I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
You might be interested in reading the classical book about cultural difference by Geert Hofstede as it provides another perspective on this.
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.
In a park in Stuttgart a man approached us as we were walking the dog, and after realising we spoke English politely said "You must not be aware, dogs must be on lead here".
That's kind of a funny example, because my go-to on the subject is that if you visit a park in Washington State (or most of the US) you are immediately hit with a wall of text that starts with "no alcohol" but goes on to describe every annoying boom box cruising fireworks soliciting vending way you could potentially annoy someone. In Germany you can just sit on the grass, crack a beer, and watch the river roll by.
I think it's a great example of social policing, which IMHO better than anorganic, artificial traditional policing.
But I'm still not 100% percent sure what he meant because I don't speak german.
It is more of a difference in British English, where a leash is used to control a large/dangerous animal, while a lead is used more cooperatively (like walking a dog).
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.
I don't think so. Often I see people in the UK breaking rules like that and it's almost never mentioned.
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.
yea, I'm afraid I'm not adding much to the discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter if Germany really is like this - the idea of an orderly country still exists.
I beg to differ, counterpoints are always useful. I have an outsiders view of Germany. I've seen large chunks of it. Even stopped for a month or two (Munich, Berlin). But I don't speak German, or at least not enough to be useful (Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut). I visit a park once or twice, not with a group that you get to know.
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.
Ah, I read that differently. Yeah, it depends on the dog I guess. I have an English Cocker Spaniel which the worst risk is probably knocking someone over. I'm generally not pro breaking rules like that, and in the case above I actually hadn't seen the sign (it was not well posted). I do generally go out of my way to translate rules where necessary.
Ah my German is a little more advanced than that, but every time I stumble through trying to communicate in German they immediately switch to English. It's not like I can blame them, I wouldn't have time for my fumbling halting German either.
What I'd do if I lived in Germany is every day read the front page of the newspaper, looking up every word I didn't know.
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.
That's a possible interpretation as well. But having travelled extensively (and I'm not the rule breaker in most cases), there are very very different approaches to rules and laws even within Europe.
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.
There is a logic to it though. On a bicycle you are mostly risking your own life, so you are likely to make good judgements about when you can break the rules. In a car, you are mostly riding other people’s lives (bicyclists and pedestrians). Different incentives.
Yeah, managed to have stitches in the back of my head, but I'll not argue that I'd rather be hit by a bike than a car. If those are the only options. To be fair, the bike rider didn't exactly walk away without some bumps and bruises either.
A neighbor, who wants to see speed cameras installed to control speeding in our small (250 person) New Mexico village: "I always drive 9mph over the posted limit".
This is simply not true. Most people in New York would not say anything, regardless of whether they support the law or not. I saw people without masks on the subway every day while they were required and nobody ever said anything to them.
I'd imagine that comes partially from risk assessment. Is the risk of a highly negative interaction worth highlighting the rules infraction? AKA, is it potentially worth my life to tell someone they aren't following the rules.
This doesn’t change my point. There are a lot of people who were for mask mandates (whether you agree with them or not), and where I live, they typically didn’t confront people who were disobeying.
The intent of moderation is "don't be horrible to each other and/or the space".
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.
> 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.
These communities are lovely when they occur, but they tend to be small and ephemeral; it takes one single persistent troll who is good at gaming community mores and calmly wrapping complaints about any pushback in reasonable-sounding phrases to completely destroy such a space. I've seen this happen entirely too often :(
HN is a good example of where the moderation works to a large extent, but it has trade offs that can be extremely problematic.
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.
Politically-charged or at least on the wrong side of the line. HN does tend to discourage a lot of low effort flamebait which is generally for the good. But even politely-made minority arguments can easily be downvoted as well.
Only if the moderators are idiots. Which most moderators are not: if one person is the bulk of complaints, then that person is the problem not everybody else.
Trusting in the moderators to not "be idiots" - not make decisions you wouldn't - is a bit like trusting in benevolent dictatorship as a form of government: it works great, right up until it doesn't.
Is that always true? If this person is a minority and people are harassing them, for example? Do you remove them for the same if community cohesion or force the community to be more accepting?
I mean, this is “no vehicles in the park” territory. One person’s harassment is another’s telling the truth and calling things by their names, and while people will happily call moderator decisions obviously idiotic, they will vehemently disagree which decisions are the idiotic ones. Bullies are excellent at playing those strings. This stuff divides communities.
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 would definitely take the Turkish way of shrugging off rules
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.
First of all, this is such an excellent post, and thank you.
>>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 think you are over-reaching on the effect of 2A. Most of the developed countries in the world do not have an armed population and still, people do not cut lines.
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.
> the worst part of it, seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive, that is so pervasive in Turkey
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
nah, the problem with the Russian mindset was never caused by Socialism. Communist dictatorship, Putinism and Czarism were all just symptoms of it. Some people think the problem is "mysticism" but I think that gives it too much credit. Look, Finland and Sweden are next door, why does a country so rich have such a mental problem with its manliness? The problem comes from that it's nicer to tell stories that impress other people. It's like they invented tiktok but 100 years earlier. My grandfather (Russian) was one to tell stories. But he was humble. 'how much do you think I paid for these boots??' he asked everybody. And when they said $40, he laughed and said $10! It was a lie. But a humble lie. The opposite was to lie the other way and say $100.
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.
> Spent a few weeks in Munich where I was shouted at for crossing a totally empty street against a crosswalk light.
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.
Exactly! I like to explain this kind of casual rulebreaking to US/UK people as being the German equivalent of using disgusting swearwords. Fine to do with your friends if nobody is around, or if you want to look tough or whatever, but don't do it in crowds and especially not in front of children.
I think this is strange. What is the example you're setting... that we all follow the rules? And when they find out that you don't follow the rules, will that not be a disappointment?
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.
That's just how traffic works in many countries. "Jaywalking" is the normal behavior, especially when streets are filled with traffic. You slowly wade through traffic in a straight line, so drivers can anticipate where you are and let you through safely. While in other countries, it is generally expected to follow the traffic rules. People exploit that to drive faster and/or less carefully, therefore crossing the street like in Vietnam might get you killed in more "orderly" countries. Violating red lights is not taught to children because they don't necessarily appreciate the dangers involved[0]. The correct way to do it is to evaluate all risks, erring on the side of safety, and only then override your instinct to follow the rules.
[0]: I often notice that children are quite unobservant of their surroundings and behave as if they are alone in the world.
Crossing a street when the light is red is dangerous, because it means other traffic will have a green light. You want to teach children to stop for red lights, or you're going to end up with dead kids sooner rather than later.
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!
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.
> Isn't it just showing your are in-group and well cultured?
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.
It's just different expected behavior. Drivers have to constantly be on alert of people doing their thing. Tuktuk rides in Bangkok can be exhilarating because of motorbikes crisscrossing through traffic right and left of you. I was glad our driver was used to it and that I didn't quite see a lot because of the low roof... Vehicular accident statistics are the ultimate judge here.
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.
I mean, that makes sense though, she was probably angry at you. "If you're angry at someone you yell at them" is very normal behavior, and has nothing to do with "following orders".
It sounds like you have some hangups that you are projecting onto this situation.
The question is then why she was sufficiently angry to voice it out to a stranger. Neither was she a policewoman, nor was she a driver, nor was GP stringing along somebody she should be concerned about. She clearly wanted to avoid her kids learning that it's on to nilly-willy cross a red light (kids can't see in GPs head and appreciate that GP considered the risks)
I mean. It seems you've answered your own question?
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.
You begin by sharing an anecdote where you perceived Germans as strictly law-abiding, only to have your assumption reevaluated when someone pointed out the presence of children, and the possible intention to teach them patience and safety.
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.
I do, from an outside perspective, see how ridiculous it sounds for me to conflate all those things. But Munich severely unsettled me and left me so distraught and angry that, as a whole, this minor incident which I'd previously forgotten only serves to reinforce my overall view. Taken together, it makes perfect sense.
You don't shout at a man in the street in order to demonstrate good behavior to your children.
> You don't shout at a man in the street in order to demonstrate good behavior to your children.
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.
> There's nothing like being told holocaust jokes when people don't know you're Jewish
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.
I'm Argentinian. I love breaking the rules and I love living in a place where rules are rarely enforced.
It's almost a sport for me. "Why? Why should go along with this? Fuck that"
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.
Haha that's true. Like you said in another post, there are benefits and drawbacks to everything. I'd personally rather have corruption and chaos than "too much order."
A lot of Estadounidenses won't get this story. When I bought a car in Argentina, I walked into a Volkswagen dealership in San Antonio Oeste and bought the least fucked up of the 3 used cars for $3000. It died on us about 30 miles out in the desert in some place called Choele Choel. I kept fixing it and eventually we made it to Mendoza and after all this time, the license plate on the car was a Xerox paper, and the targeta verde was a picture of some lady. We went through probably 20 checkpoints, and no one said anything. We finally made it up to the Chilean border in that car, and the Chileans were like, this is a stolen car. You need to go back down the mountain.
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.
Haha oh man I laughed hard at your story, especially the test drive/just taking your car thing, sorry.
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
I love Las Grutas! It's a hidden gem. We spent part of a summer there when the peatonal was still being built (around 2007 - soon after when Ginóbili made his big investment). I love the weird arabesque architecture of the old hotels, and the rock pools. It feels like a magical place. It was so much chiller than the beach towns in Buenos Aires province. I hope it doesn't become overdeveloped. I would love to visit again someday.
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!
I grew up overseas, moved to America and I have felt absolutely liberated by the freedom I now have when it comes to following rules. I think it's productive that people can definitely choose to follow their own gut and conscience when it comes to their own lives.
> I grew up in America which is fairly rule-obeying.
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.
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’d add in some variance of coastal/inland and urban/suburban/rural environments, which can reveal a lot of differences within a single state.
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.
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 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.
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.
Don't know about there, but in Oregon you just know where it's enforced. The limit here is 55 everywhere, but if you can get a clear stretch you can drive 80mph on I-5 without being stopped anywhere within Portland city limits. Once you get a little outside, the state police will stop you for going 60.
In NYC, jaywalking is normal. In Santa Monica, you get a ticket.
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.
"Lived in Australia and New Zealand which are disgustingly, obsequiously devoted to following tiny guidelines."
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?
Fair dinkum? I've lived in Oz for many decades and travelled widely. I have never seen obedience as a common trait. In fact, rule breaking with a shrug is far more prevalent.
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.
fair 'nuf. I'd love to hear your opinion on it - take up my point or the opposite - whenever you have the time. I would say "no offense" but I think I've offended basically everyone on earth now in this thread.
I have never been through a police check point other than booze buses or border control focusing only on fruit and similar to avoid disease propagation.
I think what you are noticing is the difference between a liberal democracy and autocracy. Where in one there exists a social construct of rules, where in the other rules require enforcement to exist, as they do not exist in the social consciousness
Defining rules based on intent works when there’s less corruption. Otherwise the rule will be vague enough to extract a bribe or a blackmail by the enforcing authority. Once corruption is under control you can have things like prosecutorial discretion. On the other hand, having so many rules that no one can reasonably know, understand and follow will also lead to bribes and extortion by law enforcement if corruption is common. Essentially, corruption can take advantage of either scenario and make the life of general mostly law-abiding citizens’ life much harder. So, corruption is the issue and not necessarily the laws.
Well, I had similar thoughts. I am reading the comments about laws and rules here and I am thinking: You people have never been in Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan.
Agree. IMHO, the problem can be solved with enhanced bandwidth(that is, to use things beyond text, IRL we have mimics and voice tone so emojis are a start) of the communication.
> That's true but without assuming intent you end up blindly following rules.
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.
That sounds fantastic actually fighting everyday bribery is such a nice feeling. I spent some time in a country with corrupt officers it was a real life drain for me, it was why I could not live abroad.
If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index you can also notice how post-soviet countries that keep close ties with russia also still rank high on that. I wonder how much of that is from same kind of people keeping power, or russian influence.
> 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.
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”.
This is why there is a difference between rules and guidelines.
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.
Well, the consensus is that the no music after midnight rule was an attempt to squash the western lifestyle(it had serious impact on the livelihood of the musicians and the venues). At places where the rule was enforced people simply continue their night somewhere without live music. It made no sense in the context of Covid, it made sense in the context of islamist trying to destroy the non-islamists.
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).
> Anyway, what's the difference between a rule and a guideline? Is a red light a rule or guide?
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)
Now imagine you are not, in fact, on good terms with your neighbour, as sometimes happens. How should you behave in order to not spend every single evening arguing over the meaning of "bother neighbour" with the police?
A more rigid definition serves to protect you, not just your neighbour.
>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.
This isn't a court, so no need for a paper trail. Rules are already like this in many flat complexes - I'd say most even, here in Denmark: No loud noise after X except with neighbour permission. Silence after Y.
>At places where the rule was enforced people simply continue their night somewhere without live music.
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?
It was clearly targeting the secular folks and the musicians, which are predominantly secular and from the opposition.
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.
That's why it's a ridiculous rule. It's arbitrary and subject to selective enforcement.
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.
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? :)
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.
> No, it's not assuming, it's interpreting based on prior experience in communication.
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.
> 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
This is how I interpreted the test, but you're making a good point.
If a vehicle entering the park would directly endanger lives--rather than just being a nuisance--the sign would (should) give the extra context to make a stronger discouragement.
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.
I voted that a police car/ambulance driving into the park _was_ breaking the rules, though breaking the rules may be justifiable in some circumstances.
The smoke signal example you gave is similar - if I’m lost, I care more about being found than the punishment for starting a fire.
If the ‘no campfires’ rule was punishable by death (and enforced), perhaps I wouldn’t risk a smoke signal
In the US, usually the law is structured in such a way that the powers of the police are at the state level. A city or park authority isn’t empowered to restrict their actions in pursuit of her duty.
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.
"State Police" (or "State Troopers", or "{$state} Highway Patrol, are different from "County Sherif[s | [Deputies]" and city/town/village police. Each level has a local jurisdiction. A city police officer (a subset of city authorities) tends to have authority to restrict actions according to law. Also, a city or park official may technic'ly have the right to do so according to law & park regulations…although some non-pliable people may force the official to summon police.
For anyone who has read the introduction, that's the only valid answer to that question in the context of this game:
"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)."
I did read the intro, but I considered police/ambulance to be a "universal" exception, not a "local" one (i.e. not idiosyncratic to a particular jurisdiction.)
(*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.)
The thing is, you don't generally get to know the context or the intent. You can't have a discussion with the sign, nor can it lecture you. A rule against starting a fire might be because the land owner doesn't like burnt patches on their meadows, or it might be because the vegetation is super dry and if you set fire to it you kill not only yourself but also all the surrounding villages, or something in between.
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?
Imagine there’s a military bombing range full of unexploded ordinance. The sign outside the range simply says “Keep off the grass”.
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.
The point is that language is unavoidably ambiguous (I'm sure there's a mathematical information theory proof of this, akin to the Byzantine Generals problem.).
"DANGER!! Unexploded ordinance! High risk of death!" is far less ambiguous than "Keep off grass". The former is sufficiently unambiguous that it will deter any sane person from entering.
You pretty much have to assume intent, though? To mind, language doesn't exist without intent. You are correct that you may be wrong on the underlying message that is being communicated, but that is basically boiling communication back to the measuring problem. You measure what is easy to measure, you say what is easy to say. (As a fun counter to your example, so it would be ok if I bring a jack hammer and start pounding away? Or a shovel and dig to my hearts content?)
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.
Context always matters. Most people aren’t programmers or engineers and don’t appreciate or benefit from the level of micro-scoping that you crave.
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.
> Regular expressions can describe context free shapes of symbols.
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.
Ha! "shapes" was a typo there for me. I meant collections or strings. Was trying not to bias it too far to where I was going.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Well, every rule and law in existence, that I can think of, has an assumed intent. That's probably a necessary condition for rules, whether it's a sign in the park or a government regulation or anything else.
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.
You should really look into how judges interpret laws (rules, basically). There are two schools I know of: purposivism and textualism (I agree with the latter and it doesn't take into account intentions. That's the basis of how the recent case Van Buren v US was decided, I would recommend reading it: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf). But in both, you have things like canons of interpretation and background principles and so on. It's always awesome to see how people who have to deal with the problem have thought about it, because they have usually invested a lot of time into it and come up with insights. See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation
The justification for textualism is that it's better to be wrong in a precise way, than to try to be right in a fuzzy way.
But both models are wrong. Bit rot is real and applies to laws. It's not possible to keep laws up to date with what they would be if lawmakers had infinite resources to dedicate to lawmaking and maintenance, even ignoring the huge issue of democratic consensus and parliamentary procedure issues.
(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 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.
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.
This is core to the Gricean Maxim of Quantity [1], according to which one gives as much information as needed but no more. If the sign says "No vehicles in the park" and nothing else then any reasonable person should assume that the reason for the sign is so obvious that no further clarification is needed.
Unrelated, it is also the reason why a hot-dog is not a sandwich, pragmatically speaking.
Where I live, vehicles like police cars have the letters "xmt" on the left side of their license plate. That's because they are exempt from rules like "no vehicles in the park". Per the questionnaire, if the SWAT team drove their tank into the park that would be a vehicle in the park, but they get a pass.
This is a great anecdote for the need of intent. But, you also need context. Without either of those it’s very, very hard to agree on rules. And agreeing on either context or intent, let alone both, in a small community is hard. Doing so across the internet is damn near impossible and that was the point of the article.
Minor point perhaps, but there's no question about whether the police are violating the rule when they drive their car into the park: they are.
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.
And that’s why education, and an educated society, are so important.
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”
> If you're the park ranger and the local police come into the park in their car chasing after some criminals... If the exact same thing happens but you're having a dispute with the local police
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
No the experimenter doesn't assume that, they say: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
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.
> It doesn't matter, the rules on police and emergency vehicles usually supersede some local rule about a park.
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.
The game didn't say the park is contained in another land. It's a "hypothetical park". It could even exist in a virtual reality that doesn't have any other rules for all we know.
Yeah, the game is very specific about other rules not applying. It's about "what exactly is and is not in" (in the airliner and space station question) and about "what exactly is and is not vehicle" (all others)
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.
This goes right to the discussion in the first couple chapters of _Promise Theory_, laying out the difference between a promise and an obligation. An obligation requires global knowledge, whereas a promise is local in scope, necessarily voluntary.
It might be a problem, but it is also an inescapable part of the human condition because, at the end of the day, rules are imaginary and all that really exist are human actions. It is pretty hopeless to complain about rules from this point of view.
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.
From computer programming we know that strict rules for complex systems become unmaintainable messes, with countless edge cases that result in things either just not functioning or - worse - allowing people to bypass the rules entirely to, e.g., run malware.
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.
> 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.
They really need to work on their signage wording.
In a lot of countries intent is in fact everything. It's common for developed countries to be more governed by written law and have that interpreted as such in court, but in many developing countries it's all about what you are trying to do.
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.
>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.
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.
You just made me look up the rules in germany. The wording is somewhat particular. "An emergency vehicle following a higher cause can invoke special rights ("Sonderrechte") indicated by blue flashing lights. These special rights authorize the driver of the vehicle to divert from the regular traffic laws as long as done safely." Interestingly, this is separate from the "Right of the way", which can be ordered on top using a siren. This is why they need to run the siren for 2ish seconds before running a red light for example.
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.
In fact, in Germany, everyone would be authorized to enter that park with a vehicle if it were necessary to avoid serious danger or to save others from serious danger. This is referred to as 'rechtfertigender Notstand'.
It's both of that. It has been determined that 2 seconds of siren should be enough for everyone on an in intersection to realize what's going on.
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 answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules
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.
I think it's a fascinating practical example of how "baked in" cognitive bias is. The sort of people that use HN tend to be highly analytical. Yet nonetheless we see a massive public display of people rationalizing their failure to directly answer the question that was very clearly and unambiguously asked while pretending that they did.
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.
"break" / "violate" have same semantic ambiguity. You can't separate language from the rest of one's comprehension of the world e.g. most would probably agree that in general, "a rule" cannot prevent someone from saving a life. Overriding moral necessity is built into the understanding of the limitations of "a rule". It's implicit and does not need to be spelled out explicitly.
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.
Please note that I have 0 interest in inciting anger in this absolutely (to me) fascinating topic. The way I present my arguments are very strongly detached from how this should be handled in any real world scenario. On that part from, what you wrote, I am relatively certain that we would be in easy and relaxed agreement. I don't want people to die in parks because EMTs are vehicles. Please keep that in mind while reading on :)
> 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.
> detached from how this should be handled in any real world scenario
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 :)
Oh well. I reckon that some of our argument could stem from the games instructions, albeit fairly concise at first and second glance, not being specific enough after all.
No room of 100 people will ever agree if a rule that was broken was only technically broken. What should be an exception is in fact an opinion.
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.
Both those examples (rescue/no-chase) are in order to save lives... but I agree there are examples like not interfering with a state execution. My point was about the general case and not denying there is tiny minority of exceptional counter-examples. I expect between 99-100% of park rules will not be enforced to save a life.
See, even there for me it's rather a "firefighters/police have an exemption to the rules". For you it's "firefighters/police are breaking the rule but it's fine".
Except the blurb at the start clearly says there are no exemptions. The only rule is "no vehicles in the park". So all you're judging is 1.) is it a vehicle? and 2.) is it in the park?
Yeah, I actually thought that the phrasing of the blurb weighted the answers in a particular direction, and was surprised to discover that most did not answer questions about emergency vehicles as violating the rule. To quote specifically, it says "...please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
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.
To me it looks like the emergency vehicles are counted as violating the rules by about 60% of players? Which I assume is meant in the sense of "yes, this technically breaks the rules, but we assume they had good reason to (because they were following higher-scope rules)".
Yup, without clarification the rule might be there because any vehicle might just be immediately stuck in the terrain. Or hit a landmine. The assumption of course is that it is just a normal park
Here where I live, the latter is actually precisely how the traffic law enforcement works: emergency services get tickets in the post for traffic violations same as everyone else, and it is up to the officials to check their logs and respond with "the vehicle was responding to an incident", which is a valid defence and gets the violation dismissed; or not, as the case may be, if it turns out the crew ran a red light while on their way home or something.
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.
>Here where I live…emergency services get tickets in the post for traffic violations same as everyone else, and it is up to the officials to check their logs and respond with “the vehicle was responding to an incident”
I assume you are referring to traffic laws that are enforced by cameras. Is that correct?
I answered in the same way. I chose to interpret the rule as "no functioning registered terrestrial road vehicles", in which case emergency vehicles are violating the rule.
My approach was that the tank and the emergency vehicles were all strictly violating the rule, and that in a reasonable world they would all have some external dispensation for being allowed to violate the rule.
In my country ambulances are allowed to run red lights, but not speeding. Actually they have their own rules that allow speeding in certain roads if the are in an emergency over their own limit: they are limited to 90 kmh in the motorway, but can go up to 120kmh, like any other car, in an emergency. Over that, they could potentially get a ticket. But AFAIK they can never go over the limits a normal car has.
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 answered the same way as you. Because there are rules and there are laws. The only reason park rules have any weight is in a larger context of laws. So, if the only park rule is "no vehicles in the park", then clearly the rule is violated by an emergency vehicle, but it will be that larger context that determines whether anyone cares if the rule was violated.
> 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.
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.
It's more complex: in many countries if an ambulance hits a car while running a red light because of an emergency, the ambulance is at fault, as they were breaking the rules.
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)
> The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules
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.
Exactly. There is a clear majority in the answers. Sure, there are edge cases, but they are edge cases.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That's not true. As far as the law is concerned, users/providers are shielded so long as they don't take part in authorship. You be as despotic or biased as you want, and you're still not considered the publisher of content provided by another user/provider.
Further to that, the idea that "if you take moderation far enough you become a publisher" is the situation prior to §230, that §230 was enacted in order to get rid of (so that there would no longer be a disincentive for intermediaries to choose to moderate!).
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.
I mean why not? Automoderator bots are already a thing on reddit and work reasonably well with just simple fuzzy string matching. If one can appeal to a human as a last resort when edge cases occur I don't really see a problem. If anything it'll have a few orders of magnitude less false positives.
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.
Good point. The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion. I wonder how much consensus there would be if the intro asked you to go by the intent of the rule as you understand it, rather than what it literally says.
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.
> The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion.
...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.
The whole discussion hinges on the definition of "vehicle", which is not defined. If I take my definition as being "a vehicle that meets the definitions of a motor vehicle in the UK Road Traffic Act 1988, but not including those in use as emergency service vehicles" then the majority are indeed correct. And that's how I answered, because it's consistent with my expectations for a sign like that which has been placed by a human authority. If you choose the rather broader definition (from Wikipedia) of "machine that transports people or cargo" then more scenarios are excluded. But that's a more fuzzy definition too: is a remote controlled car (neither carrying people nor cargo) really not included in the category of "vehicle"? In practice you won't typically find humans placing signs with that intent.
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.
> 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.
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.)
That's a fairly culturally specific interpretation of common sense. Where I live it would for sure also include e-bikes and scooters, quite possibly regular bikes too (this is assuming "park" here means something on the ground and not e.g. a roof park where there might be weight limits).
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.
On the contrary, "precise rules" make things harder for many people in the community, because the more precise you get, the more attention people pay to them, and the more work they put into getting as far with those precise rules as they can (after all, if the rules are precise, surely it's OK to come right up to their edge, like the railings at a scenic overlook).
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.
Getting moderated typically results in a post being made invisible to most site readers, which voids the effort put into writing it. Of course it imposes cost on the person being moderated, that's the purpose of moderation and bans in the first place.
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.
One person's "cultural homogeneity" is another's "shared community goal". There are, for example, people who share a goal of curious conversation, and others who advocacy goals, or other kinds of goals.
Yes, but the goal of curious conversation requires a diversity of views, otherwise there's nothing to be curious about. In turn that would greatly benefit from a more classical approach to rules of debate in which speakers aren't blamed for the behavior of listeners or responders regardless of what they said. Otherwise you can't be too curious, in case someone flips out about the dangerousness of that idea, and then you get blamed for starting a flamewar.
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.
What I find really amusing is that the top comment (yours) is about how obvious the interpretation of the rules is, but there are dozens of subcomments disagreeing with your interpretation and each insisting how obvious their own interpretation is... exactly like with content moderation ;)
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).
> even if they are allowed to break the rule they are still breaking the rule.
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.
In the absence of a definition of vehicle I chose to define it as any device that is a conveyance. Thus a wagon, rowboat, and skateboard are all vehicles in the park (even if not in use).
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 can't find any definition of tank that doesn't describe it as an armored fighting vehicle. If it's a tank, it's a vehicle. If it's not a vehicle, don't call it a tank.
The scenario said tank. A tank is a vehicle. No vehicles in the park.
Does the tank ever become not a vehicle? Rusted to the frame?
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.
The bicycle is quite capable of acting as conveyance for a human (or perhaps bicycle peddling robot, or trained animal) in its current form, so that's an easy "no" from me.
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.
Belgian traffic code says "Het niet bereden rijwiel wordt niet als voertuig beschouwd.", i.e. "The bicycle that is not ridden is not regarded as a vehicle." When you walk next to your bicycle, you're effectively a pedestrian here. No idea how things are defined in other countries.
Interestingly, in Brazil's transit code a person carrying their bycicle unmounted is considered a pedestrian. Otherwise, they're a non motorized light vehicle.
The 11% seemed odd to me... I selected only 3 violators: the car, the ambulance, and the police car, and those seem to be the only majority-chosen violators according to the graph so I would think I matched 100%?
> It's a vehicle if it is transporting people, things, or itself (e.g., the R/C car).
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?
I realize this is the point this article was making, but I must say this is exactly the level of pedantic-as-the-point conversation that I no long put up with in my adult life.
A broken car is still a car! If I pushed a broken down Honda Civic into the park with the gear shift set to neutral and left it there, surely that would break the rule?
Is a sculpture of a car a vehicle? The broken car is still a car because the intent of the thing is stop to be a car. A memorial tank is not intended to be a vehicle, but rather be a sculpture. A sculpture is usually not a vehicle, even if it may look like one.
I was similar, a bicycle is a vehicle and I even called the toycar a vehicle because I think they were talking about those cars kids build and race down hills. I was considering more about "how is this typically powered?" and "what is the F=ma if it hit someone?"
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.
I think it really depends on where you are located. I can't imagine personal wheeled vehicles like bikes and skateboards being prohibited from a park in the Netherlands unless explicitly stated so. On the other hand in suburban Florida biking places is so far out of the norm that it might make sense.
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.
It's honestly blowing my mind right now that anyone could interpret as a bike as anything but a vehicle. What else would it be? What is a railroad handcar? What is a paddleboat? What is a cycle saloon?
It is a mix of pedantry, iamverysmart, ackshully, treating dictionaries as prescriptive (the English dictionary is _descrptive_ and the French dictionary is _prescriptive_) and a bunch of other nonsense.
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.
I really hate to break this to you, but in no case would I see a sign that said “no vehicles” and hesitate to ride my bicycle right past it. If it applied to bikes, it would say so. This doesn’t take vast knowledge nor is it a flex, I’m saying this is uniformly what I would expect cyclists in all US cities in which I’ve lived to understand as well.
That's fine - and I would ignore the sign too but that wasn't the question being asked in this quiz. It explicitly said do you consider a bicycle a vehicle and it is a vehicle by law nearly everywhere.
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.
The sign said “no vehicles in the park” it didn’t say “and by the way use a specific and pedantic definition of vehicle”. Bicycles are not vehicles to many people; others would disagree. That’s rather the point, and it’s not a vacuous one.
> by the way use a specific and pedantic definition of vehicle
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 would definitely ride my bike in that park and were I a mod I wouldn't give a shit. But as the to directions of the game, the answers were different. But that too is part of the point of the game.
I would do the same. The park will likely add a "bicycles excepted" sign to indicate bicycles are exempt because implicitly most people know that.
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.
Yeah I agree. I really think the game is about how language is fuzzy, which I said a bit more over here[0]. I had a more detailed comment but the person deleted their post by the time I hit reply ;.;
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.
A "gotcha" comment, but that only adds to the author's point. Which luckily this wasn't one of the examples. Though see back to my comment about the items I said no for (that aren't confused for being outside the part like the ISS)
I know this is a "gotcha" comment, but it actually only adds to the author's point: language is fuzzy and imprecise. Moreso, that we assume it has far higher precision than it actually does.
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.
Obviously some people think bicycles are vehicles and some don't. For this reason, I applied the logic that if the park wanted to ban vehicles including bikes, they would write "No vehicles, no cycles" and so while I think a bike is a vehicle, I don't think it violates the intent behind the "no vehicles" rule.
I can't fanthom how a "no vehicles" sign would NOT apply to bicycles. What else would you call a bicycle if not a vehicle? It would be clear to me that park is catering to pedestrians and not cyclists (or car drivers).
I similarly can't fathom how a bicycle is anything other than a vehicle. It has wheels and gears, it's a machine, it speeds you up significantly, you get one an off it, you have to learn to ride it, it can carry additional items. And you have to follow traffic rules (which is like circular reasoning but shows that governments say it is a vehicle).
> police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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)."
You are mimicking local jurisdiction rules. You don’t even know why they disallow vehicles. Let’s say because of subsidence or weight load. Then even emergency services should not go in as it would give more risk to them. Instead they need to walk in or use a helicopter suspended in mid air.
More surreal maybe it is above that cave in Lost and even an ISS or plane should not go over that location.
> So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
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").
The nuance on that one felt odd. I said that it did violate the rule (even the spirit of the rule, being a large motor vehicle), because it was a binary question. I also felt the rule violation was justified and that they shouldn’t be called out on it.
The second page of instructions actually specifically addressed that: "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
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".
I even disagree that there was any nuance. I wasn't told "you're doing content moderation, there's a rule, the rule is violated but there could be some mitigating circumstances, do you allow the content?". I was told: is there a vehicle in the park, and I said yes because a police car is a vehicle and it's in the park.
I agree that the police car is a vehicle and and it is a violation.
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.
Could be an exception... or not. Some prohibitions come from hazards like "this won't hold your weight" or "this could flood unexpectedly". And there's no emergency vehicle exceptions.
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.
The issue this is inspired from was pretty interesting [0], and notably very few things were exempted from the rules leading to interesting debates on how the rules should be interpreted
Yes, this is the only thing I disagreed with the majority on, and that’s because I answered “was there a vehicle in the park”. I don’t think anyone disagrees that the vehicle should be able to go to the park and we should amend the rule. I came away thinking content moderation with better rules is actually quite achievable
And the instructions very clearly state that you should not take into account whether in this case it would be OK to violate the rule. Just whether the rule was broken or not. As such, a police car or ambulance in the park very clearly violate the rule and thus you must choose that answer.
The question specified that it was only asking whether the rule was violated, not whether the violation should be permitted (e.g. because the police doing their job is more important than the rule)
I agree with this take. Most questions were very obvious when thought about from the angle of "what is the intent of the rule", which is likely to be "let people enjoy the park by not allowing large, noisy, smelly conveyances".
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.
Bikes do annoy people with small children because some people try to ride bikes fast where not appropriate, and this is dangerous when small children change direction unpredictably.
In other words, absent any actual formal specified intent, people interpret the rules to best suit their own self-interest.
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!
Or, small children annoy people with bikes, because some people try to take small children where not appropriate, and this is dangerous when small children change direction unpredictably.
So if child A starts hitting other children is it still appropriate for child A to be there?
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.
There are all kinds of parks. I would argue you should probably not be letting a 5 year old loose on a biking path which would seem to me to mean it is an inappropriate place for (some) children.
What kind of park has a biking path, I wonder to myself. I personally have never seen it; generally, paths are either mixed use or pedestrian only. Mixed use is fine, for people who go at an appropriate pace when in proximity to pedestrians, but some people treat mixed paths as an entitlement. It's more common for paths that are on commutes.
Those people get annoyed by everything and try to impose on people and prevent joy in the world.
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.
This is only true until an old grumpy lady is sitting on a bench in the park and don't want to hear any more skateboard noise. From that point on there is someone who considers skateboarding a violation of this rule.
I think we are all proving the author's point here.
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.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
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".
Your attempt at making it black and white fails. When you say "obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign."
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?
just an FYI (going out on a limb) but nobody knows what this even means "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?"
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 2 means emergency vehicles are responding to an emergency, have their lights and sirens on, and are thus permitted to violate traffic rules.
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.
The terms you are using are not universal, and in the United States “Code 3” typically mean lights and siren, and “Code 2” typically means lights but no siren.
> So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
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 a great take. I thought the author was only trying to demonstrate problems that occur when moderators act in good faith. Since the only forum I use is HN, I forget that plenty of moderators do not act in good faith.
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
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.
Agree. Emergency vehicles don't automatically get a "free pass", there are separate rules that apply an exemption. So the question and rule, as written, says that the emergency vehicles do violate the rule IMO. In the real world, there would just be other rules that would apply an exemption.
(IANAL, but have been driving emergency vehicles for 15 years).
What if the rule was created after the tank was already in the park? There was no information given on how the tank was transported to the park, and you're creating a violation based off a hypothetical.
Are you being serious? Obviously the rule is not meant to outlaw that specific scenario and local authorities or the company that provides the transport will put measures in place to make sure it goes safe and sound; they will close the park, drive at walking speed, etc...
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
I think the author should have made the statement "A sandwich is an item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with meat, cheese, or other filling between them".
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.
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?
Aha, I love a man of principle. I would say that I would have had a sandwich in that case, as I believe that the structure of the food item should only be considered as it enters your mouth, completely removed from an explanation as to how that food item came to be up to that point.
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?
If you gnaw off the fold, does the remaining part become a sandwich? If you bite off a piece that excludes the fold, does it become sandwich in the mouth? Fascinating mystery, right up there with the transubstration in that cannibal religion!
I don't understand. If you walk into an establishment and ask for a sandwich, and they bring you any of the items you listed, you and me and everyone would be upset and confused. So no they are not sandwiches.
Fascinating that the first comment entirely disregard the very simple game rules (“it’s not about your jurisdiction“ and “it’s not about wether the rule should be disregarded in that case“).
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?
I did read the instructions and I also assumed that I should use my judgment to determine whether the intent of the sign was violated. If the author had wanted otherwise, they should have said something like "Forget everything you about how laws are written and interpreted in the real world and simply take the most literal interpretation you can, with no regard for how ridiculous the outcome might be."
> If the author had wanted otherwise, they should have said something like "Forget everything you about how laws are written and interpreted in the real world and simply take the most literal interpretation you can, with no regard for how ridiculous the outcome might be."
>> 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__).
>> 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.
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.
> This tells me that my job is to determine whether the rule allows skateboards and not whether the rule should allow skateboards.
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.
> But the fact that we disagree is exactly the point of the game.
> 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 don't think the author intended for so much confusion at this meta-level that our disagreement is occurring at.
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)
The author completely intended for this level of discussion by asking for you to dogmatically follow the rule and posing a lot of circumstances where most people would allow it to be broken. It appears to be working as intended.
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.
> The author completely intended for this level of discussion by asking for you to dogmatically follow the rule and posing a lot of circumstances where most people would allow it to be broken. It appears to be working as intended.
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'm pretty surprised that you thought it was so black-and-white to allow things like emergency vehicles
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.
Well, "no child porn" is a comparatively black-and-white rule.
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?
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
What was your percentage of agreeing with the majority? Greater than 50%?
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.
>> Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
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.
I think the website is very disingenuous because it purposely asks the wrong question. The question is not "is the rule technically violated", the question is "should they be fined for violating the rule". If you asked the latter question, then 99% of people would agree on all questions.
It poses a deliberately vague question to provoke controversy where none exists.
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.
> "To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear."
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.
Given the spiel at the beginning about how this place is different from where I live and that in this place, there are no rules which trump the park's rules, I can't agree that it's obvious that police, ambulances, and fire trucks obviously don't have to follow the rules. To me, it seems that the framing all but says that they do.
Police, ambulances and fire trucks are if anything some of the clearest violations. They are unambiguously vehicles. They are unambiguously entering the park.
It was really surprising to me how many so explicitly ignored the instructions for them.
There are two ways to approach the problem. Either to be dogmatic about the wording or to be practical. I ended up with only one "is a vehicle" because I was enforcing it the way I would enforce a rule like that in real life, a practical rule. If you were being dogmatic about the wording you would undermine the likely intent of the sign by kicking people out of their wheelchairs and having to shoot down the ISS. Rigid adherence to bad (or even just badly worded) rules is its own form of tyranny, one that is even more insidious because it has a veneer of legitimacy. Much evil has been perpetrated throughout history by people who were "just following orders".
In Europe our driver education contains a legal definition of a vehicle (and motor vehicle). You'll find almost all parks with drivable roads will have a clear definition at the entrance what's allowed and what isn't.
If in Europe there was a sign that says "no vehicles", that disallows skateboards and bicycles too. Signs will always make it clear if they mean "motor vehicles".
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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).
Wasn't the point of the experiment not that you could come up with answers that seemed sensible to you, but that different people came up with different answers that seemed sensible to them? I too felt the line was fairly clear in this case, but I was very surprised that others thought differently.
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.
Yes, but then the experiment kinda proves the opposite of the point it was trying to prove. As it were, people largely agree with each other as to what's reasonable and what is not.
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
That was not how I interpreted the results. Nor the discussion elsewhere on this page where some people included skateboards and bicycles under "vehicle" and some did not.
No, police and ambulances are vehicles. They're not allowed in the park. It's a violation. Maybe they can get away with the violation but if you're following the rules it's a violation.
This is why the real rules say "Emergency vehicles allowed", and then usually "No skateboarding, roller blading, scooters".
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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 police is like one super clear example of violation, everybody can agree car is a vehicle, and it's clearly written that you answer whether it's a violation not whether it should be, ignoring your local laws.
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.
> 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.
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
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.
There was no reason to assume either the police car or the ambulance was doing their job. There was no mention of a medical emergency, just an EMT driving an ambulance. Police officers may or may not have jurisdiction in the area and there was no evidence the emergency was even a police matter. The EMT driving through the gate to watch the music festival, and the police officer driving through the park during mid-2020 (when the entire world had declared COVID an emergency) would both qualify.
And that doesn't even address the bigger issue that even if they were justified in breaking the rule, they were breaking the rule.
Yes indeed. “In a justifiable emergency, X breaks the rules — does this break the rules?” Is a very clear “yes”. It doesn’t ask whether X should be punished for breaking them.
> There was no reason to assume either the police car or the ambulance was doing their job.
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."
Ehm. I answered that the cop and ambulance were in violation of the rule, but it’s sometimes okay to break the rules. That doesn’t mean they didn’t break the rules — it means they were justified in breaking the rules.
in other words, there's two pieces here, 1) the rule, 2) the consequences of breaking the rule.
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.
If people don't agree on it, then the clarity you feel is an illusion. The point of rules is common understanding of what is acceptable. Notably, you pulled a bunch of special cases and refinements from thin air. The way I read the setup, it was "crystal clear" that the rule was violated by emergency services, even if we could agree afterwards not to enforce it there.
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.
I feel the same way as the above comment. If you were an actual administrator in charge of fining people for violating the rule, almost none of these examples should give you pause. You wouldn't be trying to give a ticket to planes flying overhead, for example. With these examples, there really isn't much disagreement on whether action should be taken, so any discussion of whether a rule is technically violated is moot.
> You wouldn't be trying to give a ticket to planes flying overhead
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.
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).
Planes are usually required to fly above the height defined by property laws, and so it makes sense that "park" is deines by the areas that planes don't fly in.
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.
Those are exactly the questions the quiz should have asked, not clearly absurd examples that are unambiguously not vehicles in the park, like the ISS passing over the park.
This is a mix of ad hominem and no true Scotsman. And the iss had a clear purpose, if space is excluded, and civics are included, how high counts as "in the park"?
I love my fully battery powered ebike but I am well aware they are prohibited pretty much everywhere. When filling out the form I figured a bike is not a vehicle because they tend to be explicitly spelled out, but ebikes are more often prohibited (though in my area, not enforced), and my overpowered ebike is illegal everywhere, but I am respectful of others and there is no enforcement.
Generally it is too difficult to enforce whether someone was or was not using a feature so in my area (SF Bay Area) they would just outlaw anything with a capability to do something undesired, regardless of whether it was being used. The thinking would go that if they catch someone they can point to the feature and say "you're breaking the law". No need to prove the feature was in use. Plus if you let people in with a bike with some undesired feature, people are going to end up using it and that would be what such a law would be trying to avoid.
I don't see it as applying my local laws. Everywhere I have ever seen that I can recall will explicitly spell out bicycles if they are prohibited. I have never seen a prohibition on "vehicles" that included bicycles. So I applied my understanding of the word vehicle. Of course I have not seen everywhere in the world, and the whole point of the survey is that people have to apply their own perspectives in order to even make a judgement, and this is the problem of content moderation.
I fully agreed with the GP for the same reasons: in my book everything except the Civic was OK, because that matches the intent of the sign.
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
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.
It does not tell me not to moralize. It just tells me to not take any other rules into account that might exist, i.e. to not construct a legalistic argument.
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.
> 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?
The instructions specifically say not to apply this kind of logic.
Well my view was that the answer is yes the ambulance violates the rule, but violating the rule is morally fine there. But still pedantically yes the ambulance does violate the no vehicles rule.
Yes, the instructions say to not moralize, justify, or apply local laws. Strictly enforce the stated rule.
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!
I'm with the parent comment, as I think the context is important here.
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?
The whole exercise specifically asked us to ignore context, "common sense", etc. If we were supposed to consider an exception for park services, it would have been explicitly stated.
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.
To me that's precisely the point: since vehicle itself is not defined and is a subject to interpretation, excluding emergency services is less of a problem than carving out an accurate boundary around what is or is not a vehicle.
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
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
The intent isn't super clear. Personally, I don't think that emergency vehicles are obviously exempt, we don't know why the rule is there. I don't that bicycles are obviously exempt either, they are clear vehicles that go faster than normal human speeds and the line between motorcycle and bicycle is rather unclear. (Ask five of your friends and associates whether ebikes should be allow on a bike path, then ask about ebikes that hit 45mph, then ice mopeds, then those e unicycle things, then the faster versions...)
Likewise with boats, it seems that there are many cases where no watercraft at all should be allowed, and other cases where a motorboat is fine even if they don't want cars and whatnot in the park. And while flying aover a park is arguably not in it, a helicopter hovering a few feet over a field obviously is in the park and far more disruptive than the other vehicles.
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)
What did you answer about bicycles and roller skates? It wasn't one of the questions, but I bet razor scooters would split the vote close to 50/50.
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?
For me, it is obvious that police and ambulances in emergencies violate the rule.
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.
The website closes with a graph objectively showing how people disagree with each other on these questions. People thinking that interpretation is obvious and that there is no reasonable disagreement is exactly the problem.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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 interpreted the ambulance and police as breaking the rule, even though it wouldn't be persecuted. Of course the important thing isn't the rule, but people's reaction over time. A vehicle might cause unwanted noise or damage park grounds. Even without the rule, people might get upset if people use vehicles to degrade park quality. On the other end, if the park is many miles across and it has large paved trails, people might perceive the rule as unjust. So it's ultimately this negotiation and power between participants (including the park owners) that determines acceptability. An arbitrary rule which is easy to break but without real harm, in enforcing it, creates more harm than it prevents. So, I don't care about the rule but how it's enforced. Another concept useful to these situations is Taleb's intransigent minority: those who care will win over those who don't. With content moderation, we will always have a battle between those who perceive harm and those who don't. Problematic rules must be fought just as problematic content must be fought. A systems ability to adapt rules over time will ultimately determine its useful life. Change or be replaced.
So which side of the vehicle/nonvehicle line did you choose for these? Wagon, wheel chair, skateboard, surf board, parachute, roller skates, ice skates, shoes, socks.
It's not that hard. You have to understand a "park" is usually primarily some pseudo-preserve of nature, with varying degrees of permitted human recreational uses. That is what a "park" actually means.
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.
> There are people with authoritative knowledge, and you ask them the questions, and they give a "yes or no".
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.
It's crystal clear until it's not. In the UK a bicycle is, rightly so, considered a vehicle. I know this, but I'd guess many British people do not. I also understand why bicycles are considered vehicles and, when on my bike, tend to follow the spirit of rules and designs that appear to prohibit vehicles.
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.
This is funny because others probably answered differently but feel the same way. So the site is actually achieving what it was created for. Discussion.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
> 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.
My takeaway was similar — the problem is one of how we define "vehicle". Is it anything that moves, anything that carries a person, is it a toy model of a vehicle, etc., etc., etc..
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.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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".
Same here. I looked at the intent of the rule given the context. Rules are enforced by humans not robots and are meaningless without context.
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.
Courts consider the context of enforcement, and police both decide whether something is a violation as well as handling enforcement.
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.
It's also an awfully simplistic vision of moderation/rules, whereas the answer in real life should be "it depends". Should an emergency vehicle be allowed through the park? Yes. As another comment says, is there a known risk about things collapsing in the park? Guess what, that kind of stuff is either displayed prominently at the entrance, or told in advance to the few people that might legitimately have to go through the park.
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.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
What was your answer on the wheelchair? Same as for bicycle, or different? If different, what about a wheelchair but the person in it doesn’t need a wheelchair, they just enjoy the sporting aspect of arm-powered vehicles?
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?
>obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
There is being rational, using principles to interpret a statement.
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)_/¯
To me, a bike is clearly a vehicle. To double-check, I've searched for "list of vehicles" on Google, all the lists I have seen include bikes in them (and I didn't expect anyone to disagree with this).
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
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.
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”)
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
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.)
I felt the exact same way. I found there was exactly one example of a vehicle being in the park, and everything else was fine. That didn't seem to be their intent
You clearly didn't understand. It's mostly not able how easy or not you found it to apply the rule, it was about how whatever you decided was actually quite different from other people. In fact, you finding it very clear makes the point apply even more.
I felt it was easy too, but I felt that almost every item listed was a vehicle and in the park. If it helps here was my reasoning. To start with I checked the dictionary for a definition and it appears that a vehicle is "A device or structure for transporting persons or things; a conveyance". Then it was a matter of categorizing.
The only one I had to deliberate was the horse, because while it transports persons or things it isn't a device or structure. I ended up saying almost everything was a vehicle and in the park.
> … obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
I'll argue that the police can enter the park with their vehicles, but they'll be violating the rule when they do so.
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.
In that scenario the duty to help citizens in need simply supersedes the rule that vehicles are not allowed in the park. So pedantically the EMT and police officer are breaking the rule, but breaking the rule of idly standing by in an emergency is worse.
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.
Yes, I'm not questioning whether in real life this sign would cause issues or not. The question is "Does this violate the rule?", To which the answer is "yes" for an ambulance.
Whether it's fine in certain scenarios to break some rules it's a different topic though.
Whether it violates the rules depends on whether you live by the letter of the law, or the intent of the law. When it’s by the letter an ambulance is obviously violating that rule but that’s perhaps not the most sensible way of going about things.
> 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.
"Obvious" for you that is. I had a different interpretation of the obvious rule, so came up with a different set of answers.
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"
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
I think it's more intended to be a proof of how people have a difficult time applying clear-cut rules without relying on their prior biases. That (conceptually) is a really good exercise and one that we could all benefit from. The implementation, explanation and result transparency otoh, are garbage.
> but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer
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.
It's obvious that the spirit of a rule that says "no vehicles in the park" actually means "do not cause inconvenience or ruin the serenity of the park." A person in a wheelchair, nor an astronaut passing overhead do those things. A guy driving a Toyota around does.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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”.
>(and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
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.
You didn't follow the instructions. He specifically says forget all existing rules you may know. There are no vehicles allowed in the park. That includes ambulances, fire trucks, orbiting space stations that pass through the border of the park, etc.
I may have answered differently from you (I would say the police violated the rule) but I think we actually agree on the point that the rules do not apply to emergency workers. In essence, the data collected isn’t reflective of peoples actual attitudes.
I considered the emergency vehicles to be violations of the rule, but that they were defensible exceptions. To borrow a legal concept, that they are emergency vehicles was an affirmative defense, meaning I had to first admit they violated the rule.
Yes I'd say it's "unclear to follow" to adversarial (or just nitpicking) people
(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)
While I agree, I marked the emergency vehicles as being in violation of the rule. My interpretation being that such a rule would not be enforced even though it was technically violated.
the child in the electric toy car is probably the real dividing line on the question of what is a "vehicle"... the ISS orbiting is the line on what is "in the park"... and the police car in an emergency is where you're supposed to bend the definition of the word "allowed".
I think the answer to the survey is "I want to talk to my lawyer".
you give emergency vehicles an exception to the rule, that was specifically mentions as not being the intent. the rule is no vehicles in the park, an ambulance is a vehicle so it broke the rule. if then punishment is applied and what is something else, in the basis it's a vehicle in the park.
I came away with the exact same takeaway. If you really want to convince people that content moderation is a hard problem, just ask them to listen to this Radiolab episode about Facebook's struggle: https://radiolab.org/podcast/post-no-evil
Is this some dumb philosophical thing? It's just contextualized language, with fairly well established context.
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.
It sure _may_ be. Nevertheless, the efficient way of solving the problem is making concise and accurate rules, and perhaps explicitly expressing the intent.
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).
I think it does a fair job if you realize that the entire thing is semantics.
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.
I agree 100% with the spirit of your point and I think imagining a forced bet scenario can help to clarify things. There are three main concepts we want to interpret within the context of the phrasing of the rule: (1) the intended referrent of 'vehicle'; (2) the intended meaning of 'in' the park; (3) the actual intention of the rule regarding emergency vehicles.
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.
I think you would lose a lot of money. Bikes and skateboards alone are going to have tons of violations. Also, I feel like if i had to bet money, boats aren't going to be included unless specified in most but crucially not all circumstances.
If it's even odds then I expect it's a losing bet no matter what anyone writes down - that's why in the imagined scenario it's forced. The pertinent question isn't whether you expect to lose money by playing, it's whether you expect to lose less money by including non-motorised vehicles in your write-up than by excluding them.
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".
The number at the end is unclear - it says I agreed with the majority 11%, but then it shows a bunch of charts. Yet the three I said were vehicles (the car, the police vehicle, and the ambulance) are the only 3 above 50% support, so it seems I agreed with the majority 100%. I even opened a second session in another browser and hit yes to everything to see if the numbers in the chart was the amount that agree with me, and no, the numbers didn't invert so it seems the chart is measuring yes answers.
Same, the only three I marked as violating the rule were the car, the police and the ambulance. And it told me I agreed with 11% but showed a bar chart showing that basically everyone agreed with me. It was confusing.
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.
This entire thing is showing that people have different interpretations, you can't resort to "that did _not_ violate the rule" to say that it's super obvious and the only answer.
I phrased my answer a bit difficult. What I meant was exactly that, instead of stoplisting a few items, like most people appear to have done, I allow-listed only a few (which is emphasizing the fact that vastly different interpretations exist).
Am I crazy/dumb or is the chart super confusing? I really had to stare at it to figure out how to read it, and I'm still just guessing the vertical scale is percent of the whole that think each item is a car.
I agree. This has to be the worst, most unintentionally confusing graph I've ever seen. And I don't solely blame this website because many people make this mistake too: For crying out loud, how can you make the simple mistake of not labeling your axis? People online who make graphs—stop not labeling your axes! It's the whole point of the graph!
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.
Given that “kite” is the lowest and “Honda civic” is the highest, I’m assuming the bar chart shows % of people who classified it as a violation, regardless of color. For me, the last three are red, and they are also the only ones above 50%. To me that means I agreed with the majority 100% of the time.
But it says I had 11% agreement with the majority.
The problem is that I also got 11% just saying yes to everything. It would seem surprising to me to have the same percentage of maximalists as there is for people who are in the majority on every question
I came to the comments to find out what's going on with the 11%. I was worried that if I agreed with the majority just 11% of the time I must have reversed the buttons or something. But my choices mostly agree with the graph, so I don't think I made an error. I guess everyone gets 11%?
I got 12%, and after also not knowing what it means, and seeing no units whatsoever on the y-axis of the chart, have to leave feeling the author completely and utterly missed their opportunity to convince me of whatever argument they were making. You lose me completely at inability to convey meaningful data from the experiment.
What, exactly, is the graph showing? % of people who said "Yes this is a vehicle in the park" or % of people who agree with you ? It's very difficult to tell as I said yes only to the car and the memorial...
Your first interpretation is correct. No one thinks a kite is a vehicle. Everyone thinks a private car is a vehicle. Everything else is in between.
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.
I see. This graph is pretty confusing imo. My first idea for a visualization is to use a stacked bar chart that always adds up to 100% with "No it's not a vehicle" above "Yes it is a vehicle." Use 4 colors, dark red, light red, dark green, light green, and emphasize your choices with the dark ones.
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?
You can get not-11% by choosing to skip before the end. IF you skip after 7 questions, it's "You agreed with the majority: 29%" — same whether I say yes to all or no to all.
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.
What it appears to be actually calculating is that 1/9 of items had majority consensus that they were against the rule. It doesn't appear to take your actual selection into consideration, only the amount of questions answered
You are right, the "all violate" and "all do violate" options both give 2/7 = 29% for the first 7, which is the majority opinion (car and ambulance violate, the others do not).
I also got 11% and think that number may be a result of some kind of flawed calculation. The final chart distribution of each "vehicle" paints a much clearer picture.
Yeah, I don't get what the score means. Also saw 11%. Clearly the number means something other than what people think it means, which is maybe the real test.
To me, if I see a rule trying to ban "vehicles" without defining "vehicles", I take my concept of "vehicles" by deduction: I think about all the ways that things that I know of as being "vehicle-esque" could be problematic in various different ways such that you'd want to ban them — being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example); property damage (skateboards, dirt bikes) — and then I guess that the "spirit of the law" is to put whatever requirements in place would be required to reduce the instances of those problems.
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.)
The problem is that it won’t always be enforced that way.
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.)
Sounds like the railway staff are indeed enforcing the spirit of the law by allowing mobility scooters on the platform. If I had to guess why your tricycle was not allowed it's because the staff perceive your tricycle as a potentially very fast moving obstacle on the platform which the mobility scooter obviously is not. They are probably more concerned about the safety of others than yourself when they apply that rule. In my opinion analysing the intent of rule is the right way to go about enforcement even if it means different people will arrive at different conclusions.
When visibly travelling at the same speed as pedestrians (… even when there are no pedestrians around!), and still insisting when you explain why dismounting is worse for everyone? No, it’s simply applying the rule because it’s a rule. The Protective Services Officers (cut-rate policemen) that are enforcing these sorts of rules are seldom interested in nuance.
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.
>No, it’s simply applying the rule because it’s a rule.
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.
Someone walking can plausibly be on a phone or similarly badly distracted. The tricyclist, whether walking or riding slowly around people, cannot. You or the toddler are far more likely to be trampled by a careless pedestrian than run over by a cyclist of any form (and even less by a recumbent tricyclist than an upright bicyclist) in a shared space.
>The tricyclist, whether walking or riding slowly around people, cannot
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.
Just to be pedantic, an individual animal (or person) "trampling" something, would require that the top of the rise of their foot when walking, rises above the center-of-gravity of the victim, such that their foot or leg would impact the victim above their center-of-gravity and so knock them over, allowing the animal to then walk across the prone body of the victim.
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.
> The Protective Services Officers (cut-rate policemen) that are enforcing these sorts of rules are seldom interested in nuance.
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.)
>Common sense says I should ignore such signs and assess each situation individually.
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.
Cycles that are not upright bicycles (e.g. recumbent bicycles, upright tricycles, recumbent tricycles, quadricycles) are (completely naturally and understandably) discriminated against in legislation because they’re not so common. Although the law classifies them as bicycles, many laws and rules that affect them are made clearly not considering their different characteristics—their size, their stability, their handling, things like that—and end up mandating things that make sense for upright bicycles but are for these other cycles counterproductive to the clear or likely (depending on the case) intent of the law.
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.
I agree that a form of category might be a good idea, but I disagree that the example is a different thing.
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.)
We recently had this problem in Sweden: There are parking spaces where "Caravans" or "Campers" are forbidden (because they either tend to stay there all day or sleep) - we have a VW T4, it is considered of class "car" in Germany. We still sleep in it. Are we allowed to stay on these parking spaces? We decided: No. Our interpretation was that overnight-stays are unwanted by the local population or government. But the sign wasn't clear. The pictures on these signs also showed no vans, just big campers.
To me, it is as simple as the questions in the link. It is a van. You sleep in it. It is clearly a camper van. In my opinion, anyone who disagree are doing so to be edgy or cause problems just for the sake of it. Of course, there are a lot of those kinds of people.
But rules are a "contract" between two parties. The people who put up a sign are trying to fix a problem and they care about the intention behind the sign. But the visitors need to try to follow the rules, so they need to decide of the activity they were considering is allowed.
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.
To put it more succinctly: the sign itself isn't the statute or bylaw! it's just a quick reminder.
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.
But this depends on "in what context am I being asked whether a rule is violated"? I didn't start out knowing I was doing content moderation for a website or I might've answered those differently.
Nitpick: The summary at the end labels your choices as "You think it is not a vehicle" or "You think it is a vehicle" based on whether or not you said the situation violates the rule, but some of the scenarios were clearly about whether or not something was in the park, rather than whether or not it was a vehicle. I can think a plane or a space station is a vehicle without thinking it violates the rule about not being in the park.
Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
That seems like good analogy to content moderation. You have to ask "is the forbidden content actually on the site?"
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.
That is a pretty clear distinction. A separate site has separate administration, can be blocked separately, etc. Otherwise you have additional rules: disallow direct links to forbidden content that causes it to render on the page, disallow linking to specific forbidden content, disallow links to on blacklisted domains, allow only whitelisted domain links.
What if it's a discussion about Terms of Service (ToS), and for some particular reason the Pornhub's ToS is relevant? The site itself is nsfw but if someone makes a claim that their tos says it's okay to kick puppies then you kind of have to link to it to support your claim. And how many ways around linking directly to the domain are there? hub for pron, bay of pirates, etc.
Hehe, that's a fair take, but I must also mention that I've encountered far more porn unwittingly/unexpectedly on Twitter than I EVER, ever, ever have on reddit. Again speaking to the utility of moderation in general.
People on certain apps often have links to profiles that I basically can't read because every post is NSFW. I used to be able to at least peek with Nitter but now I just insta close most Twitter links.
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.
Twitter moderation has cratered .. reports to the contrary otherwise.
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.
I assure you there is far more than softcore and often on accounts where it isn’t obvious until you’ve viewed the offending tweet that there may be X-Rated audiovisual content.
I’m sure much of it violates the rules but my initial inclination is always to browse away, not report.
Given that the whole exercise was about meticulous line drawing I think this bit of nitpicking is entirely appropriate. Clearly “is a vehicle” and “is in the park” were the two major axes that each question needed to be plotted on.
Interestingly, some people added others that weren't explicit in the rule. For example, the person riding a skateboard was considered a violation by roughly twice as many people as the person carrying one, despite both being identical on the "is a vehicle" and "in the park" axes. I suppose unless someone's definition of vehicle depends on it being in use.
Despite the instructions explicitly saying not to I suspect many people (like me) could not help but “look through” the stated rule to infer its intent, especially for the more unusual examples. It’s quite a lot harder to imagine a real world rule that prohibits a carried skateboard vs one being used, even if both situations represent the same 2-vector in the rule’s truth table. It’s hard to turn off the part of your brain that applies past experiences to every new situation.
It’s funny, I first thought the game was going to be a commentary on the “no mechanical transport in the wilderness” rule that he mentioned at the end. You cannot have a bicycle in the wilderness. You can’t push it or carry it. I guess this simplifies enforcement. If someone is camped with a bike, they can be ticketed.
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.
> 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?
If I stab someone in the eye with a pencil, then the pencil was clearly a weapon. However, I'm not violating a "no weapons" policy simply by carrying a pencil.
Yeah applying a very loose, or perhaps pedantic, definition of vehicle (it doesn't specify size, for example) combined with a reasonable understanding of "in" ie including air space in proportion to the size of a regular park led me to say most things were in violation of the rule. Those were the only relevant factors, all the other info was fluff.
I considered ISS to be outside it, and that was pretty much it. My views weren't shared with too many, about 11%.
You draw the line between ISS and commercial airplane? That seems like an odd place for it. I would think the limit of "in" would be at the prevailing treeline or maybe requires ground contact (I haven't fully decided yet), and beyond that it's "above" rather then "in."
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.
But commercial airlines do not need permission to “trespass” over my property when they fly over it - because my property is not considered to extent infinitely into the sky (in the same way that, under any reasonable definition, a park isn’t). Countries are different because we have considered it and explicitly defined airspace boundaries.
The instructions say to ignore all other rules/laws besides "no vehicles in the park" because the jurisdiction is unknown. International agreement doesn't seem like it should break through this barrier, although I understand why others may disagree.
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.
Yes, any liquid or solid works to maintain contact. Gas eliminates contact. Otherwise you could say shoes prevent 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.
Things don't even actually touch each other though. At no point does an atom of my stuff make contact with an atom of your stuff, right? things can be uncomfortably close to each other but the Van der Waals forces mean it'll never actually touch. to be pedantic.
Depends on the meaning of rule and violation I guess. I interpreted it as a sign posted at the entrance of the park. I interpreted violation as something that would be stopped by the park rangers.
Their point is that "was the rule violated" is a combination of "is a vehicle" and "in the park", hence both axes are relevant factors. If pushed, I would concede that the ISS is a vehicle, but I would consider the bounds of the park to end far lower than where the ISS orbits, so despite being "a vehicle" it doesn't violate the rule because I don't consider it "in the park". "Is it in the park" isn't relevant for most of the questions, but it's still an important part of the premise.
Similarly, the question asks "does it violate the rule" not "should the vehicle be allowed in the park". Of course driving an ambulance into the park violates the rule - but it's ok the break the rule for emergencies!
Which of course illustrates that in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply. Especially in content moderation.
The instructions explain that, so it shouldn't interfere with the decision making, but the thing that the instructions don't talk about is whether the park extends indefinitely into the sky. One need not even consider the legal aspect of this (airspace rights: historical versus modern) but merely consider what it means to be in the park! Personally, I think that if the vehicle is making contact with the ground then it's "in" the park, but if it's not making contact with the ground then it's "above" the park.
That's absurd generally, but for purposes of this rule specifically, I think it works out totally fine, yes. Because if you replace the human jumping with a vehicle jumping (being that the rule is regarding vehicles, not humans) then the answer to the question of whether a violation has occurred is "yes" -- repeated violations does not matter when answering. For flying vehicles, only taking off or landing in the park is a violation.
How about hovering? at what height does it become not the park? 10 centimeters above the park is one thing and space is at 100 kilometers, but there's a lot of room in between those for disagreement.
At what point is a helicopter hovering above the park in violation?
This is why you need a lawyer familiar with the local regulations, which clarify these things. Thus this test is invalid because there should be an “there is not enough information to answer” answer.
I think getting lawyers involved is more for if you want to know what the law is. For this, we just want to know what is. It's very common for legal definitions to differ from normal definitions.
Dunno about other jurisdictions but the written Polish law actually has some quite prominent references to unwritten, socially defined rules, both in the civil and the criminal law.
> Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
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.
It's exactly the point of the exercise. Whether something is a vehicle and whether said thing is "in" the park are both separate dimensions of logic that each individual applies differently towards their decision making. This is exactly why content moderation has trouble to stay consistent and rarely pleases everyone, because so many nuances from non-intersecting aspects of logic/context/culture/opinions are forced to consolidate into a binary choice (violation vs. non-violation).
You've missed the point of my comment too. We all agree that the exercise is pedantic by design, and that the goal of the exercise is to show how much variance there is in interpreting them.
The point, that you've missed twice now, is that the results are presented using incorrect language.
A point that does not exist is a point that's not possible to be missed. It's okay to admit you don't know anything about content moderation, and frankly it's a blessing to not know anything about it. Best of luck.
Same - I used the simple "rule" that basically everything that's in the park and used to carry people or goods is a "vehicle" at least by some people's standard. But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
> But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
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 it's not really a local thing; I'd be shocked if there was a park which meaningfully controlled it's airspace. Practically the bounds of a park only go so high.
That's how you see it, but not how most people see it. The "corner crossing" lawsuit got a LOT of coverage on Hacker News. Landowners claimed that merely floating over their property was trespassing. The courts disagreed.
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.
Ignoring the fact that many of the corner crossing cases were bad faith arguments by landowners intentionally attempting to abuse the situation, I don't think anyone would argue that the park boundary is a prism that extends vertically to infinity.
Why wouldn't it? If you think most people would consider a satellite passing overhead, an airplane flying high overhead, the Moon, the Sun, other objects in space etc. when directly overhead to be "in" a park, I think you'd be mistaken. And the results here bear that out, at least to the limited extent there were relevant questions.
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.
I mean, while it's not technically just the park, I'm sure there are several parks on US Military bases where the airspace is restricted. Also, we can be the change we wish to see in the world: any park can be a park with a controlled airspace if you bring enough surface-to-air missiles into the park.
You can fly a plane across the globe but the plane's flight path must be approved by each of the 15 countries before it is allowed in their airspace.
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.
If you live in the U.S., people flying very low over your house probably are trespassing, you have air rights. (True in other countries too.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights Before commercial flight was common, air rights used to extend into space. Now they’re limited, but you have at least a few hundred feet.
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.
What about them? Both of those can violate air rights, and in the US both have FAA regulations that apply. I’m using the US as an example because I live in the US, but many many countries have similar regulations. Small drones need a remote pilot license, and drones large enough to carry a human require an actual aircraft pilot’s license just like any other airplane or helicopter. In a public park in the US, small drones are required to stay under 400 ft altitude above ground, inside the airspace of the park. (Small drones are also required to not fly directly above other people.) Aircraft with people in them are required to fly higher than that, which thus defines an altitude threshold above which is considered outside of land-based public and private property boundaries.
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.
Interesting! But you didn't answer the question of if you consider a small quadcopter is a vehicle or not, just that there are rules about them. Small ones don't carry a person, or much of anything really.
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.
Oh yeah I think a quadcopter can easily count as a (tiny) vehicle, if it’s, say, carrying a camera. I liked how someone pointed to the Merriam Webster page for “vehicle”, which includes things like “an agent of transmission” and “a medium through which something is expressed”. People fit the literal definition of vehicle!
I agree the question is intentionally ambiguous. I disagree that laws aren’t relevant, precisely because they will disambiguate. This isn’t specific to US laws, most countries globally have flight regulations. The game is using words and concepts to ask questions that can only be defined and answered by laws. The altitude and location matter, if you want to answer the question correctly. You cannot moderate the situation, and the question cannot be answered correctly without knowing the altitude and location and laws that apply, and that doesn’t mean that moderation is hard, it means the author is fabricating unnecessary amounts of ambiguity.
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.
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.
Oh hahaha! This one didn’t occur to me, but ‘no vehicles in the park’ can literally be translated to mean no people in the park. I’m a vehicle for my musical ideas. They are vehicles for their heart & lungs. People are vehicles of cold viruses.
That would depend on your definition of "carry." I personally wouldn't say that shoes "carry" people any more than floors do (which is to say, they don't).
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 argue it's able mechanical advantage. Everything you listed is a vehicle. Also, skateboards are far more agile than scooters when used by people who know how to ride them. Scooters are just easier for novices.
I would only consider skates to be slightly ambiguous because they are shoes that are mounted but worn. but still, i say vehicle
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 :)
I would say those two things are very different. The ground (floors are inside) is the cooperating object upon which leading objects carry.
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.
The plane question stated the plane was `over` the park which implies it is not in the park. If the question instead said `through` the park, the answer would differ.
The question intentionally left out the altitude of the vehicle in order to trick us into thinking it’s a harder question to answer than it really is. I agree that ‘over’ tends to somewhat imply out, and ‘through’ tends to imply in, and would indeed change the distribution of answers.
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.
Given that a helicopter at that speed is a clear hazard to anyone below it and will blow a person below it off their feet, and could easily be pushed around or into the ground at any time (sudden gusts of winds do happen, although I have no real experience with helicopters so I may be wrong on some specifics), that is through.
"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.
Given that the whole point of the website and the discussion is the fuzziness that any such rule implies, I'm pretty sure they _do_ see the point, but decided to play the interpretation game anyway. What's your point?
Your list of altitudes didn’t go high enough to change the answer. ;) Drones (in the US and the UK) must be limited to 400ft/120m and are still considered “in” the airspace of the ground they’re over. Commercial aircraft flying at 35,000ft AGL are not considered to be in the airspace of a specific park or private property when over the U.S. (and most of the world, I suspect), but they are considered to be inside the country’s airspace, since park & private property airspace has a limited ceiling, but country airspace extends up to space.
Let's say we imagine a dome over the park which is geometrically a convex hull that encloses all the tree tops. Everything in that dome is in the park.
In the U.S., by FAA law, flying a helicopter 10 feet off the ground in a public park is both over the ground and through (or “in”) the park. There’s no either-or.
Depends on how you word the question. If you say the helicopter is flying 10 feet over the park, by the rules of this game it's objectively not a violation. If you say it's 10 feet above the ground inside the park, objectively a violation.
Humans carry all kinds of goods and often carry people. Even if we limit "goods" to exclude our personal effects, someone carrying takeout across a park—especially for someone else—could be considered a vehicle by that definition.
Additionally strollers, wagons, and other baby or child conveyances would also qualify.
Yep. Obviously this is a thought experiment, and the site did tell users to take the problem as stated very literally. So I basically went with two simple rules:
Personally I wouldn't call a wheelchair a vehicle for purposes of this question, but I think some people would call a wheelchair a vehicle, yes.
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.
> I think some people would call a wheelchair a vehicle
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!
Speed and impact on the user are meaningful differences. I don't like bikes in parks (except those designed for them) because the bikes are moving much faster than anything else. For that reason I might feel that a small child on a bike is more permissible than an adult. Also that the carried skateboard is not a violation - I understand the rule to be about vehicle use more than presence
> I understand the rule to be about vehicle use more than presence
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 said, no. A wheelchair is not a vehicle. In my opinion, the wheelchair is an extension of the person, and not a separate object as long as it is being used by someone who needs it.
This seems a fun direction of thought. So does it cease to become a vehicle as soon as someone sits in it, and resume its functionality as a vehicle as soon as it is abandoned?
Since the preamble mentioned this was a test of language literalness, before I answered the question, I looked up the definition of “vehicle”: “A means of carrying or transporting something” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vehicle
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?
It's a common sentiment among wheelchair users that the freedom they enable makes them feel like an extension of a person. In that context, for the purpose of the "vehicle" question, there's not much difference between a wheelchair, prosthetic leg, or eyeglasses.
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.
The Merriam-Webster definition tends towards a vehicle being something with a power source (something where the power source is not manual/manus/human) capable of moving other things. That would include any sort of powered chair, but not be a problem for a standard wheelchair. Interestingly the Oxford American dictionary explicitly includes a cart as a primary example however, and Wikipedia’s primary example of a vehicle is a bike.
Does a wheelchair become a vehicle if somebody who _can_ walk without it sits in it? Does that mean everyone in wheelchairs must be harassed (to find out if they need it)?
Sorry, I didn't mean it that way. I have older parents who can walk short distances but I'd rather they have the choice to use a wheelchair at an airport.
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.
What is your definition of need? If I need to meet friends in the park in five minutes I clearly need a car to get there in time. So the car would not be a vehicle in that case?
It isn't so clear to me. If it conveys a human in any way that humans don't naturally move unassisted then in my mind it qualifies as a conveyance and hence a vehicle, especially in the sense of the the French véhicule, from Latin vehiculum (“a carriage, conveyance”), from vehere (“to carry”)
Kites, toy cars and toy boats are toys (to me). Slippers, skis and skates are footwear. A toboggan isn't normally attached to a person's body, so a vehicle.
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.
Posting “racial epithets” is banned on social networks but if I post a video of a politician saying a racial epithet to raise awareness. Does that violate the rule? We aren’t debating whether or not it was a racial epithet.
I was thinking along these lines as well but after reading the explanation at the end of the game, I’m not so sure.
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.
The instructions beforehand were very clear that you should answer whether the scenario violated the rule, not whether it should be allowed.
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.
If "in the park" is meant as an analogy for "on the platform" in content moderation, then curiously enough Twitter suspended @RealDonaldTrump for off-park action (Jan 6).
Nobody provided the definition of vehicle either. The summary references lawyers using a variation of this game, but most legalese I've seen as a layperson usually starts by defining terms.
Yes, defined terms are critical. As the exercise went on, I kept refining my mental model of what a “vehicle” was in the context of the park sign.
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.
>But that wasn’t absolute - the non-functional tank was, in my mind, quite obviously a vehicle, and so was prohibited.
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.
I had almost exactly the same definition, but interestingly I let the skydiver go free, and I figured the tank would be okay because it was stationary (and I think in my head I assumed someone else had allowed the 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.
Horse is a fun one. I started to wonder does putting saddle and reins on one change things... So if you ride without them it is fine, but if you put those on it becomes a vehicle...
Travois is other one I kinda struggled... Just a a-frame even if you drag it in clearly is not one to me.
I don't think it really matters. The point I guess was that an ambulance or police car is obviously a vehicle, and obviously in the park. And yet enforcing this seemingly simple and logical rule becomes so absurd that some people would decide that a police car is not a vehicle just because it should be allowed in.
No, I felt a bit "betrayed" by this as well but also probably the point of the exercise? I dunno. Obviously there is rhyme to reason as to why you're offered to skip after 7 questions. I'm not sure why, but somewhere after 10 I started to feel like I wanted to go back and re-answer.
Did this change? For me it says "You think it is (not) a vehicle in the park," which doesn't match with your description of your issue with the results.
The "pulled a wagon" one is another aspect. Is the answerer assuming a vehicle pulled the wagon? I immediately wondered if the wagon was pulled by hand or animal or a vehicle.
> 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).
What this highlights is that online we have lost - or at least eroded - social norms. If I see a sign that says "no vehicles allowed", it's obvious they don't mean wagons and strollers. In almost all cases the police and the public are 99% in sync. Online, though, the moderators are forced to do a careful study of every action and become asinine literalists lest a horde of boundary-pushers ruin it for everyone.
Social norms are quite culture-specific. Online people from all countries and cultures interact, and that's where some misunderstandings come from.
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.
I think it goes even beyond that. Online you can get a lot more socioeconomic, age-related mixing than IRL. On some websites there is a large contingent of actual children/college students who have never worked or don't understand certain social norms due to inexperience. Or, if you live in a bubble of highly paid professionals like many on this site (honestly, including me), you can be completely shocked seeing how the working class people you see but don't actively converse with (beyond pleasantries) think.
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.
I found some old posts of mine from when I was 15. If anyone ever finds them I will have to kill them.
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".
To me the issue is one of pragmatics: the instruction say "ignore your local law" but they don't say "ignore reality".
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".
I think what it highlights is that the meaning of words depends on context and stripping all context from a rule and situation makes that ambiguous. Reading more into it than that seems silly.
Thank you! Language, specifically legalese, tries to make precise something that can't ever be. It's why "language prescriptivists" annoy me because it's not even a preference difference it's simply impossible, you can't define any word completely. Worse even if you could your definition is only good for a point in time.
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.
The majority of comments and people participating in a forum generally both have common sense and are good actors. It's the borderline cases that are difficult, and of course there are boundary pushers of all sorts persuasions. Some are right, some are bad actors.
two people are tried for the exact same crime, the lawyers used the same responses, questions, etc. all the discovery and testimonials are equal. The only thing different is the judge, jury, defendant, prosecutor, and defendants lawyer.
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.
I think the police and ambulance examples are interesting. To me, they're clear and blatant violations of the rule. To be sure, I certainly think it's ok that they broke the rule, but they still broke the rule. Yet some (45% of respondents) clearly think the rule wouldn't apply to them in the first place?
The instructions for the exercise tell you straight up to ignore any and all exceptions, yet 30% of people chose to apply their own judgment in the police and ambulance case because it felt right to them. Very telling.
If you believe that the spirit of rules is more important than the text, then those people were obeying the spirit of the rule to not include exceptions, not the text.
Following the letter of the law or rule to an absurd conclusion without any common sense is a typical example of bureaucratic nightmares.
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.
> Following the letter of the law or rule to an absurd conclusion without any common sense is a typical example of bureaucratic nightmares.
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.
We should first examine the origins of morality. That will allow us to understand the goals and motivations behind rules. If one of the goals of a moral system is also to get across the message that "We are in charge, remember it and don't mess with us or with the system", then deliberately vague rules are a feature of the system for those that can benefit and wield the law and social opinion against others. Rules can be interpreted to the advantage of the group that runs the show.
One thing that makes this exercise fairly useless is that any real world law or rule would have exemptions for such circumstances, and a definition of “in the park” and what a vehicle is… not just one sentence with no clarification. Beyond that, also a history of previous legal interpretation to which one could refer.
I actually disagree. I assume every law is subject to "at the discretion of the DA/judge" (or whoever is in charge). Do you think everyone needs to account for every emergency circumstance possible in every law? In real life, there's the law and then there are mitigating circumstances.
(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.)
Legal decisions are made based on historical interpretation, assumed intent of lawmakers and legal precedent. If needed legal interpretation can go back the English Common Law or the Magna Carta. A law or rule like this could be challenged in court as so vague as to be meaningless, and unenforceable.
This exercise is not about a court of law but any random online forum, for example the kind we are on right now. If you look up the HN participation guidelines you will find they are exactly as vague as the rule in the exercise and open to endless interpretation.
I understand the point of the exercise is to shed light on the vagaries of internet moderation. It’s not a very precise analogy. HN is essentially private property, and nobody needs to wonder things like “is flying a satellite over HN the same as posting on HN?” or “what is a a comment?”
My reasoning was that in emergencies, typically, certain rules don't apply to certain groups of people if their actions are related to the emergency. Therefore, a police officer driving a police car into the park (assuming they're doing it because of the emergency) is not a violation of "no vehicles in the park" because for that officer, in that situation, there effectively is no such rule.
In the real world, we might debate whether it was actually an emergency and so on, but here we're told straight up.
I think the instructions are ambiguous. The instructions first say to disregard any "rule in your jurisdiction which overrides certain rules", or whether your "religion allows certain rules to be overridden". But both of these hypotheticals are reasons why you might disregard the desires of the hypothetical park owner who instituted the rule. This is different from the police and ambulance examples, where the park owner would almost certainly want to allow those vehicles.
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".
The exception for emergency vehicles is just another rule. And even that rule can be more complex, like a police car could be not allowed to drive on railways. Or military rules that are above emergency vehicle exceptions. A police officer is not above the rules.
And in the given case we had none of them. It was just one simple rule - no vehicles inside the park.
I agree with you, but also the first time I did it I started answering in a different way, before realizing I should change my interpretation.
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 think a questionaire telling you to ignore all preconceived notions about a topic in a note and then ask fairly unspecific questions about that, will have a lot of people answer without ignoring their preconceived notions about that.
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...
> Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
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.
I said no to every question as even in the cases where a vehicle did enter the park, it was only one and the rule says "no vehicles". Remember that the No Homers Club was allowed to have one Homer.
You're overthinking this. To recap the rules of the game:
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.
I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is. In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed. This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
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.
I'm not sure if you do, honestly. The point of the exercise is exactly the ambiguity that stood out to you.
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.
That makes a ton of sense. I was always confused by that. Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone. Those comments were always greenlit. Maybe I just take stuff to literal. But some people sure have a hard-on for the death penalty...
In the US legal system, probably elsewhere as well, we have the concept of an "affirmative defense." That means "I committed the crime, but it's OK because of extra facts." That's different from denying one or more elements of the crime.
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.
Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
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.
> Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
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.
For whatever reason, it seem like people usually exclude acts undertaken in connection with the state’s monopoly on violence from the scope of these things.
The spirit is that governement is an extension of "the people" and as such this violence is an extension of their own - i.e. in a healthy society the violence perpetrated bt the state is fully known and sanctionned by its citizens.
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.
> Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone.
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).
Strictly speaking, I think calling for the death penalty is advocating for a legal ruling. The violence following such a ruling is a second-order consequence.
It's calling for the state to kill someone. Doesn't seem any less an advocation of violence than advocating for a vigilante killing or advocating for some specific person to do the killing.
I was solely addressing the fact that both are violence, and asking for either is advocating for violence. Exercise for the reader to decide if they think either is moral or just, which is a completely different issue.
By that logic, no one is advocating violence unless they intend to participate in the violent act directly. It’s a logically consistent position, but it’s also a highly implausible one.
Of course one can advocate for violence without participating in it directly. For example, you could call for a riot. Or for the death of someone directly.
No reasonable person would confuse “the traitor should get the death penalty” with “kill the traitor!”.
I guess I’m not a reasonable person then? Advocating for state sanctioned killing is no different to me, in terms of advocating violence per se, than advocating anyone else do the killing. There are surely other distinctions to be made, but “the state should implement violence” isn’t categorically different from any other actor in the same configuration.
Now the interesting question is, what would happen if I was to ask for the death penalty on a crime that does not carry the death penalty? Or only carries the death penalty in countries with legal systems that we object to, like Iran?
I think what's being noted is slightly more nuanced than what you're responding to. The analogy is slightly flawed because a few additional indicators remove a lot of the ambiguity, which is possibly not the case at all with moderation, which is often about far more nebulous things. In that way, the comparison is flawed.
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.
I mostly thought it was easy to tell if the rule was being violated (the vast majority disagreed with me), but where it gets much more complicated is deciding if a rule should be allowed to be violated. I think most people don't want rules that are blindly enforced without consideration to circumstance/context. We carve out exceptions to rules everywhere in life.
it's a nearly perfect analogy for a laymans view of what content moderation should look like.
"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.
Heh, I thought the quiz was almost entirely not grey areas. It seems like the police car and ambulance were about as gray as it got, the others seem pretty obviously non-gray.
That's why the analogy is so good! The police car and ambulance were the most obvious ones to me (other than the Honda Civic); surfboard and ice skates were much tougher. It shows how we're really seeing things through our own lenses, even when they seem so obvious that no one could conceivably disagree.
Also interesting: the fact that 50% more people described a skateboard being used as a vehicle than a skateboard being carried.
It seems pretty spot on to me! A "vehicle", like "hate speech" or "words that glorify violence", is an category that humans create, and the things that fit in that category vary from person to person and situation to situation.
I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?
think the fundamental difference is that “vehicle” can be broken down into a number of concrete subcategories that cover the vast majority of vehicles that people use in practice, while “hate speech” and “speech glorifying violence” are often very nebulous and hard to define.
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.
etc. The point isn't whether you agree with all these decisions (maybe skateboards shouldn't be allowed in the park?), but rather that you can enumerate two or three dozen vehicles and cover virtually all the vehicles people might possibly use in real life. Occasionally new categories need to be added (e.g., electric bikes or drones weren't really common 30 years ago) but mostly this can settle all possible debates.
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.
I don’t know why we insist on pretending that there’s no way to figure out what counts as “hate speech” or “glorifying violence”. If you look on any social network you’ll find you can report people for saying things that clearly fall under those categories. Like if you’re calling someone a slur, or threatening them, or telling them to kill themselves, those are all pretty clearly out of bounds!
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.
> I don’t know why we insist on pretending that there’s no way to figure out what counts as “hate speech” or “glorifying violence”.
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.
Can you not with the victimhood mentality? There isn’t a single major social network — let alone many — on which explicitly calling for genocide does not run afoul of the moderation policy, and we both know it.
>
I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is.
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
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)
The crux of this really is about whether the ambulance is violating the rule "no fahrzeug in the park".
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.
Yeah, he needs a better example. Vehicle has some ambiguity when you hint about it in the introduction, but not much. If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere. But then I don't know how people would get into the park.
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.
> If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere.
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.
What are A and B here? Points in space? Distinct venues? Are we counting the primary use or any possible use? (e.g. most of the time, the point for drivers is the transportation, but most of the time, the point for skateboarders is leisure). These things are why I agree with the above poster that mode of transportation is practically more ambiguous than vehicle
> most of the time, the point for drivers is the transportation, but most of the time, the point for skateboarders is leisure
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).
A vehicle is any kind of tool that makes locomotion for any animate or inanimate object easier. This includes wheeled craft, seafaring vessels, shoes, aircraft.
The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.
Full on pedantry here, but a snowmobile will still work without snow, perhaps not long, but while it works it will be faster than walking. A motorcycle goes faster than walking without gas downhill. You can also use it as a really heavy dandy horse.
You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles," they are usually things like "no hateful language," which is so vague, that "no vehicles" is beginning to look pretty cut-and-dry by comparison
> You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles,"
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.
Is it? It seems there's a clear majority that vehicle = operational motor vehicle. The only two that are even close to 50/50nare the non functioning memorial tank, and the bicycle. I guess that shows a disagreement between those assuming functioning is a requirement, and those reading into the intent (which is devices operating at human scale in pedestrian spaces capable of achieving a speed that would cause injury). But neither of those interpretations are surprising
I don't think you do get the point - the point is that unless you define every single word in a rule (like how legislation has a definitions page), it's very hard to do simple content moderation in a way that everyone agrees
This is silly, though? Rules and legislation is also usually layered in such a way that other rules can supercede.
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.
Regardless of whether you do actually get the point, when multiple comments indicate that they think that you didn't get the point that tells you that you have failed to communicate that you got the point. Doubling down doesn't help
I do not know how to communicate "I got the point" more than "I got the point". Please tell me how to communicate "I got the point" better than saying "I got the point".
They think I didn't get the point, but they're wrong. Hope that helps!
It's definitely a rhetorical challenge, and even if TFA is using a poor analogy, it does serve to illustrate this problem, which feels to me like part of what it is trying to communicate.
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
This whole debate is funny because it's exactly what the game itself is about. Everyone sees this as a very clear, unambiguous thing, and the other side must be misunderstanding it. If only I explain it the right way, they'll be forced to concede to my point of view. It's the only valid one! They can't possibly understand it and come to a different conclusion!
In this case, there are just three angry internet commenters who want to tell someone else they're wrong. It's not GP's problem. I agree with GP -- it's a bad metaphor. GP doesn't owe you litigating that in depth.
Do content moderation rules define "violence" or "harassment"?
> 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.
> the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
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.
>In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed.
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.
> This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
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.
> 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...?
By the way, there's no "hate speech" exception in U.S. first amendment jurisprudence.
This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising.
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.
> Is “No pornography” a rule? It doesn’t specify any prohibited action and on its own isn’t a complete thought, let alone a rule.
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.
It’s a legitimate definition though. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are many fundamental things that can’t be defined, where we have to rely on social norms and common sense.
>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.
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.
Vehicle is a word with a dictionary definition -- why does it need to have a definition included? Would that definition not include other words, would those also need to be defined?
That's not how the law typically works. Laws provide their own definitions because dictionaries describe how the language is typically used, not in a precise manner.
Perfect illustration of how tricky it can be to draw a firm line.
Another survey in this same genre is "the rape spectrum" with >5k respondents ranking scenarios: https://aella.substack.com/p/the-rape-spectrum-survey-result...
Tough topics to discuss (I see why the OP went with vehicles in the park). I'm glad I'm not in the content moderation business!
Yeah. Sometimes I see private Facebook groups by otherwise smart people, where one rule is something like "racism of any kind is forbidden". As if the addition of "of any kind" made the concept of racism any less vague.
I think that it might make expectations about moderators' interpretations less vague.
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.
Fascinating exercise. During my first attempt I found that I had to look up the actual definition of vehicle.
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.
The legal definition of a vehicle can become relevant in some surprising ways under drunk driving laws. Most people assume that drunk driving laws are limited to driving an automobile, but in most states it simply refers to vehicles. Consequently, every now and again you get a story of someone being convicted of drunk driving when they have been bicycling while drunk. You can also be convicted of drunk driving for riding a horse while drunk (and people have been).
Does the legal definition include a sled going down a hill? If sleds, then skis aren't much of a stretch. And if skis, then shoes aren't much of a stretch.
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!
If the park is in my neck of the woods, I can just use this definition:
"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
In a legal context "highway" has a broader meaning than in everyday use. From the link above: highway "includes every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles"
A park where vehicles are not forbidden also might not have any highways. Vehicles are defined in terms of being capable of transport on highways, but there are vehicles used off highways.
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.
Translation: his parents are lawyers, so he has a low opinion of the rule of law and wants to "problematize" it. In favor of arguing for, essentially, despotism.
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.
> So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.
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.
All the discussions over interpretation are missing the point of the exercise, which is to show how hard it is to find agreement over something as emotionally neutral as "is the vehicle in the park".
Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".
I am kind of floored at how badly all the top comments have missed the point, considering how clearly the point was made by the author.
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.
Except the top comments aren’t doing that. They’re all saying it’s a flawed contrived example and despite that the actual results show most people agree. And not only that, the questions get ranked by decreasing agreement which shows that it’s pretty easy to make a cut off if put up to vote.
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.
We agree that it is flawed and it is obviously contrived, because the difficult decisions happen at scale and in edge cases. This is content moderation on easy mode; difficult stuff happens at scale and in the greyest of areas and have to be applied consistently.
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’m honestly not sure what the point of the exercise is. I went through and answered honestly, and looking at the end results it seems that most people agreed with me (the only significant minority disagreements were about the bike and the tank). Overall, it looks like almost all of the cases have a clear opinion?
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.
Count the number of times you have used the words “most”, “almost”, “only disagreements…” etc. in your two paragraphs, despite the fact that all of them were relatively simple scenarios like you said. That is the point of the exercise. Yes people mostly agreed on most things, but they did not absolutely agree on everything. And those 20-30% of people arguing about 20-30% of edge cases is where all the disagreements and flame wars and toxicity comes from.
I mean, this is an online poll. There are always going to be people who argue, "technically, shoes should be considered a vehicle!". But when it comes down to it, those same people aren't going to make content moderating decisions based on those philosophical arguments. These examples fall sorta flat for me because they don't present an actual difficulty with moderation, just an imaginary one to get people arguing over semantics. Such arguments should be ignored.
The thing that really proved this game's point for me is the comments here from people giving slightly different versions of "well it's obvious what 'vehicle' means".
It’s weird that I barely see any comments like that. most people seem to be simply saying the game is silly because it’s so contrived and gives no definition of vehicle.
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..."
You seriously don't think some clarity could have helped? Like, if the law explicitly said strollers are okay and that bicycles are [not] okay, you think the quiz wouldn't have more consistent answers?
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.
Oh, in this case, sure -- but I think it's a great teaching tool in getting people to understand the difficulty in other cases, and perhaps more importantly, understanding that these things are not solvable and that the essence of the very purpose of law is to have a method to get through these "not fully solvable" things.
I'm not sure what your point is. The laws can't be written clearer? Even if they were, you'd still get stuff that's ambiguous? As a lawyer you don't write the law so you have to go with what's written? You like interpreting vaguely written rules?
It's just how language works. Language is inherently ambiguous in the strictest sense. It's why at times you need to use more and more words to convey a clear message to someone, but in some sense, it's a never ending rabbit hole. Most of the time though, you don't need to be super precise in order to get a general message across to someone. Just something good enough.
That's a great read, thanks for linking it. The twist at the end is kind of funny because it makes you think, "do I really get it"?
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?
Well, in a way, it's not "just words" or "experience?" It took me a long time to love the law, well after I was out of law school -- which was basically getting over the cynicism. It's just overwhelmingly the best method of dealing with perhaps the MOST DIFFICULT task possible, resolving disputes between/among imperfect unpredictable humans. The "messiness" of it is just as much a feature as a bug, and thus the most important part really does become, for lack of a better way to say it -- "faith?" in law?
Not that it's impossible to improve things, but people (frequently techies) believe the problem to be solvable and relatedly think it's easier than it actually is.
Just because "some people" believe something doesn't mean you have to make a webapp "debunking" them, and just because law is often complicated with many edge cases doesn't mean it can't be simpler or partly automated.
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.
Jim backs his RV into the park. He does so without his vehicle entering the park.
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.
At the time of my completing the quiz, 21% said riding a skateboard in the park violated the rule. But only 13% said carrying a skateboard violated the rule.
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.
So the point is that content moderators will inevitably encounter ambiguous situations where they must use context to make a judgment call? And that no matter what call they make, there will be some people who believe it is the wrong one? Are those contentious points? Seems fairly obvious to me that would be the case in content moderation as well as many areas, notably law, which he mentioned.
I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, although I find the method kind of confusing.
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.
I don't see this as a good way to get the point across. I perceived it like this:
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.)
There is two levels of moderation in my mind. The first is to logical/ mathematically determine if the rule is broken, with goal of amoraly just answer if the rule is broken (binary). The second step is to determine the degree of rigidity/flexibility.
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.
There was one question about some sort of thing that was pulled that started with the letter T. I had no idea what that was. But then later it goes into detail defining what a Matchbox car is. I thought that was odd. Was the assumption that everyone would know what the T- thing is, but not a Matchbox car, part of the test?
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?
"travois". It's basically a sledge dragged along the ground and pulled by (usually) a horse.
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.
>I hope that this game has made you reconsider your views on content moderation.
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".
I thought the same - the surprising thing to me is that most people disagree apparently; my match was 11% with the majority.
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).
Biggest takeaway here for me was that a rule needs definitions for everything, including things which don’t even seem to be part of the rule. To complete this, I was forced to define the vertical extent of a piece of real estate (the boundary between the park and this country‘s airspace), to define a vehicle, versus something you wear or a toy. By the end, I had actually established a kind of caselaw, which defined that a vehicle is a thing that people or cargo can be on top of or inside for the purposes of transport. I defined that something you put on is not a vehicle and defined that there was some upper bound of the park above, which he would not be said to be “in“ it. I defined that the dragging frame was a vehicle, but an identical frame that was not designed to transport. Things would’ve been classified as not a vehicle. Arguably all of the above are just my conjecture. But I could not decide most of those questions without, at least internally, making all of those judgment calls. Each judgment call introduces even more edges, which could be tested by further questions.
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.
I don’t find this particularly funny or enlightening. Making rules has always been hard, and I don’t see the author propose a solution to the problem that some people post weird shit on public feeds that we don’t want our young kids to witness. Kids are always online now - even if you think you have parental controls figured out, someone at school will have an uncensored phone and they‘ll all watch all the weird stuff during breaks.
Fascinating thought experiment! For a version two, I would love to see:
• 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.
As a metaphor for content moderation, there’s a clear bias to the examples, which I don’t object to per se, but there’s also a fairly large blind spot in the way the bias is presented.
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.
The whole problem hinges on everyone who wants to use the park having to share the park as is. But that doesn't have to be the case with content moderation -- everyone could choose what rules and rule intent they want to subscribe to, if the content delivery was built that way. Hacker news has a very simple version of that: "show dead".
* 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.
As it’s enforced today, that would be relatively easy to define, but I don’t think anyone wants to actually say out loud what that definition would be.
This is why legal documents often have important definitions listed. In the last case, the answer hinges on the definition of “machine”. Pick a definition of that, and I’ll tell you if a boat is a vehicle.
Continuing to stick with the Cambridge Dictionary.
> ((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).
This is a bit of a straw man, because (1) a real sign would say something "no motorized vehicles allowed in park". (2) implied with the sign is the jurisdiction of whoever put it there - presumably the city goverment which doesn't control things in the airspace high over the ground, and which grants exemptions to emergency services.
I find the results confusing. I said a wheelchair is not a vehicle in the park. On the results page I see wheelchair has a score of 16.3. So this means 16.3% of people said the wheelchair is allowed in the park and 83.7% of people think the wheelchair is not allowed in the park?
If so, I now understand why moderator decisions seem insane. It's because they are.
> In a way I regret having said what I said about obscenity—that's going to be on my tombstone. When I remember all of the other solid words I've written, I regret a little bit that if I'll be remembered at all I'll be remembered for that particular phrase.
Is every single answer that there is a vehicle in the park? I skipped after 7 but I said all were vehicles in a park. I looked up the definition of vehicle before answering and all seemed to apply. Surfboard I wasn’t certain but I think it’s still definitionally a vehicle? I looked up machine at this point as this one was tricky.
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]
Uninteresting lawyer chiseling. This is all about the making the author feel "smart" by selective (mis)interpretation of ambiguous conditions, absent information, and rules not present.
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?
The point of the exercise is to require you to make decisions under uncertain conditions with limited (or next to no) information.
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.
This is just one case the general rule of ambiguity.
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.
I find it a bit disingenuous to overlook any rules outside the thought experiment and then want to apply it to a real world discussion where the overlooked rules do apply. Like the Police question. It has nothing to do with the context of the questionary (internet moderation) as it is a real world law, not a moderation rule. In reality, the statistics at the end show who decided to do a white room thought experiment and who did not - nothing else. I see no big problems in moderation at all unless it is on a government made platform or some other state owned utility thing.
If you see a sign that says this in a park you wouldn’t go tell a person in a wheelchair to get out of the park (I hope). Common sense is a thing and it’s also a thing in comment moderation. This isn’t rocket surgery.
For most of the more down-to-earth questions, I made the distinction between something that aids a human in moving by augmenting their analog output, and something that either doesn't require much human involvement to move or supplants it entirely.
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.
I don't know that this had the intended effect for me. I answered the questions as I would like the 'rule' enforced. The important thing isn't about believing the rule to be entirely valid and merely enforcing it, it's about which way you want it applied and why. Then you have to try to make everything else also fit into the oddly shaped boundaries that are forming. It's also way better if you can be transparent about it, and in some cases redraw the lines and reformulate how to decide which side new cases land.
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
It's small-minded actions like this that would ruin any attempts to moderate meaningfully. It can be effective by its own definition, but not serve the community's best interests. This 'rule' and blind applications is what makes moderation easier and worse. The exercise should instead be demonstrating how moderation is hard to do well because it's not always cut-and-dried.
> 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).
This whole thing is dumb. There's never a description of "What is a vehicle?" And there's never a description of, "What is the park's jurisdiction?".
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).
> Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
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.
I think this analogy kinda falls apart because in reality the rule “no vehicles” is for a reason.
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.
Where I live, such signs are more specific. They prohibit either use of any motorized vehicle (which by law doesn’t include electrified bicycles that can go up to 25kph), or the use of bicycles, or both, or only prohibit cars, or only motorcycles, or only trucks above a certain weight.
I expected this to be tough, but it was even tougher than that! I treated it purely as an exercise in classifying what is a vehicle and what it means to be in the park.
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!
It sure was interesting. One gave me a bit of a pause. The rowboat... I immediately thought "a rowboat is not a vehicle (it's human powered), but how did he get the rowboat there in the first place?"
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.
I took the survey, then my wife did. I was being strict, so I said the parachute was a vehicle in the park. The site said I agreed with 8% of people. My wife was being reasonable, and said it wasn’t. The site also said she agreed with 8% of people.
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.
If nothing appears after the initial instruction, try a different browser. It doesn't seem to work (but also not show any error) on chromium-based webview android 11. At first I assumed the site was hugged and the questions were being loaded non-statically.
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.
Great game, cleverly demonstrates a fundamental problem with creating rules/laws. I've wondered if focusing on the goal/intent when creating rules would be more effective? For example, instead of just a rule that says "No vehicles in the park", you could say, the community wants the park:
- to be safe
- to be peaceful/relaxing
- to accommodate physical activities/games
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.
> All these things are defined by some jurisdiction
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.
Interpreting a law is usually done through the guidelines of a separate legislation outlining how it is to be done. E.g., Australia has an Acts Interpretation Act which outlines how to interpret laws by various means, including the context in which the words appear and the purpose of the act. I am unsure of other jurisdictions.
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.
The word vehicle is up to interpretation, so it helps to not use umbrella terms like vehicle. Anything used to move goods or person is technically a vehicle. However in the a conventional understanding it is the embodiment of what would move goods or person, functional or not, to carry out a task not recreational unless also used with the intent not recreational. If both it becomes a recreational vehicle.
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 like this experiment! I hope to see some further analysis on the results. I came to a similar conclusion years back about languages: it's impossible to translate a word perfectly because the border cases differ. Is it a cake or a bread? Banana bread is called bread in the US, but as a Dane I consider it "kage" (the usual translation of "cake").
if the car behind or in front of you crashes into you, a human on a bicycle, the damage is much greater than if it crashes into another car. If you assume the other driver is drunk, and stomps on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal, in some ridiculous souped up sports car or truck, the human goes squish.
But that's in normal course of usage. A person walking from their car in the parking lot into the restaurant is normal. A person standing the drive thru isn't.
It's dumb and it's stopped me from getting food late at night too, but that's the lawyer-based corporate CYA logic.
Over the years I've come across a few online communities that have noticeably higher conversation quality than the rest of the internet. The one thing all of those places had in common is a very strict moderation policy.
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.
I came to a different conclusion and said no police or ambulance should enter the park. Obviously there should be an exception for true emergencies, but stretchers exist for a reason. Police can walk or ride a bike.
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.
In what way is that conclusion different? I argue that a strict moderation policy and enforcement is needed to keep a community healthy, even if that leads to the exclusion of a few posts/users that would have been good for the community.
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?
What this showcases isn't an issue with moderation, it's a lack of shared culture in digital spaces.
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.
I really thought the seemingly blatant stereotypical names were going to be a factor in the assessment.
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.
This “thought experiment” is painting a narrative using a false dichotomy. “I don’t know” is always a valid answer. The nice thing about rule based systems is that they can be augmented with additional rules. You don’t know wether or not a skateboard is a vehicle? That’s ok. We can add a new rule that defines that.
I see a lot of "just add more specifics to the rule" in here, but that's fighting a losing battle. There will always be another edge case, and the rule will end up being so long and complicated that no one will properly follow it anyway.
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.
A lot of comments here about how the intro instructed us to make a very literal interpretation.
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.
No the instructions are clear. Figuring out where the park is just isn't part of the exercise. In fact, by the letter of the rules, it's impossible to find out. Pick any definition of "local jurisdiction" you want and you still don't know where the park is. It is not necessarily in that jurisdiction (or out of it either). It's not necessarily even on earth or in this universe either.
About space stations, ambulances, matchbox cars, and the rest of it I'd venture yes. The only one that seemed remotely jurisdiction-dependent was bicycles.
Can you name a single real park that denies entry to police or ambulances or wheelchairs?
Uh... yeah? Are you aware some parks are dangerous? I just spent Father's day on a narrow boardwalk through a swamp. No vehicles allowed in there of course including emergency vehicles and wheelchairs. If something bad happens, help must arrive by foot. I mean at this point it just sounds like you haven't been to many parks. Parks can vary wildly and so do their rules.
Additional suggestions that i think would make the game better/harder because the answer distribution is currently pretty skewed and many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule (though all respect to rule sticklers, general contrarians, and everythings-a-vehicle hipsters):
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?
I suspect I'm not the only one who tried this, but ChatGPT does predictably well at this task. I gave it a basic prompt of 'Let's play a game. The rule says, "No vehicles in the park". This is a game about language and rules. I will describe different scenarios to you. In response, you respond "Yes" if this scenario violates the rule or "No" if it does not. You have to make a choice and can only say Yes or No.' and then just fed it the scenarios. It ended up agreeing with the majority and my own intuition quite well.
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...
It would have been better if the page defined "vehicle" since people's definitions may vary. The one I used was basically "Something used to carry people or goods". That meant that a toy car wasn't a vehicle, only a representation of one, but even a toy car could conceivably be made to carry something else at which point it would become a vehicle. I also struggled a bit with the disabled tank, since it's clearly designed for the transport of people, but while it's non-functional it couldn't fill that role. A car that's parked is also incapable of transporting people, but I think most people would argue the rule was still being violated by its presence.
It would help a lot to know the reason for the rule. Perhaps the park is filled with lots of rare, delicate plants and only narrow dirt pathways. Or perhaps the pathways are somewhat wider and allowing in a wheelchair or a small wagon wouldn't be a problem.
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.
spelling error in "propultion" ("propulsion") in the question "Keisha plays with a Matchbox car in the park. A Matchbox car is a toy car with wheels that turn; it has no means of propultion other than Keisha pushing it." BTW.
I've seen much discussion of what a vehicle is, and some of what is "in" the park.
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>).
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.
Given the initial instruction to not take into consideration any obvious common sense, I expected questions to scale up to "everything is a vehicle of some information, so the parc should be put into absolute unmoving zone to make the rule strictly operate", which is of course beyond human possibilities.
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.
I humbly believe the real takeaway is that we need LESS rules and LESS fragile egos.
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.
That was fun. I decided early on that a vehicle is any tool that allows something to move. So an ant on a paper airplane or a kite is a vehicle. The surfboard allows someone to move and they carried it into the park, so that's not allowed. Since I wasn't allowed to apply any of my jurisdiction's laws, I also had to ticket the International Space Station for going into my park's airspace. Moon, I'm watching you, you're next.
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.
I kinda answered in terms of "what interpretation of the sign gives parkgoers the best overall experience". Don't legal situations generally consider the spirit of the law, not just the letter of the law?
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.
That kind of proves the point. The starting paragraph asked you explicitly to ignore local laws or personal beliefs and take actions based on only the most literal definition of the rule, and yet almost half of people chose to ignore this and use their own rules. Like how they do for content moderation.
Well in that case the whole ruse of the park is pointless, and the game should just be "click the words that are vehicles". And matchbox cars and space stations are included.
The exact phrasing in the intro 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."
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.
I think it is entirely reasonable to be in mind that emergency does not stop some rules.
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.
This whole precious little webgame is about interpreting a sign in a park. Presumably a park on earth. Of course you can't park ambulances inside the crowded walkways of most shopping malls... or on the top of trees, or inside HVAC ducts, or in the intestines of parkgoers, or on the head of a pin.
The number of pedantic HN bureacrats in these comments is maddening... thank god real parks (and content moderators) generally exercise some common sense.
That's just the point of the page again. To highlight how there is no uniform agreement on if the rules should be enforced 100% to the letter, or if they can be bent when it makes sense. And even if you agree they should be bent, agreeing on exactly how is not agreed on either.
> 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.
I found that my responses hinged on the use of specific pronouns - e.g. “in” or “on” so a space station flying over a park wasn’t “in” the park per se - and on whether it was clear to me whether whether the park was being used a thoroughfare.
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.
The vehicle has to be consistent with all others to decide on it but certainly with all previous judged vehicles on your shift. Who is bringing the vehicle might also be objectively relevant. Time is also relevant.
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.
So much talk about the rule but not much about enforcement. To me most of the scenarios are breaking the rule, but what happens afterwards depends: emergency vehicles, wheelchairs, toys get a pass. Bicycles either get a pass or a warning. Cars get a fine. Repeat offenders get a license suspension etc.
The gray areas are settled based on local culture and who is enforcing the rule. And it’s the same with moderation of course.
My own conclusion is that the rule is not clear enough. Define "vehicle" and "in the park". Sure it's probably hard to think of all the use cases when you first write the rule. Simply iterate and add exceptions and clearer definitions as needed (seems like it's exactly how laws are made, and nobody is saying "we should not have any laws because it's hard to think of all the use cases")
> some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply
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".
No to all questions since there’s probably a way in which doing any of those things still obeys the rule. The rule is about achieving the intent of the rule, not rote obedience.
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.
I mean, I know where I am, but good god damn lord so many of you are missing the point by restating it without taking anything from the text provided at the end.
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.
One thing this doesn't mention bit I think is just as important is tone. Some communities are fine with casual assumptions, others require sources if challenged. Sometimes these things can be encoded in rules, sometimes it's more moderator discretion. So in addition to rules interpretation communities can be distinguished by vibes as well. This is just as valid a reason to moderate as rules
On nebulosity, see https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262134095/ . No need to read it, just to be aware that there’s a thick book full of people trying to get a handle on what a concept like “park” or “vehicle” or “in” actually is for humans, and failing completely.
Based on this I think the likelihood of me enjoying the park is inversely related to how hard the park moderators have to squint to apply the park rules. I'm totally cool with people having a park where a stroller counts as a vehicle but it's not a park I would want to spend my time. (The only one I agreed with was the one where a random person drove their kia into the park)
A better example would be a private property (you're the sole source of law, not interpreting someone else's rule) where people come to network (people are here because other people are here) and there's a competitor literally next door (there is no cost for them to change platform).
These three crucial differences make the game incomparable to actual online moderation
For me this article is not about content moderation, but about software requirements.
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.
I found the term 'wagon' to be unclear. In the UK, this would be something akin to an articulated lorry, although I am familiar with the American term 'station wagon' so I took it to mean a type of motor car at the very least.
Presumably that is not the case, having now seen the results. Is it a sort of unpowered trolley?
I was waiting for something more "insightful", it sets the expectations too high and then instead I got hit by the content moderation crap stick, a vehicle is a vehicle and if an ambulance is driven into the park is violating the rule, wether you like it or not, the rule doesn't define morality. What a waste of time.
As classified and intended by the sign and societal expectation, a vehicle would be any self-propelled method of transport which violates the space or near space of the park. So a toy car or boat doesn't count, but an actual car or boat would. Just as a bicycle doesn't count but a motorcycle does. And a bit of logic has to be applied for what constitutes "within or near the space of the park" in practice. A plane flying thirty one thousand feet overhead is not even near the park, but a helicopter dropping down so low that the rotors are level with or below the top of the tree canopy is violating the space near the park. And exceptions to rules have to be made under certain circumstances. The ambulance and police car do violate the rules, but have to be given special extensions of jurisdiction to perform the duties wider society assigns and expects of them.
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.
This reminds me of the local political candidate who argued that the 100m distance rules around campaigning extended to a sphere around polling stations, so he claimed he was allowed to fly a banner over the stations as long as they maintained enough altitude.
Trying to find a link to a news story about this. I swear it's true.
Which is why there should be no moderators besides each person having an equal vote. "But then people game the system." is always the answer, which is always the root cause of the problem: on the internet, everything is completely fair until someone, inevitably, games the system.
Austria has this sort of problem when it comes to forests and cyclists. You might want to read a longer article in German about this https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000134804355/als-oesterrei... but the gist of it is:
The law until 1975 didn't allow anyone (that's everyone in Austria) to enter forests (which in comparison belong to only a few people, besides the state).
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...
I notice that people who say "obviously emergency vehicles should be allowed, because of intent", despite the explicit instructions at the beginning of the test, often talk about "the sign" in their comments, despite no sign ever being mentioned in the instructions.
One is reminded of the difference between proof-relevant and classical mathematics. The letter of the law is a mere proposition, whereas the spirit of the law is a program of a certain type, whose “computational content” describes the actions one takes to produce the state of compliance.
The lesson here is one worth learning, but the vehicle (forgive the pun) is very poor. The lesson is: we can't agree on what to moderate and what not to moderate. There are very good thought experiments here, including citing actual prose. Should we ban parts of the Bible (the sexually explicit ones, or the ones that seem to approve of slavery?), should we ban books like Lolita or the Scarlet Letter? Should we allow Neo-Nazis to protest? What about Stalinists?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
IMO the point is that those semantic quagmires always exist, especially if you're trying to make rules about something as nebulous as human language. And ambiguity is really common, too. Like, consider a rule against "hate speech" — that's ambiguous as heck! Even if you try to really nail it down, there will always be a zillion ways that people can try to skirt by on a technicality.
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.
I stopped at the first question. Without a photograph, I can't really tell what a "wagon" is supposed to be. How big is it? Does it have an engine? Is this a toy or a diesel truck? etc. There's cultural context that's not present at all.
Am I the only person who looked up the definition of "vehicle" and counted everything that wasn't a toy seemingly not meant to "transport something" as a vehicle?
It seemed like the spirit of the game was a strict interpretation, to the letter, of the rule.
I’m not sure the sign can have one unanimous understanding - which is why we have court rulings to back it up. If you disagree with a sign, take it up with “contemporary society”.
But given a situation where no proper trial is available, the sign could mean “anything”.
Cool game, but let me comment on the method of detecting bias based on names... I think it'll only work for audiences that recognise these names in a way that triggers those biases. So it'll not be very useful for outside US.
Clearly, this is all about driving cars or trucks in the park. The roads there are intended for pedestrians, cyclists, etc. It seems that 93% agree with me. Well done, everyone. ;-)
I think that was a really good way to get the point across. Which I suppose I already agreed to, but if I ever wanted to argue the point of how hard content moderation is, I might share this website.
"Travois" seemed the most interesting one. Based purely on the first page of Google images, it struck me as somewhere between a horse and a carriage, but ever more on the vehicle side.
it has no wheels so it is just dragged, maybe behind a horse but people can drag them too. horses walk and carriages roll, so it's not really between them. it's the asymptotic limit as wheels shrink to zero.
Three questions in I thought “hey, this reminds me of that recent 99% Invisible episode about restrictions on mechanized equipment”. Then I got to the explanation at the end and sure enough…
Just because there’s no analytical closed form solution that you can easily invent does not mean it’s a bad idea to have rules. The entire justice system works exactly like that.
According to most Reddit moderators: no vehicles in the park (unless the vehicle is in front of a sunset or we have to save our democracy by allowing vehicles with megaphones to drive around the park spouting the exact political ideology of the moderators)
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.”
Stopped playing after the first question because I don't care and i don't know why anyone would. After all this is just a website asking questions without context. It seems as interesting to me as the political debate in Star Wars Episode I that was famously mocked by the Simpsons.
i did 7 questions and agreed with 29% of the majority. can see why i'm writing on some "reddit alternative" platforms as much as i'm writing on reddit.
When one answers these questions, one must consider the reason behind the rule, the spirit of why vehicles are not allowed in the park: because this disturbs the park for many others in the park. It makes the park less enjoyable. People won't want to come to the park if it's full of cars.
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 only thing this convinced me of is that content moderation is even more brainless and straight forward than I thought. There wasn't a single question that didn't have a straightforward commonsense answer.
In the olden days of internet forums we would consider this type of thing rules lawyering [1]. The rules were put in place to protect the community from trouble makers and trolls.
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.
So, maybe we need use the Jury system then, say 9 of them, with diversified backgrounds(e.g. 3 liberals, 3 conservatives, 3 independents, also consider age and gender,etc), and they vote online for edge cases, majority wins.
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.
The park may only have one rule, but the quiz has several , including disregarding exceptions to the rule. Yet there are people arguing here that rule shouldn’t count because they disagree with it. Even on a meta level, this is an interesting exploration of how people interpret rules.
This is always the way with these hypotheticals. People only disagree because they don't want to stick to the hypothetical. But the flip side of that, if you do stick to the hypothetical you also need to be clear that it is therefore of limited use in the real world. Is an ambulance in the park breaking the rule? Cleraly. Does that have any relevance to what we would expect to happen in the real world? Nope.
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.)