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Comment by jprete | Hacker News Reader

I tried the game after your comment and got 100% agreement with the majority.

My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving itself along with one or more people (not necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold). "In the park" means in the region of space where one could physically interact with people in the park, or alternatively in its legal jurisdiction; the airspace a few thousand feet above the park's topmost solid point is almost never under the jurisdiction of the park itself.

I agree with the overall point about moderation, but I find this a bad example because I think someone reasonably rules-oriented would settle on very similar rules.

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It's a good example exactly because it demomstrates how people will disagree about easy rules. All while they somehow remain unable to acknowledge this. That's the actual point to me.

Its hilarious that the top comment on this submission still doesn't "get it". Set theory and combinations get thrown out the window to loosely redefine "majority" to make a point.

Yeah, "I got 100%" therefore it's easy.

> "In the park" means in the region of space where one could physically interact with people in the park

Endless regress detected, redo from start.

100% agreement with the majority per question might put you in a very small minority, BTW.

I got a 100% agreement with majority too. I did not try to define anything formally, instead I judged each case by itself, asking whether I'd consider that thing a "vehicle". Which ended up meaning "car" in practice.

You only go mad if you try to lawyer things. Or your opponent does, which means that this test lacks the thing that really makes rules-making hard: determined opposition, would to trust your every word.

Good point! Although I'd do a somewhat different definition for people in the park. I'm not trying to recreate the entire legal and judicial framework.

> My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving

The definition of a vehicle is quite broad and you've scoped it rather narrowly. When left so open people may scope it more or less narrow and land on differently scoped definitions.

I think there is certainly a middle ground when making rules(and laws). But this example purposefully uses an ill-defined rule to drive a point home.

> My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving itself along with one or more people (not necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold).

So... motorized wheelchairs are vehicles?

Definitely. Just because they break the nominal rule doesn't obligate me to throw them out of the park. I wouldn't stop the ambulance either, but it's definitely breaking the rule.

The test prohibits vehicles, not specifically automobiles, but basically everyone interprets the rule to only apply to automobiles.

Are motorized wheelchairs vehicles?

> a thing used for transporting people or goods, especially on land, such as a car, truck, or cart

I’d say yes

Yes. But that doesn't make the rule just and doesn't mean it would be enforced.

And this is why we have videos of bicyclists yelling at parapalegics.

I went with anything that moves unpowered or not that is not also a living thing is a vehicle so long as it falls within the light cone that could theoretically be projected from the park grounds directly upwards if it were in a vacuum.

Not many people agreed with me, but it’s a strict rule that I could imagine something like the military trying to enforce over a top secret area.

It blocks everything ambiguous so only the horse was not a vehicle.

Overall I think it’s a good experiment as it shows why it’s good to enumerate examples of what is and isn’t part of a rule in order to adjusted it the future.

> so long as it falls within the light cone

I look forward to bring my vehicle by navigating through my 4D tessaract to a place where I could not have had the information of the rule.

Light cone? But over the park is not in the park.

What is the vertical limit of the park? If I build a ramp and jump off it in a vehicle, at what point in its arc is the vehicle "in the park?"

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