problem that could easily be fixed with normal tires on EVs.)
This ambiguity can cause issues. In a perfect world it doesn't exist. But in reality it usually does because you don't want to hire a lawyer to help you understand if the 30-page sign prevents you from bringing a toy boat into the park.
Everyone is trying to interpret one line of text. But that line ks just a stand in for a much longer text that should answer all of the questions.
E.g. for emergency vehicles, there is certainly a statute somewhere that grants them exemption, if that is appropriate. We don't need to torture ourself wondering.
The sibling who mentioned his recombinant bicycle not fitting the intent of the bylaws should petition the relevant authority to update the text to clarify this detail. But that doesn't mean they're going to change the signs or graphics.
Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
I have friends that do long bike camping trips, and they sometimes want to pass through areas of wilderness on their trips. What do they do? They take apart the bike and pack it, because you are allowed to have bike parts in the wilderness.
I would love for someone to try disassembling less of the bike and still getting ticketed, just to see how that line ends up getting drawn. Is a bike without a seat still a bike? What about a bike with no tires? Does 50% of the bike need to be "contiguous" to be considered a bike? If it can be ridden? What if there are no pedals? Is a unicycle considered a bike?
I considered ISS to be outside it, and that was pretty much it. My views weren't shared with too many, about 11%.
The problem with treeline (or any similar threshold) is that even having that defined doesn't solve for the fact that we don't know the altitude of the quadcopter. That's why I'm leaning more toward ground contact.
Just like "contactless" payment cards, which for some reason involves the word "tap" as well, even though tapping is the act of making brief contact, and is not required for the communication to succeed, and that successful communication could be referred to as making contact, but I digress.
International agreement says that objects at the altitude if the ISS are not counted in the park, that’s not local jurisdiction
The notion of permissions afforded by "airspace rights," even those internationally agreed, therefore cannot be used when deciding how to answer the questions in this game. Even if we could lean on that here, airspace rights actually were infinite for a very long time -- there's even a Latin phrase saying "up to Heaven and down to Hell" -- until modern air travel began.
Instead of rights/laws, we must focus only on what it means to be "in the park" by common use of the phrase. At some point you're above it rather than in it, perhaps. It may happen to be the case that people do most often think of this altitude threshold roughly equivalent to modern airspace rights, but personally I'm not so sure.
This is why some people (including myself) chose that an ambulance driven into a park wouldn't be a violation of the rule.
I would say those two things are very different. The ground (floors are inside) is the cooperating object upon which leading objects carry.
The shoes carried the person on the ground, the car carried the person on the ground, the horse carried the person on the ground, etc;
An interesting dilemma does occur if we are walking barefoot: our feet carry us but are part of our whole, so we cannot reasonably consider them or ourselves a vehicle. But in a general day-to-day sense we would say they carry us.
It is very interesting what you brought up because I think it shows some people consider their outfit as an extension of themselves. Then again, many people also do for their car :)
Since we're already taking it too far, I want to point out that you can have outside floors, and you can have floors that are not supported by the ground.
An airplanes floor in flight, or a dance floor in your backyard are examples of both.
Rollerblades, skis, snowboards, skateboards, scooters, bikes.
IMO the definition of a vehicle comes down to how wieldy, how large, and how powerful the device is - for instance car is obviously a vehicle as it's very powerful, has a large turning radius, and large area. The interesting thing about this is that there's an argument that scooters are not vehicles but skateboards are - scooters are far easier to control (i.e. more wieldy) whereas skateboards have a tendency to launch the user in one direction and the skateboard in the other, which makes it rather unwieldy.
I would only consider skates to be slightly ambiguous because they are shoes that are mounted but worn. but still, i say vehicle
Other definitions include an agent of transmission (e.g. for and infection) and a medium though which something is displayed (dance is the vehicle for my creativity). Would have been interesting to see the different definitions exploited vs more strained classification of shoes or skates or whatnot as vehicles.
- Would anyone call it a vehicle?
- Is it in the park?
In general, no testing. Unless some people are being jackasses and doing something absurd like standing on wheelchairs jousting with long sticks holding up everyone in line.
While it might be uncommon to call a wheelchair a vehicle, it fits the literal definition. I don’t understand the ‘extension of the person’ rationale, you’re still using the word ‘wheelchair’, and it’s obviously a separate object from a person. How would that rationale differ if you were talking about cars? Can I argue a car is an extension of me as long as I’m using it while I need it?
I wouldn't say I'm entirely convinced, but it's at least convincing enough that I said that a wheelchair did not violate the "vehicle" rule. I can't define "vehicle" in a way that would satisfactorily justify that decision, but I'm comfortable with that.
A bicycle actually goes on roads, follow rules and get a ticket for jumping a red light.
You can take roller skates off, get out of a wheelchair, and get off a bicycle.
Imagine you were wearing roller skates being pulled by a dog.
Imagine you were sitting in a chair, with a roller skate bound to each leg of the chair, rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a flea in a roller skate rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a dog in a wheelchair rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a flea on a dog in a chair with roller skates on its legs rolling down a hill.
I don't think that's particularly clear and I think a non-negligible number of people would disagree
After all, bicycles are clearly vehicles, and bicycles and wheelchairs are both things with metal frames, wheels and seats designed to convey humans around under their own power.
Other than the placement of the wheels, the main difference is the character of its use.
Which I guess is part of the point - the rule specifically does not say anything about use, only presence - but people (including me) are still interpreting the rule with a "usage" axis. Perfect demonstration that the "simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply" assertion has fallen over at the first hurdle.
I think, just being overly annoying and literal, that the game shouldn't be answered by asking whether anyone would call a wheelchair a vehicle, but whether a wheelchair is a vehicle in the sense meant in the rule statement. I don't think it is, personally, though it's probably the closest non-vehicle in the list.
Strictly speaking, by the definition of "would anyone call this object a vehicle", every single thing on the list is a vehicle, because apparently at least ~2% of the quiz respondents said they were vehicles - including kites!
It might include a powered mobility scooter.
Drones and balloons I would say are in the park, whereas aircraft (at normal altitudes) I would say are not. Unfortunately: I'd like more parks to have a protected square inch of silence.
a thing used for transporting people or goods
On this basis, I conclude that wheelchairs, roller skates and carried skatebords are vehicles, and horses are not (as thing implies non-sentience).
Or if it was motorised?
Is the correct resolution to deny (b)?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "in the park" represents within the analogy.
Additionally strollers, wagons, and other baby or child conveyances would also qualify.
But you were specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction, and that's why this can happen. The 15 countries it flew over are members of the ICAO, which delegated some of their sovereignty to the common good of easy air travel. It could have easily worked out some other way; fly over our country without stopping for immigration, and we blow up your plane. (You can see this in action if you fly your plane from Canada to do a low approach over the White House. You probably won't be home for dinner.) Similarly, in the US, the FAA decides who can fly over your property and how low. These are not universal constraints on existence, just actual laws that people wrote down because nobody could agree on the details. I'd venture a guess that if you asked the average property owner if airplanes could fly over their property and stare at them in their hot tubs, they'd say "no". However, the law simply doesn't agree with them, and a satellite is photographing your underwear as we speak!
But what if it's a single unit (no warhead) which only works via kinetic contact, then perhaps not a vehicle.
Trust me, if there weren't any laws, people would be shooting down airplanes above their farms, or at the very least, writing a lot of angry letters to the FAA. The laws that we have right now allowing the freedom of air travel were hard-won and unpopular among those affected.
Therefore, the park in this exercise would mostly like try and shoot down the International Space Station, or else risk the reputation of not being strict against surfers carrying surfboards. It's exactly the same thing.
So where do you draw the line?
Similarly a subway train passing underneath the park is not "in" the park, nor are vehicles that are at the antipode of the park on the polar opposite side of the Earth.
To me, that doesn't change the answers much. You still have to have some definition of vehicle that inevitably assumes some context.
That to me means any human-propelled thing smaller than say a motorbike is not a vehicle.
So I only said 'is indisputably a vehicle' to cars and similar (even if was an ambulance or police car)
The countries often ask for passenger lists and manifests before they allow your plane to do so and have, in the past forced planes to land to get to passengers or suspected passengers on the plane they have an interest in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
Parks do have airspaces, obviously and literally, and more to the point, in the U.S. there’s existing legislation defining the altitudes that are considered “in” and out of the park.
Whether any airspace is included in the park is completely ambiguous in the game.
Asking intentionally ambiguous questions that existing laws already answer in order to make a point about the difficulty of moderation kind-of undermines the author’s intent here. He was trying to prove that unanswerable corner cases always exist, but it’s not true for the specific case of airlines over parks once you know the laws.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/become_a_drone_...
The question in the quiz about flying airplanes over a park can be correctly answered with 3 pieces of information: the aircraft type, the park’s location, and the altitude. The question cannot be answered without that information. Contrary to the author’s attempted point, the correct answer to the question is not a matter of language ambiguity.
Is a quadcopter at 399 ft in the park then? If it's at 401 ft, then it's not?
Yeah I saw all those rules. The FAA killed flying drones as a legal hobby for me.
Is an airplane in your park if you put a roof over it? Is an airplane in your house?
"the park" includes not only the ground, but also a certain area above the ground - otherwise someone riding a bike through the park wouldn't be in the park (as they are not touching the ground) but their bike would be. That would be absurd.
You see the issue, yah?
In at least some countries (such as the U.S., and I would speculate practically all countries in the age of commercial flight and private drones, but I don’t know that for a fact) there are laws that define whether flying “over” a public park means in our out, and the park’s bounding volume is defined with a specific altitude ceiling. (It may be different depending on the type of aircraft, e.g., civilian drone vs emergency helicopter vs commercial airliner, etc.)
The author’s trick worked. People are arguing over whether a hypothetical airplane is in the hypothetical park without knowing the altitude or location, rather than pointing at the fact that he question is intentionally under-specified and the right answer depends on important details that were left out.
I say none are vehicles but I could see how one might.
For example you can have a rule like "no sharing pornographic content", but then are people allowed to share links to forbidden content? Links to sites that are 100% links to forbidden content? Links to sites that have one link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? Links to sites that have one extremely prominent link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? How prominent? Etc etc etc.
I’m sure much of it violates the rules but my initial inclination is always to browse away, not report.
I'm pretty sure a few explicit Google searches with "site:twitter.com" should pull up plenty.
And I'm not talking softcore, unless my descriptions are way off base.
Granted those aren't necessarily unwittingly, I can usually guess it's going to be like that, but I've definitely "fallen into a rabbit hole" so to speak at other times.
On reddit, if you're not subbed to porn subreddits, you normally wouldn't see it. Though the homepage was still jacked up enough a few days ago that I was seeing softcore stuff on page 1 or 2 with the country set to Mexico.
You'll see a fair degree of NSFW porn if you firehose capture all images, on the "hate speech" front (repeatedly calling disabled, minority, indigenous, queer people names, cyber stalking, etc.) it's reached the point where (for instance) Australia has warned Twitter it will start issuing daily fines of up to $7K AUD [1]
The increased porn & veering into CSAM territory is tailwinding that trend.
[1] https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/esafety-d...
How far does the airspace extend?
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
(If Schrodinger brings a backpack into the park but doesn't know what's in it, is that a violation? Did you pack your own luggage today, sir/maam?)
Same goes for things like kites and quadrocopters.
The labels at the end now say:
> You think it is not a vehicle in the park
> You think it is a vehicle in the park
No actually I do think it does and is captured beautifully in the game. Things that clearly once vehicles are arguably no longer - like the war tank.
Like Michelangelo's David, is the nudity porn? is it obscene? for who? Is this a website about art? or a porn site? education site? a site for children?
Each one of those sites have differing views of the exact same thing.
Love this exercise.
I eventually came up with a mental model that was something like “an artificially powered or mechanically advantaged means of conveyance or transport, especially one that creates negative externalities to other park goers inconsistent with typical use and enjoyment of public park space.” But that wasn’t absolute - the non-functional tank was, in my mind, quite obviously a vehicle, and so was prohibited. Someone at a higher pay grade is going to have to make an exception there. The skydiver - ehhh, it was a stretch to call him a vehicle, but by my heuristic he broke the sign’s rule.
Was, or is? The non-functional tank was a vehicle, but is currently a non-functional lump of steel and is thus no different to a statue. A statue is obviously not a vehicle, and a statue of a car is still not a vehicle.
Seems unlikely to have been pushed by people.
“Matthew, head of an organization of WWII veterans, puts a non-functioning WWII-era tank into the park as a war memorial.”
In the end, I only banned the car and the boat, and the boat was only really on a technicality. In retrospect, I might have been being too lenient, but I think it had a lot to do with just the stuff that I wanted to see in the park, which is pretty interesting from a moderation perspective.
Travois is other one I kinda struggled... Just a a-frame even if you drag it in clearly is not one to me.
For an exercise that is, by it's own admission, pedantic by design that's a pretty glaring fault
Rules are pedantic by their nature, that's the whole point of interpreting them.
The point, that you've missed twice now, is that the results are presented using incorrect language.
Which of course illustrates that in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply. Especially in content moderation.
I think it might be worse than that, there are sometimes rules which aren't actually rules which can still (sometimes!) override rules which are.
At what point is a helicopter hovering above the park in violation?
The rule is no vehicles in the park. I’ve also concluded that an ambulance or police responding to a call didn’t violate the rule but saw that a lot of people seemed to think it did. And it made me think.
The rules say to not apply any other rule but the stated one. And if you follow the rule to the letter, a police car in the park is a vehicle in the park , violates the rule. It’s dumb but it does.
Common sense says it shouldn’t but the rule says it does and the instructions say to only consider the rule with no nuance.
I suppose that's the beauty, intentional or not, of this exercise... Since the point was to highlight human behavior your response is still a valid, important datapoint despite you "failing" to complete the exercise according to the instructions.
Even simple things like chairs, you can't write down a definition that includes everything that humans consider chairs and excludes everything humans don't consider chairs.
It's not a big problem if everyone is civil and existing moderation mechanisms aren't overwhelmed; people quickly learn from online faux pas and the online social norm is restored.
Also, on pseudonymous sites, you may not even be able to know this at a glance. Sometimes on reddit I have been baffled at the replies I've received, until I realized it was coming from a child, or an older conservative person living on disability.
It's not that I was mean or nasty, or pushing any boundaries – I was never like that – I was just ... 15.
Also turns out what people meant with "your English is very good" was "your English is very good for a 15 years old non-native speaker", and not "your English is very good".
This is an argument against migration then.
How would you phrase the question/game so that 100% of people all get the same answers as you?
How would you expect others to phrase the question, so that you'd 100% agree with their answers?
Taking the ambulance example: it would indeed break a literal interpretation of "no vehicles in the park" and would also fall under the instruction "ignore your local laws". The issue, however, is that 99% of all parks in the world would allow ambulances, and those that don't would have a specific clarification as to why (archeological site, dangerous, etc). At that point, if it didn't allow ambulances then it would almost certainly not be a park either.
If I wanted to get agreement I would specifically write "forget what you know about the human experience and pretend you're a cold robot with no feelings and no idea about social contracts".
could one of these people be acquitted but the other not? Say if one committed the crime so did the other, ie everything being equal except personality and demeanor of key players.
not everything is black and white.
(A few years ago I could have said "we don't get ticketed by an AI that only follows the rules it was given." Well, we do now in many places and that's a problem.)
In the real world, we might debate whether it was actually an emergency and so on, but here we're told straight up.
The instructions then continue, "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)." But again this could be interpreted two ways.
One interpretation is that an emergency vehicle entering the park would technically violate the rule, but everyone (including legal and religious authorities and the park owner) would agree that the violation "should" be allowed. However, I interpreted "should" more in line with the previous statements as referring to some kind of controversy (park owner says it's not allowed, but for legal or religious or moral reasons I think it should be allowed). Under this interpretation, the rule has an implicit exception for emergency vehicles, so they are not violating it. The exception is just so obvious that it's not worth including (especially given the text length limits of the signs where park rules tend to be written down).
My interpretation might sound like a stretch. But imagine if the rule instead said "No vehicles in the park, including emergency vehicles." Wouldn't that be materially different? Yet the difference doesn't affect whether a violation should be legally/religiously/morally allowed. At most, it might hint that there might be some practical reason why emergency vehicles shouldn't enter (perhaps it's dangerous), and perhaps a reasonable emergency vehicle operator should take that information into account when determining whether violating the rule would be justified. But that's only an indirect effect, and there's clearly more to it than that. Regardless of whether there is any justification, the clause would clarify that the park owner really doesn't want emergency vehicles, when otherwise we would assume they do. And to me that difference is best interpreted as affecting "whether the rule is violated".
I don’t think there’s ever effectively “no such rule” but only “(expected) immunity from consequences of said rule” which is subtly different.
And in the given case we had none of them. It was just one simple rule - no vehicles inside the park.
It should be comforting that people are able to use independent judgement when faced with a nonsensical situation, situations that illustrates a glaring lack of detail to the law or rule rather than anything else.
Basically the more terse a rule is, the more it requires the enforcer to use their own judgment.
That game would only be supportive of the point the author wants to make if the rule had a few paragraphs of examples and defined vehicle.
Instead the author hand waved away the case of a rule with examples by saying that nit picker could always find ambiguity. So instead they gave a overt terse rule that defies common sense. It’s a strawman attempt of a example.
Deciding that something violates the letter of the law is not an absurd conclusion. That's just step one, and the more important places to involve judgement come after that step.
It's telling that 70% would apply immoral guidance. "Just following orders."
Says who? So I can park my car in the park and take the train so long as I don’t “use” the park? Or drive through it on my way to work?
Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
Uncle Jim Bob trying to drive his Buick around is what's obviously prohibited as that's the vehicle/driver most likely to cause harm...
By this logic, it’s ok for a police officer to drive through the park’s green on his way to work, with no emergency.
* if the siren is off, then “the vehicles bring attention to themselves” doesn't apply.
* if the siren in on, then they're not violating the park's rules, but they are violating the rules of their emergency vehicle.
I started answering by interpreting the choice as "is this allowed in the park", not "does this violate the rule".
I'm not sure if this page makes its point better or worse if you know what it's testing. It's interesting though how explicit you have to be if you want people to not add any additional context. But also, so much of the questions rely on context. So it feels like an unfair test, but it's hard to say exactly why.
I'd assume the answers would be different if the questions was phrased differently, restating the assumptions and some of the consequences, e.g., that there might be exceptions, we just don't look at them yet.
1. Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park."
2. Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Your job was to determine if rule 2 ("this rule") has been violated. By playing the game, you are fulfilling your job and thus the rule is never violated.
It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.
I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.
They think I didn't get the point, but they're wrong. Hope that helps!
I have a lot of experience thinking that I get the point of someone else's argument, and then realizing later that I didn't actually get the point, or not in a way that was useful to both parties in the conversation
When I don't feel understood it's usually because the counterparty hasn't said things that allow me to recognize that they have internalized what I'm trying to communicate
Changing tack a little, I think that this is one of the things that I admire about some legal writing, that they are intentionally addressing the act of communication in addition to the substance of what they are communicating. In addition there is a recognition that their words have consequence
Such that, if your model of how rules and regulations work is that they are all active at all times.... I have really bad news for you. For fun, consider that there is still the 18th amendment to the US constitution. There is just also now the 21st amendment to go with it. And at no point did we have to redefine words for that trick.
Also, the question was very explicitly not asking if an ambulance in the park is "okay." The question is asking is it a rule violation.
It's an excellent analogy, in my opinion, because what it's trying to be analogous to is the general ambiguity of language that makes content moderation difficult. It's hardly even an analogy because it is about precisely an identical concept: determining whether behavior is violating a rule.
"my children will see no violence" looks wonderful on paper but there are a great many edge cases where this simple rule is plainly broken all the time in harmless ways.
in reality, what crosses the line one has in mind when they create the simple rule is created is far, far more complex than anyone who makes these rules is prepared to admit.
there is so little "black and white" in these things; it's almost entirely "grey" areas. that's what this quiz is meant to convey.
it is extremely effective at this.
Also interesting: the fact that 50% more people described a skateboard being used as a vehicle than a skateboard being carried.
That roller skates are clearly either a vehicle or not, but a police car is a gray area?
note that the question was whether the rule “no vehicles in the park” has been violated, not whether it should be allowed to be violated.
People are saying that it's not, and that it's a strawman for what a layman's view of what content moderation should look like.
Like having prisons or letting police use lethal force on dangerous people, some things fit this description - but at some point lines have to be drawn and the leashes have to be reigned in if the violence is not agreed upon anymore - institutionalised racism and the likes.
All rules have countless unspoken caveats and are inherently only able to be interpreted in a cultural context; rules cannot be made so specific as to remove the need for that context. Problems come in when essential parts of that context are not shared by everyone who interacts with the rules.
Having rules against advocating for violence means that you want to prohibit such calls (otherwise you would have written down such exceptions and admit that calling for violence is sometimes OK).
Let me put it this way: what Reddit secretly wants is not standing up against advocating for violence, but avoiding the reputation risk that might happen if there exist to many post that advocate for violence in a way that causes an outcry.
In other words: the hidden problem is rather Reddit's "secret" agenda behind the rules.
Example #1: I didn't poison Joe. I was out of town when it happened.
Example #2: I poisoned Joe. He had been sentenced to death, and my job is prison executioner. That's why I injected him with poison.
The second example is an affirmative defense. A murder occurred, but it was not illegal because it was authorized by the state.
I have a feeling that lawyers who took this quiz were more likely to answer yes for the ambulance and police car, but nonlawyers would answer no. That's because most people were answering the question "would they get in trouble?" But lawyers might have been thinking "is there a valid defense to a violation that actually did occur?"
In your example, calling for the death penalty isn't advocating for violence because executing someone in the justice system is legally permissible (let's not get into ethics or morality). The Reddit rule is generally understood to cover only illegal violence.
There may or not be exceptions in universe that this sign is in. The sign clearly has no exceptions however.
The death penalty is a legal ruling that is often not even the final decision.
No reasonable person would confuse “the traitor should get the death penalty” with “kill the traitor!”.
Note that taking it literally even calling for imprisonment is advocating for violence (unless convict accepts imprisonment voluntarily and not under threat of legal violence by law enforcement).
A: *saying something stupid as a joke B: "I hope the country will impose death penalty to those who support it"
Or when it's used as discussion, like this, is it violating the rule?
Asa an example, I'm seeing most people (based on people saying they match the majority at 11%, but there's some indication that may be broken) that chose to go with the common understanding of what the sign meant (as opposed to some literal definition they decided to follow) seemed to have an inherent idea of how we might better define "vehicle" to match those expectations (such as whether the conveyance provides power itself or whether it requires power from a person, or whether it houses a person, or whether it is assisting normal motion in some manner).
Also, without further analysis of the data it's hard to tell whether removing or redefining slightly a few questions might bring a core consensus far above 11%. And even if we can get this specific question to a good consensus, there's no real proof that it indicates that content moderation could similarly come to a consensus on specific concepts (I doubt it could for many important things).
In those ways, this is a clever and interesting experiment to take part in, but I'm not sure how much it really says about content moderation, as I think (as perhaps the GP thinks) it was made slightly too simplistic in an effort to be approachable, and in that case lost some of the aspects it was trying to convey.
And separately, a lot of the ambiguity in content moderation comes from people trying to frame what they don't agree with as something that's against the rules. If a vocal group doesn't like ice skaters, you can be sure they'll be giving detailed explanation why skates are a literal vehicle.
Perhaps as a non-native speaker I miss some linguistic subtlety, but does not "mode of transportation" mean "thing to (help) bring person from A to B"? Thus whether skating is a mode of transportation (or not) should be rather clear.
In this sense it should not matter whether the transportation is recreational or not, i.e. you can also recreationally drive a car or recreationally go by train.
Via going by skateboard, a transportation happens. Whether you do it recreationally or not does not have anything to do with whether a skateboard is a mode of transportation (or not).
If 5 different sets of people argue about 5 different issues, each at 20%, then 100% of people are in disagreement. Total failure;
You don't have to have silly rules like that, though.
my complaint - that "no vehicles" isn't a great analogy - is because it's not vague enough. I didn't state that outright, you just assumed something different.
Exactly. I being a non-native English speaker, just to be sure, looked up in a dictionary: the most common German translation of "vehicle" is "Fahrzeug".
Of course, as it is quite common, there do exist laws in Germany
> https://gesetze.io/definitionen/fahrzeug-f9r8
what is a "Fahrzeug" and what is not, and also a German Wikipedia article that goes quite deeply into this topic:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrzeug
Just to bring up a linguistic point (it is far more common in German than in English to carefully analyze words if subtle parts of the meaning are to be cleared up): actually, one could argue (contrary to the Wikipedia article) that "Fahrzeug" comes from "fahren" (to drive); thus a "Flugzeug" (airplane) is not a Fahrzeug, because it flies (Flug -> flight) instead of driving (but as mentioned: the Wikipedia article states a different opinion: Flugzeuge are Luftfahrzeuge, while, say, cars are Landfahrzeuge, i.e. both vehicles belong to sub-categories of Fahrzeuge).
---
But back to the topic: as a non-native English speaker
- all my arguments are based on the most common German translation "Fahrzeug" of "vehicle". What if some subtleties are lost in this translation?
- I doubt that the typical English native speaker tends to think as deeply about words as is not unusual in Germany (when I did analyses of English words to native English speakers they nearly always admitted that they never ever thought of such analyses)
Personally, I feel it's unamigious that the ambulance is violating the rule as written. Whether it should be granted an exception to the rule is a different question. Such is the difficulties of content moderation.
It's also apparent to me how a rule enforcer sufficiently distant from the scenarios would declare that the space station violates the "no vehicles in the park" rule, no matter how ridiculous that sounds.
I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?
It's true that “vehicle” can be vague, but it's also true that in many contexts it's well-defined. The very common ”no entry for vehicular traffic” road sign applies to bikes and mopeds and cars, but not pedestrians, wheelchair users and roller skaters, for example.
Similarly, you can operationalize the “no vehicles allowed in the park” rule by enumerating the different types of vehicles people might wish to drive in the park:
- A bike? No.
- A moped? No.
- An unpowered scooter? Yes.
- A powered scooter? No.
- A skateboard? Yes.
- Roller skates? Yes.
- A wheelchair? Yes.
- A powered wheelchair? Yes.
- A car? No.
And yes, it's still possible for some weirdo to build a supercharged wheelchair that can go 80 kph, but that's the extreme exception, and if the guy keeps driving through the park at 80 kph repeatedly eventually he will get arrested and then he will claim he is in the right because he's driving what's technically a wheelchair, and then a judge will rule that a wheelchair that can go 80 kph isn't actually a wheelchair in the sense intended by the law, and the rules will be updated to say “powered wheelchairs with a maximum speed of 15 kph” and that's the end of that.
The problem with “hate speech” and “glorifying violence” is exactly that they are very hard to nail down in an objective and clear way, and the majority of cases where someone is banned for “hate speech” involves vague and subjective judgement.
For a concrete example, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter on the grounds of inciting violence by tweeting “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” There is some really creative reading going on in here. How would you substantiate the rule against inciting violence in a way that it clearly covers this statement? People aren't allowed to announce that they won't be attending some event? That seems overly broad. Sitting presidents aren't allowed to announce they won't attend their successor's inauguration? This feels like it's overly specific, covering only this one event.
So that's the fundamental difference here. “No entrance for vehicles” is a rule that can be operationalized by enumerating and defining the kind of vehicles that people might think of using to enter the park. While “hate speech” defies objective definition.
And, I mean, to be clear: there will always be weaselly “oh-but-I-didnt-technically-break-the rules” comments like that Donald Trump tweet. But the whole point of this is that you’ll never be able to make a rule with an objective definition! These are not mathematically defined sets; someone will always need to make a judgment call.
what if this was a forum that rebels to the gov't are using to discuss how they will form the revolution? Is that now disallowed, because what they discuss could be considered hate speech?
What if this group of rebels (or freedom fighters as they call it) is someone you personally want to support?
What if this group are labeled terrorists by other governments?
It's not so black and white tbh. It's only black and white when you imagine yourself to be the authority.
They're often ambiguous though. Lime bikes and motorized skateboards have been a recent edge conditions in vehicle laws that have needed to be specifically addressed.
But, yes, normally laws will actually define their terms.
Since the "legislature" in this example did a really lousy job of definitions, I only counted the one car as violating the rules.
I disagree, lawyers would have no work then. Laws are not as specific as you would think they are and it is to provide a diverse gamut of powers and broad discretion in their application.
For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
There is plenty evidence of people exercising free speech such as wearing cuss words on shirts and their speech being stifled by police through intimidation and arrests. Most famously Cohen v California and for example more recently Wood v Eubanks (25 F. 4th 414 - Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit 2022) with very similar facts to Cohen v California.
Here is another one "Battery is an unlawful application of force directly or indirectly upon another person or their personal belongings, causing bodily injury or offensive contact." I go onto the bus and my shoulder hits the shoulder of another passenger. I did not have consent to touch them and they are upset by the contact / found it offensive. Am I guilty of battery?
In the test "No vehicle sin the park" there is no ambiguity that an ambulance is a vehicle, but clearly 1/3 of people don't think it breaks the rule, presumably largely because it's for an emergency purpose despite the rule not having an exemption for such a scenario. Neither would a rule that says "no hate speech". What is hate speech? Would speech stating "I hate..." Nazi's or a genocidal leader or regime be hate speech? So what are the exemptions, what are the discretions? How do we define things?
What about support for LGTBQIA+? Some countries only recently have become more amenable to these groups, but plenty of jurisdictions and cultures are still very much opposed to them. Is homophobia hate speech? What is transphobic speech? Is stating there are only two genders transphobic?
The same could be said about support for Ukraine which is positive in the Western world but would be illegal in Russia. But then, what about Taiwan and it's disputed status with respect to China? What about other contested borders and lands?
The fact that even when there is no ambiguity people don't entirely agree whether a simple rule is broken is entirely the point of the exercise. And now, you expect platforms and countries to exercise those rules and laws when evidently people can't even agree on a simple rule.
By the way, there's no "hate speech" exception in U.S. first amendment jurisprudence.
You really do not.
The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.
I think that's a further example of ambiguity.
A park that had a rule in the 1990s saying "No motorized vehicles" probably wouldn't have wanted to prohibit electric bikes or electric mobility scooters, but such a rule would do that.
> often to be about being motorized or speed.
This more precise definition would include the toy car, quadcopter, ISS, and airplane, all of which fewer than 20% of respondents believe are vehicles.
> It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed.
It doesn't actually. It asks if a particular rule has been violated, not whether the violation is or should be acceptable (and it makes that distinction very explicitly even!).
The objections you have to the exercise don't actually seem that well founded, and the analogy appears even better due to the nature of your objections.
I get what the author hopes to do, but it’s really a bad go at it.
Although perhaps that’s because arguing a losing position is hard.
If this included a definition of a vehicle, and asked if a vehicle was in the park, I'd expect consistent answers outside of the oddball aircraft and space station questions.
I'd note my local park has such a rule, and the sign has pictures of what are and are not allowed, including a picture of a drone.
It’s typically shades of gray and requires judgement, discretion.
And consequences of breaking a rule or law require even more judgement.
The world isn’t a “smart”contract.
Here's a common example from real life: "No pornography". Even SCOTUS famously couldn't define obscenity ("I know it when I see it")
“I know it when I see it” was in reference to _hardcore pornography_, not obscenity. The Miller Test deals with obscenity perfectly well.
If you were to open a subreddit, or walk up to a library computer/print shop counter and saw "No Pornography" under rules - would you be unable to figure out what's being asked of you? If so, then that seems like a complete thought and a perfectly comprehendible rule to me.
What happens if the sign in your park was made in 1995, when drones, electric scooters, and electric bikes didn't exist or were not commonly used?
It's not possible to list every possible vehicle in existence, and to keep such a list updated. There are all sorts of weird things like electric unicycles, that most people haven't come across.
That still seems as if it adds some useful information. It's informing people ahead of time that moderators will probably not interpret "racism" in the narrowest possible sense, or likely even in a medium grey-area sense, but rather in a broad sense.
I initially thought that a vehicle means someone is being transported by the vehicle, using an engine.
According to wikipedia vehicle also includes things being moved by muscle, and it is not limited to transporting persons, also wares.
I also changed my mind on whether a police or EMT falls under the rule. It obviously does. There has to be a second rule overriding this rule for those cases.
Also I changed my mind on the paraglider and the ISS. The ISS is a vehicle but it's over the park not in the park. The paraglider is a vehicle under my new understanding of the definition, and it does not matter whether the initial thrust came from when the paraglider was outside the park.
It also explains why the rules in the park near me prohibit _driving_ a bike in the park, not having one.
When I was reading the dictionary definition, I got the sense that gravity isn't eligible as the motive force, and instead it would need to be someone exerting themselves (like pulling a wagon) or using stored energy (like an automobile). But sliding down a hill by gravity is indeed using stored energy, so I'd think that counts!
"vehicle" means a device in, on or by which a person or thing is or may be transported or drawn on a highway, but does not include a device designed to be moved by human power, a device used exclusively on stationary rails or tracks, mobile equipment, a motor assisted cycle or a regulated motorized personal mobility device
[BC Motor Vehicle Act, 1 Definitions]
https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/stat...
The words written on some sign on a road or park are not meant to be freely defined by whoever happens to be reading the sign.
By definition, a park where vehicles are forbidden is not a highway. Please don't act smarter than you are.
Just because the definition of vehicles refers to highways doesn't mean the definition is not relevant in a situation in which there are no highways.
But his own experiment shows that most people do agree on what even a deliberately poorly worded rule means in most cases. So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.
The "game" (I use the word loosely) gets quite silly. The space station passing overhead is not "problematic" for a rule about vehicles in the park, except for someone deliberately trying to be obtuse. Like with the rest of this other nonsense, if it ever did become problematic, someone could change the rule to clear it up. The end.
I did not interpret the creator's point to be that rules are unworkable, so much as that rules alone are insufficient. ie, that even the simplest of rules need to be augmented by human judgment.
But rules are still an important ingredient, as they and judgment complement one another.
Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".
It has basically nothing to do with your interpretation, or how "good" you are at understanding the literal or intended meaning of the sign. The point is about how hard it is for all of us to agree on these matters.
Are bitcoins allowed in the park or beanie babies since people consider them investment vehicles? Are pill capsules allowed in the park as they are vehicles for medicine? Are brains allowed in the park because they are vehicles for consciousness?
All the example shows is that rules need definitions or they need juries. And why is subjectivity even bad? It’s impossible to do anything without some degree of it. It’s also impossible not to have rules, like there are hundreds of unstated ones going on all the time and no one including the author is objecting to them. They aren’t objecting to the rule against DNS attacks or a thousand other examples.
A hot dog cart serves food in the park.
A 1997 pickup truck is rusting away on the bottom of the park's lake.
An elevator moves equipment up and down floors within the park's maintenance building.
Deep under the park's lake, a nuclear submarine hides from satellites.
An ice cream truck sits just on the border between the park entrance and a private road to a residence.Try to define "furniture". You may say "Something to sit on". But what about a table. Ok, something to keep things on. But then is a soap dish furniture?
Furniture is a concept. It has fuzzy boundaries of meaning. And the meaning is only ever clear in context. And context is not just what is said alongside the concept. It is also the exchange itself in a particular situation.
When 14 years olds play ball in a "garden" area of a park, it's clearly disruptive. It can hurt someone, destroy the foliage etc. But when you play ball with a couple of 4 year olds in a garden, no one will suggest you stop. It is understood that a 4 year old in a play area with teenagers is at risk of being harmed, and so better to keep them in the garden area.
Rules, and the standardization of some of them into a system of law is problematic only if taken literally. As long as the what is written is understood to be a scaffold for actual meaning derivation from context there is no problem. This is the reason why judges, juries and courts exist - to interpret the law. And in the absence of formalization or systematization, common law applies. And at a very simplified level, common law is mostly common sense. Common as in shared among many. Common sense as in the sense and meaning shared among most of us implicitly.
I expected it to get into difficult edge cases, like somebody riding a motorcycle or landing a plane, but it never went there. A plane flying overhead doesn’t constitute “in the park”, and it looks like almost everybody agrees on that point.
Did you read the summary at the end?
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. I teach legal research and I do some open discussions in the beginning and (no judgment of course) someone ALWAYS brings up "if they wrote the laws clearer..."
nope. nope nope nope. This is not how it works.
It's why, as some other people noted, you sometimes can't tell anyone anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
I guess sometimes words just aren't enough, you need actual experience. Which I guess if we're taking legal stuff, that's where case law comes in, right?
Or maybe the rule was only supposed to be for things with motors/engines and after clarifying instantly 2/3 of the questions are an easy objective "allowed".
You can't fix subjectivity, but you can reduce it, and this quiz is based on super low hanging fruit.
The quizz would have asked questions about the new edge-cases (created by the additional examples).
The people just trying to follow the law would have a much easier time.
Everyone here implicitly knows that natural languages have ambiguity this is why formal languages were invented and it's painful that governing bodies hasn't caught up in many places. Imagine a world where you could diff laws from federal to state, state to state, stateA.city to stateB.city or StateA.cityA to StateA.cityB. or a log where you could see exactly when a law was changed and why.
Pam comes to the park and begins to live in Jim's RV.
Bob, an alien, lands his spaceship in the park and initiates first contact.
Tim, a pipercub pilot, lands his plane in the park after suffering an engine failure.
Sam rides the subway home underneath the park.
Jordan, a maintenance worker, repairs a broken light in the park from his cherrypicker.
Robert, Jordan's boss, alleges he broke the rule. Another light needs to be replaced, so Robert fixes it, but ensures the cherrypicker's wheels are outside the park.
Tom, a tow truck driver, tows Tamika's car.
Bill emails a complete 3d cad model of a car, which happens to use a fiber line running under the park.
He backs his RV into the park? That means his RV enters the park, right? What does the V stand for in RV?
I'm puzzled by that. Does a vehicle stop being a vehicle when it's not vehicularizing? It'd get it if it were, "Jane carries a food tray" versus "Joe rides a food tray down the hill." But here the skateboard's purpose is to be ridden.
There's a community I recently watched spring up on Reddit with the entire goal being to have a space to discuss Utah without every second comment being "Fuck Mormons". It grew pretty quick within the first day, but then the creator and community had a couple discussions on the best way to describe and enforce that rule. No discussion of Mormonism at all? No positive or negative sentiment towards the religion, but you can mention it in passing? It's certainly not an easy problem.
That could have been presented better. Is it trying to tell me the majority of people are "wrong"?
1. This is a game, here are the rules, remember, it's not about intent, as in "should this vehicle be allowed?", it's strictly about the rules, i.e. "is it a vehicle" && "is it in the park?".
2. Look at how difficult content moderation is, people said the ambulance should not be allowed in the park!
While I agree that content moderation is difficult, prefacing it with a rigged game that primes people to make bad judgements is not a good argument.
(Personally, I would like every rule to come with the justifications/reasoning behind it, so I could make the decision to break it more easily, e.g. if wilderness areas had the rules "No mechanized or motorized equipment shall be used" annotated with "It's about the noise" then an electric wheelchair would be fine, but not a loud drone etc.)
So by my logic the rule is broken when the ambulance drives into the park, but the leeway of the moderator to allow this should be apparent.
The way this thought experiment is framed, it seemed that you where supposed to only determine if the rule was broken. I think a more realistic way of framing the problem for a moderator would be something like: As security guard in a park, given this rule, would you allow ...
If the game was framed in this way I'm guessing the agreement would go way up.
This seems to be an exercise in signage while simultaneously ignoring common sense...
Also, many people said the International Space Station was a vehicle in the park. I find that suspicious and question if people were choosing random or opposite or spurious answers just to pull the levers. I would like to hear from people who do believe the ISS is a vehicle in the park. What is your justification?
I think "travois" is something you either know or you know you're going to have to look it up, so there's no risk of confusion. "Matchbox car" seems like something someone might not know, but just think "oh, a car, I know what a car is" without realizing it's a toy.
That said, I also felt like the description didn't explain it well enough. There are electric toy cars that kids actually ride in and drive around. The thing about a matchbox car is that it's the size of a matchbox.
why would this game even make me think of content moderation? When you brought it up yourself I felt suckered, realizing I'd been sucked into a poorly thought out yet somewhat politicized "bias test" masquerading as a "survey".
So emergency vehicles, toys etc are only an issue to a rule-lawyer. Not to normal people.
In my mind the rule would obviously have related list of reasonable exceptions filed away somewhere; the simplicity of the rule is to improve the effectiveness of preventing the common case violation of regular people driving their cars through the park, causing damage and impacting the people using the park for its intended purpose.
In my opinion almost all of the examples provided were either obviously not applicable or were perfectly reasonable exceptions (and I don't think exceptions violate a rule).
I did not consider for a moment whether the emergency situations should have exceptions made. I feel this is at the wrong place to do so. It’s a separate question to me to ask if it’s OK to break rules during emergencies. I really appreciated the creator’s point, which is to contradict the widely held belief among some people that regardless of opinion, there can be one and only one factual determination. It all depends on a dependency chain of definitions, even before you get into the questions like when it is ok to break the rules.
• more ambiguous examples (instead of “there are 27 examples, you only need to answer 7”, I would instead just offer 7 examples and on 7th say “stop now, or keep answering?”, then do the same “stop or keep going” prompt after 27 for the extra examples)
• three answer options: “yes, it’s a violation”, “no, it’s not a violation”, and “it is a violation but it should be exempt / permitted / not prosecuted”
• perhaps this third answer could also have a text box to enter your own epicycle / rule addition. The next time that person answers “yes but exempt”, they can select their previous epicycle as the explanation this time as well, or add a new one. Coalescing each user’s epicycles into a coherent set of “common sense exceptions” might be tedious, though
The third answer option, and the reveal that what you thought were obvious exceptions are not statistically agreed to be obvious exceptions, helps a ton with making the point about content moderation more, well, pointed. Adding epicycle text boxes takes it in a bit of a different direction, highlighting the complicated nebulosity hiding beneath simple rules.
Depending on interpretation, all or nearly all of the examples fall into these categories:
- Subjective categorization of restricted content, good intent
- Subjective interpretation of scope, neutral intent
- Clear intent to flout rule if subjective interpretations apply
What isn’t present in any of the examples is a case where the rule is clear but breaking the rule is intended and masked. That’s where a lot of content moderation struggles, and (because?) it’s where a lot of malicious and abusive users concentrate, and intentionally create ambiguities where there wouldn’t be any without such malicious intent.
And knowing that doesn’t make content moderation any clearer, probably the opposite, but it’s worth recognizing that that’s the point. A few clever jerks can convince well meaning people to reinforce or excuse their abuse, and can convince well meaning moderators that obvious dog whistles are hard to interpret, and then they turn rules over on themselves without any recourse.
* means of carrying or transporting something (planes, trains, and other vehicles) such as a) motor vehicle or b) a piece of mechanized equipment - Websters Online Dictionary
* 1) any means in or by which someone travels or something is carried or conveyed; a means of conveyance or transport: a motor vehicle; space vehicles. 2) conveyance moving on wheels, runners, tracks, or the like, as a cart, sled, automobile, or tractor. - dictionary.com
* a machine, usually with wheels and an engine, used for transporting people or goods, especially on land - Cambridge Dictionary
Any of these definitions could have been applied successfully to the series of questions on the website without ambiguity (edit: without ambiguity, but each would have led to different sets of conclusions). Which is to say, the entire point of the excercise reduces down to finding out which definition of the word someone is working from. This is only a problem if we're dealing with something that can't be defined, or something that we refuse to define.
That's why the only vehicle that made me pause was the tank, since it was at one point motorized, but no longer.
> a piece of equipment with several moving parts that uses power to do a particular type of work
How many oars is "several"? Do they count if they're not physically affixed to the boat?
> ((a piece of (the set of necessary tools, clothing, etc. for a particular purpose) with (some; an amount that is not exact but is fewer than many) moving parts that uses power to do a particular type of work) used for transporting people or goods)
Yup, that's technically a rowboat - as long as it has oars included (whether or not they're physically attached: "set of"). Take the oars out of the equation, and it's not a machine anymore...just a piece of a vehicle (like how a tire isn't a car).
If so, I now understand why moderator decisions seem insane. It's because they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
When the highest court in the land can't get a good grasp on whether a law has been broken or not you know you've hit a thorny problem.
From wiki A vehicle (from Latin vehiculum)[1] is a machine that transports people or cargo. Vehicles include wagons, bicycles, motor vehicles (motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, mobility scooters for disabled people), railed vehicles (trains, trams), watercraft (ships, boats, underwater vehicles), amphibious vehicles (screw-propelled vehicles, hovercraft), aircraft (airplanes, helicopters, aerostats) and spacecraft.[2]
1: "In" a geographic area may or may not be defined as including or excluding a particular altitude. For example, in the US, owners only own up to 500 ft AGL in Class G airspace.
2: Some jurisdictions decide a person in a boat over someone's land isn't trespassing, while standing on the bottom of the land is.
3: What is the definition of a "vehicle"? Is use or capability of occupants definitive of vehicular status? Does it require a motor? Must it be a type requiring government registration?
You don't know what jurisdiction. You don't know what airspace rules apply. "Vehicle" has its common-usage definition. (Which is different for different people, judgung by the comments here.)
BTW, the vast, vast majority of real decisions are made under uncertainty. Welcome to the real world.
At one of my jobs, a product manager came up with the idea of categorizing explicitly delineating everybody's selection criteria into a "normalized" form to allow for aggregating statistics.
I tried to point out up front what a fool's errand in this was. There is way too much ambiguity in the language.
I was overruled and the company then spent probably 7 to 15 million dollars chasing this ridiculous El Dorado dream. Eventually, after 3 years of wandering in the wilderness of normalized ontologies, they gave up and decided all NLP is bad.
This decision came out about 2 months before the release of chatGPT.
Skateboards, rollerskates, wheelchairs, bikes, wagons, parachutes etc.. require constant human involvement to keep acting as a vehicle. Horses, cars, space stations don't really require the same involvement, or aren't necessarily exclusively human transporters, and toy boats are only facsimiles of vehicles.
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
In the case the article has in mind, you can't silently decide what is ok and what isn't, as they'll be public decisions that create precedents (what formulate as "being transparent")
If you say wheelchairs are OK because disabled people need them, someone will ride a golf cart arguing they're disabled and need a cart. And you'll have to publicly explain if you think it's not ok and update the rules accordingly, and that will continue for every i stance of you not agreeing with someone's interpretation.
Put another eay, that constant and endless redrawing of the rules to explain what you had in mind is the point of the exercice, except you can't throw away the old rules nilky willy, you're only allowed to add more weird stuff on it
1. From the first page:
> please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
In other words, if a question is about some kind of vehicle that you think should be allowed to go, overriding this rule, the answer is "yes, the rule is violated".
2. There is a twist in this game and it's best to not tell which it is before you try the game. (The twist is acknowledged in the result page, 4th paragraph from the bottom, not counting the P.S. line at the end).
If the author wants to relate this whole thing to content moderation, all they're illustrating is they had crappy guidelines. Give better guidelines and then let's talk. But if you give a crappy set of rules expect a crappy outcome (the outcome where nobody agrees on anything).
I mean, who's surprised that it's not effective to do content moderation by imposing ambiguous rules with a complete lack of training, examples of correct and incorrect enforcement, documentation, context about the rules, why they're needed, why they were created, what problem they were solving...
Going through this is useful I guess, but it seems very low level. But maybe our understanding of content moderation is also very low level.
If “people could get hurt” is the reason for no vehicles, an RC car, a stroller, a quadcopter, and maybe even a hand pulled wagon is perfectly fine because the risk is very low.
If “the noise will be an issue” is the reason, bikes are fine but a quadcopter is not.
If “protecting the environment” is the problem, horses and rowboats may be allowed but RC cars and dirt bikes perhaps not.
Having a rule with no context for the rule is pointless.
Skateboards really tripped me up because I don't think of roller skates as a vehicle but I do think of bikes as a vehicle. Skateboards feel like they sit right between those two.
The wagon was another tough one because the kids riding in it certainly seems very vehicle-like to me. And the stroller felt even more like a vehicle to me (ultimately I didn't choose to classify either of those as vehicles).
I said the horse wasn't a vehicle, but I said the rowboat was.
I didn't classify the RC car as a vehicle, but the classification of a quadcopter was tough because of that. I wanted to consider it a vehicle, but I couldn't think of it as far enough off of an RC car to be one.
I tried to figure out some logic for my classifications but I really couldn't it was all down to feel and making sure that I didn't clearly contradict a previous decision. My answers may have been different had they been presented in another order or even just if my mood was a bit different!
So in the end I only said yes to 4,the tank, the car and emergency vehicles. Everything else is a no in my book. I was quite surprised 90% people thought otherwise. No doubt their vehicle definition is different.
My guess is that they’re taking the percent of all people who answered at least seven questions, but I could be wrong, and the results are in any case very misleading.
Also, I don't get how this is supposed to help anyone understand content moderation. Take any court case and you'll have similar questions: it's more like playing judge than like playing moderator. Moderation is way harder because you can offend people on both sides at once, and they'll leave your community. In this park scenario, the people being passed judgement on can't move to another park with two clicks of the mouse and take a bunch of friends with them, and the park's sole appeal is not the existence of other people in it (network effect) the way that it is for online communities. Another difference is that people rarely get angry with the judge as much as with the law and politician that made it, which again puts you in a rather different position than in actual moderation.
For these reasons, we don't allow vehicles that will unnecessarily compromise safety and/or make a lot of noise.
Of course the goal/intent I've written suffers from the same problem as the rules did, the definitions are ambiguous, but I think there's a distinction between capturing the spirit vs the letter of the law. It's a guide for why the rules exist and when they should or shouldn't be applied. It's not perfect, but, I think it's an improvement of just listing rules. If capturing/publishing the reasons for rules alongside the rules was normalized I wonder how different things could be?
I wanna share my experience and get some feedback into how you approached this. I want to make clear, that I approached this by consciously ignoring how real life works, where adhering to the rule and the instructions made it necessary:
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
This boiled down to answering technically "What's considered a vehicle?" and "What would be considered in the park?".
To answer this I googled when I was not reasonably sure.
I did not go to much length to answer the later question, but basically, if there were a rule that declared x meters above the ground is no longer considered to be part of whatever the area on the ground is defined as, this would what I would be interested in for this purpose. Of course, there is a lot of countries in the world, so there's probably more than one answer to this.
We have a little bit of an issue around the "disregard your jurisdiction" part in the intro (but I guess that's also part of the dilemma): All these things are defined by some jurisdiction (not necessarily in the judicial sense). We need to apply from somewhere. I don't see a way how to solve this without implicit bias. Both options satisfy the rule as stated without further constraints.
If you disagree with any of this on principle I would be super interested to hear you talk me through issues with my thinking or just explain where you went differently and why.
this is what i would call culture, or social norm.
And the thing is, this social norm might be different betwen different people and thus, either cause conflicts in interpretation, or actual real life conflicts.
We are explicitly told that there is only one relevant rule. So, the only relevant determinations in each case should be to the definitions of "vehicle" and "in the park". No interpretation of the intent can influence the decision. I thought the aim was to determine the scope of the definitions, then be consistent with the applications of those definitions.
Personally, I defined "vehicle" as anything that can transport people or goods, and "in the park" as a reasonable area above and below the ground. But, this ended up with unsatisfactory answers like the tank being not violating the rule because it could no longer transport, and skates being in violation.
Recreation / Not Practical = Other
Not Recreational / Practical = Vehicle
Recreational / Practical = Recreational Vehicle
You don't have to agree with me on this. I know the definition says otherwise, I'm just speaking on the perception of what people think in society a vehicle is. As it would sound really funny to refer to toys as vehicles.
Also to expand on this. Drones they are recreational but also practical, you might use your drone for recreational things but nothing practical so it is just a drone. But the second you start flying packages it becomes practical. This makes it a recreational vehicle. If it is exclusively for delivery like Amazon Drone, it is just a vehicle.
I was refused service because I was not a vehicle, and since only the drive-in was operating, I was absolutely refused service.
They claimed it was for safety.
Though technically it is true that a bicycle is not a vehicle according to the BC Motor Vehicle Act, the Act also says:
"a person operating a cycle on a highway has the same rights and duties as a driver of a vehicle"
The drive-through road constitutes a highway, according to the definition, which includes
"every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles, ..."
and
"every private place or passageway to which the public, for the purpose of the parking or servicing of vehicles, has access or is invited"
By a kind of stretch "rights" should include being treated the same by a drive-in for vehicles. :)
I actually cited this to them, but in the end it was come back with a car or no service.
It's dumb and it's stopped me from getting food late at night too, but that's the lawyer-based corporate CYA logic.
Not every forum/community/website should tolerate literally all people. It's never helpful to engage with trolls and if people aren't willing to argue in good faith than they need to go. I've seen tons of communities slowly lose their identity because they were too accepting of counterproductive conversations and bad faith arguments.
The idea of this form of tolerance comes from the goal be open minded and listen to opposite arguments, as well as to prevent a community from turning into an echo-chamber (or a cult), but I think it's better to lean towards heavy moderation. Banning someone who would be a good fit for the community is unfortunate, but ultimately not a huge loss. Not banning even one troll can drag down a whole community.
The fact that respondents are so sure of the obviousness of their answers highlights common problems in moderation— rules are ambiguous and everyone has different standards.
Is that not exactly what you are saying?
Sidenote: Does the presence of an ambulance not qualify as a "true emergency" for you? In my experience an ambulance only shows up if someone needs acute medical attention. Is that not the case where you live?
When we interact in the real world we manage to behave not because we have some sort of logical crystal palace where every word is rigorously defined, but because we have an implicit, shared sensibility for what's appropriate. When you go and sit down in a café you don't measure your noise level and there's no sign saying "only talk at 80db!", you have an intuitive and non-verbal idea of what offends the people around you.
If people disagree about the questions in this experiment the correct conclusion isn't to do away with moderation or argue about word definitions, it's to argue for shared culture in online spaces. HN is a good example. Most people who post here I think have a decent grasp of how not to act, and take little offense with moderation, despite the fact that there aren't many rules other than the occasional reminder to be civil.
Though I guess now that I think about it, I don’t know that I could point to a name that I think would be non-stereotypical in the 21st century. Maybe the names of the average upper middle class elementary school class - a lot of those seem to me to be pretty minimally correlated with ethnicity these days.
In a heavily white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of the not too distant past, there were clearly “default” names and “other” names, and I do think that’s less and less the case. Or at the very least, it’s no longer acceptable to think about the “default” names as being normal and every other type of name as signifying something outside the mainstream of society.
Still, there’s some deeply weird socioeconomic stuff that goes on with naming kids. There have got to be some good studies about those trends.
I think the solution is to put the goal of the rule right next to the rule. Maybe vehicles are banned to improve air quality, to improve pedestrian safety, to reduce noise, or some combination. Or maybe there really is no good reason, and the writer of the rule just enjoys power.
Reminds me of writing security policies. There will always be exceptions, but if you include the goals of each rule, your users are empowered to recognize when an exception is a good idea. Otherwise, you get either blind compliance or secret non-compliance.
I'm not so sure. The exact wording is "You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction."
Rephrasing an earlier comment here, but - it's still a park right? On earth? What jurisdiction on earth blocks matchbox cars and space stations? Or even ambulances and police cars, which were the main ambiguous ones? Does some country not allow ambulances in its parks? Are we supposed to include all of modern human culture as a "local jurisdiction"?
The instructions of the game were pretty unclear, that seems to be what's sparking a lot of the debate.
If we're not even taking about earth or this universe then discussion is probably hopeless...
I'm not sure how you could say something like this so earnestly... All parks on Earth have the same rules on vehicles? You sure about that?
Can you name a single real park that denies entry to police or ambulances or wheelchairs?
This is getting stupid, I'm tapping out.
construction equipment for park improvements (backhoe, etc)
gas powered moped
electric moped
gas powered rc car
4-wheeler/atv/dune buggy
golf cart
segway/monowheel
antique cars for some kind of demo/event
shriner guys in those mini cars in a local parade (at least i think most americans know what i'm talking about)
anti-drunk driving display (they have these sometimes at colleges, and maybe high schools, but it's basically a wrecked car and there are police there to do pr)
Note: i think many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule, maybe keep some of them but not so many?
The largest differences were that it didn't considered a rowboard a vehicle and that it did consider the parachute scenario a vehicle.
Bad news for human content moderators I suppose...
Without knowing the reason, it is hard to make a wise decision. At least for a problem like content moderation, people will have some idea about the goals or reasons for the rule, although certainly different people may have different opinions about how important the various goals and reasons are. But trying to enforce an arbitrary rule without a good understanding of why, on which to base judgement calls, sounds foolishly futile.
I've not yet seen (though not yet reading all 1114 extant comments) discussion of the goal and/or purpose of the rule.
Given this discussion is on Hacker News and my growing obsession with what makes this site tick (and occasionally sends it off the rails), contrast with HN's "real standard": "to engage one's intellectual curiosity" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>).
HN's somewhat famously brief and loose guidelines (<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>) augmented by dang's moderation comments (viewable by search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>) provide much of that.
And, in fact, reading those search results just now turned up a ... interesting, now deleted ... response by dang on this thread which explains the "intended spirit" nature of HN moderation. I'm not going to quote the full item (respecting the deletion), but this bit seems to echo my sense:
[H]aving the set of first principles (the site guidelines) be organized around "intended spirit" rather than formal precision is the best bulwark I know.
In the cae of laws, the purpose or intent is often explicitly stated. In US tradition, the "whereas" clauses typically preceding the main body of legislation.
And for this game, the posted rule would benefit greatly by a clarification as to why it was enacted and what the rule is intended to accomplish. This would also clarify, even without specifically enumerating classes of vehicles or conveyances, and/or proximity to the park which specific cases might be permitted or excluded.
The point that the author try to draw about moderation and underspecifications are interesting, but to my mind the framing is not giving a relevant ground to think about it. The author say the goal was to do a better job at this than some previous approachs, which is a effort I salute, though to my mind it doesn't land there yet.
* A truck is driven over the corner of the park, but it uses a ramp so it never physically touched the ground of the park.
* One tire of a car drives 10cm on along the edge of a park, but the truck’s satnav has a different datum than your cadastral data.
A Wyoming federal court just ruled the truck wasn’t in the park [1], I agree!
* the platted boundary of the park extends into the road.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wyd.606...
If we become like we used to be perhaps a cple decades ago, where an abstract tweet wouldn't make us collapse on our heads, things would be much easier.
Thinking about it further, no shoes either.
They said this was all about content moderation and to me the answer is simple. I would never visit the "no vehicles in the park" park.
and Semantle (https://semantle.com/), a semantic-similarity-based Wordle type guessing game (using word2vec similarity), is quite neat.
Was popular in 2022: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=semantle
The HN guidelines come to mind here, they're a mix of more literal ("don't use uppercase for emphasis") and spirit/intent ("anything that good hackers would find interesting"). Seems to work here - but curious how many pedantic struggles dang & co. encounter.
But it's still a park right? On earth? What jurisdiction on earth blocks matchbox cars and space stations? Or even ambulances and police cars, which were the main ambiguous ones? Does some country not allow ambulances in its parks? Am I supposed to include the entirety of modern human culture as we know it as a "local jurisdiction"?
I don't think the intro instructions were very clear.
Like do we allow emergency vehicles inside shopping malls for example? As in the walkways?
And if we are going to make carless cities, we should absolutely ban them also from the streets there and only allow things like stretchers to be carried through.
The number of pedantic HN bureacrats in these comments is maddening... thank god real parks (and content moderators) generally exercise some common sense.
> You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem. ... can reduce the problem, but [cannot] eliminate it. And at scale, with adversarial testing, every edge case will get hit.
Yup. Rules are not enough.
Same conundrum applies to taxation, safety regulations, pollution, security, etc.
It's not just a matter of better enforcement. Every system of rules will be gamed.
Alas, I still don't have a clue about solutions. I'm just exhausted by the naive hot takes.
Human affairs (societies) are messy.
So, I found myself answering “not a vehicle” in a vast majority of the cases because it wasn’t clear to me if the tool in question - car or skateboard or whatever - was being used to go through the park to the other side.
Great thought exercise though.
One day one might accept car tires to play with, the next the kids bring 2 tires with an axle, the 3rd day they tie a rope between 2 axles, day 4 tires are banned. If the events are in stead of a day a year apart it might be different.
The gray areas are settled based on local culture and who is enforcing the rule. And it’s the same with moderation of course.
The rule is more like a guideline anyway.
All rules are easy to apply when you're the moderator. Just say "I'm the moderator" and then do whatever you want. That's how US law works. They can say "this is how the rule works", and then a few years later say "hahaha! yeah, that's not how the rule works anymore, now it works this other way".
The park might contain a parking lot, or an area where skateboarding is permitted, etc. Absent context, or a specific park, who could say if any of the things listed violate the rules.
As for what constitutes a vehicle, this is why you give examples.
It sounds like you did, because you’ve given a car and skateboard example, which do appear in the exercise.
But it sounds like you didn’t because you’ve given such an authoritative answer when the whole point of the exercise is that “it’s complicated”. There is no One True Answer, it’s open to interpretation, that’s the complexity it demonstrates.
Like, missing the point with a planet's berth. Might go a ways in explaining the "mods are entitled jerks" attitude that keeps popping up around discussions of reddit, ignoring that they're the only reason reddit exists in a semi-usable state, ever.
These three crucial differences make the game incomparable to actual online moderation
It turns out, no matter how hard I try to specify a piece of software, developers implementing them manage to sneak in their own interpretation into it and i find that, yes, this particular case wasn't specified or was a little ambiguous or contradicts the other part or something else.
Presumably that is not the case, having now seen the results. Is it a sort of unpowered trolley?
But breaking things down into the very specific definition of "self propelled method of transport" is exactly what doesn't happen for a lot of moderation and enforcement. An offense brought to moderation is often several of those very specific definitions that don't get broken apart into their constituent parts for examination. We stopped using mercury to starch felt hats because the mercury was the problem. If instead we didn't break it down into components to identify the one causing the issue, would we have banned all felt hats or likely just felt altogether? Modern moderation policy dictates bias towards the latter.
The idea of nebulosity as described is precisely why reforms constantly have to be made to enforcement, why automated enforcement is harmful, and why blanket policies on enforcement are a bad idea. Public nudity is generally agreed to be a crime and distasteful, but should somebody be arrested because their clothes were stolen at a changing station? Should a bumper sticker saying "Shoot your local meth dealer" get the driver pulled over because of either threats of violence or public indecency laws that are considered relics of the 19th century and are no longer widely enforced? Moderation in reality is a very simple issue of applying societal biases as rules that becomes horribly unwieldy when scaled beyond a few thousand people. That's because the best moderation is done on a case-by-case basis, as circumstances and context are more important than the infringing action because it's simply one component in a string of them. Obviously you can't do that when you have tens of thousands of users or more and the number of possible offenses grows every picosecond.
Trying to find a link to a news story about this. I swear it's true.
I couldn't figure out what kind of park it was. I don't think a wheelchair is appropriate in a skate park.
However, if the "skate park" allowed bicycles, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and cars, I think a wheelchair is fuckin' fine.
Thus, a wheelchair is a vehicle in some circumstances.
Now that problem with this law (Forstgesetz 1975) is in § 33 (3) where it says "befahren" (drive) which is a very general word when the parliamentary discussion about the law in 1975 clearly meant motor vehicles and even lists them in the discussion but not in the law. A few years later mountainbiking became a thing and the owners of forests insist that the law includes mountain bikers. Fast forward to 2023 and the law still needs fixing...
These are questions worth asking and answers worth hearing, but the problem with the question here is that the rule "no vehicles in the park" already comes with a lot of baggage. For example, it's obvious that the rule is meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park (a rule that we've seen many times in our own parks), so naturally police cars and ambulances will (or should) be exempt, especially if trying to save a life. Otherwise the corollary would be that saving a life is less important than the rule "no vehicles in the park." Which most would very obviously disagree with.
I like the idea of the website, but there's probably a better way to convey the complexities of rule-making and rule-following in the context of both our own moral (or religious, or ethical, etc.) frameworks and the social environment at large.
That's the point, though! Everyone arrives at these moderation discussions with baggage, and it's not the same baggage.
Like, it is very much not obvious to me that the rule is "meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park". Plenty of parks prohibit bikes and skateboards. If we care about "saving a life" then I actually don't think we should make an exception for cop cars. Reasonable people can disagree! Even the most obvious-seeming judgments are, in fact, not obvious.
I kind of disagree with this. The question leaves the definition of "vehicle," "in," and "park" purposefully ambiguous, so everyone kind of tries to fit the most "common sense" solution. In fact, I'd contend that the rule "life of a person outweighs park rule" is not even remotely controversial (apart from some maybe unreasonably staunch environmentalists). This is why our legal code is pretty exhaustive (and moderation systems should be, too).
With that said, there is plenty of grey area even with extremely exhaustive rules: see abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, etc. I think that this is what the website tried to do, but sort-of failed because it purposefully got us wading through a semantic quagmire.
And even if you do agree on the spirit of the rules, they're still up for interpretation! Like, maybe everyone agrees that human life outweighs park rules, but disagrees on whether making rule exceptions for cops helps or hinders that directive.
Yeah, exactly, I do think that's the point the site was trying to make.
It seemed like the spirit of the game was a strict interpretation, to the letter, of the rule.
But given a situation where no proper trial is available, the sign could mean “anything”.
We do not define park boundaries, so each scenario must indicate those boundaries.
We do not define vehicle, so all objects are vehicles, including this soupy bag of proteins you pilot around.
The Game.
What if someone mines under the park? And uses things like carts or mining vehicles there? Are those "in" the park or not?
I reasoned that vehicle did not cover water vehicles, since that should be a special rule for the lake.
[edit] maybe I'm just cynical
The rule “no vehicles in the park” isn’t complicated. It’s complicated when it’s “no vehicles in the park except the moderators and their friends.”
Content moderation is about the same thing. It's about trying to minimize the negatives for everyone else while restricting the least. Part of Western cultural values seems to be that we want people to be free to have opinions that don't match the majority or those in control.
This is why the actions Elon Musk is taking in "moderating" Twitter are so problematic- they aren't about minimizing negatives for most users, they're about minimizing negatives For Elon Musk. This short sighted behavior erodes the platform in the long term.
The main forum I frequented has a dispute resolution area where people could appeal infractions. It was full of people arguing about this type of stuff over something as trivial as a week long ban from some topic forum. Occasionally there would be an over zealous mod too.
Interestingly while the moderation of increasingly large and consolidated online communities becomes more automated and inflexible I’ve noticed that attitudes to rules around our public spaces have eroded into pure selfishness.
It seems there is nowhere people won’t drive and abandon their cars. Cycle tracks, footpaths (sidewalks) grass verges, parks, playing fields etc. it seems that this is simply accepted.
I’ve seen police and private security lazily patrol around parks where vehicles are not allowed in their cars. There’s no appetite for a physical on foot presence. You rarely see police on the street. The exception was during Biden’s recent visit to Dublin, there was literally a Garda on every street corner for a week.
Our local sports club patrons abandon their cars all over the grass area at the entrance to the local park when there is a half full car park right across the road.
Outside our local supermarket people will leave their cars on the footpath outside the store rather than park in a space mere metres away.
All of this is confounded by a police force (Irish Gardai) that don’t seem to give a damn.
I argued with a guy on Thursday who drove down a segregated cycle lane and up onto the footpath so he could leave his car right outside the house he was visiting. He saw nothing wrong with it. Only when I pointed out the kids trying to get around his car did he finally show some shame for his behaviour. I was furious.
Car brain is a growing problem.
it will not be optimal, but better than a group of censors who share the same ideology and bias, or even worse, one or too persons make the calls randomly based on their own likes and dislikes.
Or design an AI agent to do that and save manual labor, but do let a jury to check its results regularly to make sure it works as expected, as much as possible.
—-
Results
You agreed with the majority: 11%