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?
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).