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."
(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.
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.
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.
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?