In my experience, people disagree about the "vehicle in the park" game because they try to apply other rules that are not part of the game.
Ambulances, for example, are clearly vehicles, and if they're in the park, the rules has been violated.
That doesn't mean the ambulance driver is in the wrong, though. There could be other rules that supersede that rule. We aren't told of any, though, and are simply asked about that one rule.
The only judgements that we're asked to make are "What is considered a vehicle" and "What is considered to be in the park". That's because these things are not defined for us and are open to interpretation.
Interestingly, though, the game said I agreed with 74% of people, which was a lot higher than I expected it to be.
The game explicitly says to ignore everything except the one stated rule:
I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it. I live in the real world, not hypothetical-land. Too much of what's wrong with the world starts with people ignoring the real world, and going hypothetical.
Fascinating. It’s a game! No Knight moves one square to the right and two up, but it seems chess players have no problem with it.
Because chess has a throughout specification (at least now, not sure if it was always that way). A knight is only a night and cannot fall under any other category. Can you think of a rule in chess that is not well defined?
Well, GP compared the rules against real life and decided that they are different from real life, so they shouldn't be followed.
Chess rules are also different from real life, but people don't have any issues following them.
The question whether it was “well defined” doesn't come into play here, I think: the rules in the game tell you to ignore any overrides (such as that certain vehicles may be allowed in an emergency situation). And GP decided to ignore that part.
I think interesting discussion can be had even when respecting this rule. For example, I decided that a skate board is not a vehicle but a bike is.
I disagree.
Lets take chess and the knight, and 2 - 1 movement rules. If there are pieces in front of the knight you pick up the knight off the board in 3 dimensional space, right?! The rules of chess only define the final end point of the piece and not the physical motion in real space to reach that location.
With this said, if you're in a professional setting, and you pick up the king and fly it around like an airplane, everyone is going to get really tired of your shit.
They’d be tired of your shit because you’d be acting like an ass, not because you’d be breaking any game rules.
FIDE Laws of Chess: 11.5 - "It is forbidden to distract or annoy the opponent in any manner whatsoever. This includes unreasonable claims, unreasonable offers of a draw or the introduction of a source of noise into the playing area."
Naturally, this rule is not interpreted literally.
I think which player gets white is ill defined by the game proper, and selected by the various organizers/players.
Edit: I think in tournament chess there is some ill defined rules around play behavior/distractions.
But it's kind of the point that the well defined parts such as movement allowed per piece aren't really up for discussion.
Where the contention occurs is on human behaviors. Where the rules for chess are pretty simple (and yes, this does lead to difficult to compute and complex behavior), the motivations that humans follow both individually and as social structures are far more complex and contradictory.
There are reasons not to cheat at a game. It'll have negative social consequences, and you might get barred from further games.
Why follow the rules of some online survey? Logically you should do whatever provides you the maximum emotional benefit, regardless of what the rules say.
Online surveys are not valid research tool anyway, because of heavy selection bias.
As for giving bullshit answers on them, valid surveys have built-in protection measures. The amount of trolling in surveys has been measured this way; I've seen it refered to by at least one author as "Lizardman's constant", and it was consistently around 7% or such.
It's unlikely to be a constant amount. There have been, somewhat ironically, surveys about lying on surveys. One result is that people will indicate being more or less likely to lie, depending on the sort of question: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29206289
Why follow the rules of the game then? I used to cheat at many games both online and offline, some casinos think I "cheat" because I always count cards, I have an explicit gain by winning in all scenarios, as I either gain more satisfaction from winning or monetary output.
The same social consequences come from the online survey, i.e. I do collect information about who you are, further you do damage the quality of the data meant to fund/explore future decisions in all kinds of venues, e.g. social studies, politics, etc.
This isn't just a game, it's a political analogy. If we treat it as a game without connection to real life then we can't fairly connect behavior in it to its real life analog. It's like telling someone "Counterstrike is just a game" then acting morally outraged when they shot someone in-game with an AK.
Just as chess is a political analogy of real war.
It's like the Stanford Marshmallow experiment[1]. The experiment measured the wrong thing, the credibility of the experimenters in the eyes of the subjects. If you didn't believe they would deliver on their promise, you took the first reward.
I don't agree with the conditions of the game, because far too much damage is done by people who "both sides" or "I'm just asking questions" or otherwise hedge on normal socially accepted behavior. The post fairness doctrine[2] world is a harsh place, and it's made me grumpy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
There's a big gap between "they measured the wrong thing" and showing up to play a game but not following any of the rules. If you object to the game then why are you pretending to play it?
Perhaps the same reason there are trolls on the internet. The game you are playing and want me to play is not the game I wish to play, so I shall do my own thing in your game space.
You have to go out of your way to get to this game space, so that's pretty rude and hard to defend.
Why is it rude?
If the author cared about getting accurate results they wouldn't be posting an anonymous online survey. Adding onto that, I don't have any faith in the author of the post to use this data in any significant way (no shade to the author I just think most of these studies go nowhere).
Lack of faith in the author doesn't affect whether it's rude to barge in to someone's thing, a thing that put zero impositions on you and you had to go out of your way to reach, just to ignore the simple rules and make a mess of it.
I don't understand why you wouldn't see how that's rude.
"They don't care enough" doesn't stop it being rude to break their stuff on purpose. It's still rude. I don't understand your logic.
Then why on earth are you playing a game which is purely about hypotheticals to begin with? It's like if someone were to sit down to play Monopoly but refuse to hand over rent because "I believe that having a dwelling should be free". Ok, good for you, but then it's really foolish to play the game to begin with.
The point of the game is to illustrate this behavior. That is why they use a real-world example, to produce different results when different people are asked the same question. It's not a math problem.
So your saying, what if the game was not hypothetical?
I'm also somewhat surprised how people flatly refuse to handle being asked to apply rules as written, which the game does. (Otherwise I would assume they just haven't read the introduction closely.)
To my mind, the park just needs an additional rule that allows for 911 emergencies, but this does not make these vehicles not vehicles. I am ready to disregard rules in a bunch of cases in real life, but I would not call this following the rules. Sometimes you just disregard rules and authority because you value quality of human life more. "Rescuing" these cases after the fact as following the rules actually smells faintly authoritarian to me (so that you get rid of legitimate rebellion), though maybe it's an oversensitive take.
Also surprised that I ended up agreeing with 93% of people apparently. This is despite applying a probably idiosyncratic definition of vehicle: separate from the functioning of human being, with a mechanism of propulsion and capable of transporting things or persons. I ended up allowing almost everything. I would disallow bikes but not kick scooters. Maybe I got owned by the "bikes are vehicles" propaganda.
And for moderation, any judicial role is a form of political power. This is why making it limited and not completely concentrated is more important than trying to come with perfect rules. In practice, this means you can voice your discontent and realistically go somewhere else.
Well, it is self consistent at least to ignore rules that are dumb, both in the case of the park and the case of the game, haha.
Really though, I wonder if the results are flavored by the surrounding context in which the game tends to be linked. I made what I thought were common sense exceptions I think because it was linked in an article about people not agreeing on what is allowed. The thought in my mind was: come on, people can just be reasonable.
But if something is an exception then by definition it's breaking the baseline rule, right?
Most legal systems have the concept of necessity as a defense to breaking laws. If the only/best way to prevent some worse outcome is to break the law, then the lawbreaking is excused. There's usually no need for each law to have its own exception for life-threatening emergencies.
Sounds like they were trying to forced their desired outcome instead of getting the real one.
Vehicle (in most rules) means motorized, heavy, and dangerously fast, making most of the options not vehicles. Emergency services are exempt from the rule during emergencies, and therefore not breaking it.
The way I (and I think the majority) interpreted it, was: "What did the person who wrote this rule intend?" i.e. The spirit of the rule, not the letter.
Obviously, no one expects the rule to cover all edge cases, so we have to extrapolate what the rule writer meant to say.
People are under no obligation to follow the instructions. They're free to pick the answer that appeals to them regardless.
I mean that in a serious way. It's very clear people lie on much more serious polls than this.
I can't ignore everything that is not mentioned in the game description. I would not know the definition of the words used, like the meaning of "rule". Obviously you are supposed to use _some_ external context. Everything in reality has context.
If we ignore the law of universal gravitation the ambulance can hover over the park.
Rules are a part of how the world works as is the violation of them. Thought problems that deviate so far from reality are more a test of abstract thinking.
Rules implicitly exist for terminal goals (don't kill the grass in the park so people can enjoy it) but get abstracted into actionable decrees that are not necessarily aligned (Becky can't enjoy the grass if she's dead.)
Part of the issue here on why people are adding rules to this game is because there is a real life abstraction in what seemingly most people would consider nonsensical rules.
If you said "are borbs allowed in the bezzilizx" it would be more interesting on what the gradient of answers would be as we are not making as many presuppositions.
For example, if my grandma is dying of a heart attack in the park, one of the most common behavior of those involved will be "fuck your rules, get the ambulance down here". This is that humans are not yes/no rule following computers and we will gladly toss rules to the side over a number of factors encompassing everything from immediacy of need to the depths of our greed.
The presuppositions are what make the question interesting. It's an explicit test of pedantry.
That’s what made it not interesting, and a better question would be “for each case do you think the police should spend taxpayer money enforcing the rule?”.
Not “does this pedantically violate the rule” but “would it be good for society if this case was punished?”, “would it be good for the park?”, “would the effort of punishing it be worth the cost?”.
I can’t imagine anyone seriously saying it would be worth the cost of the police trying to move an orbiting space station “out” of the park - the cost would be huge and the return negligible, but peoples views On whether a WWII tank is appropriate for a pedestrianised park are interesting, whereas people saying “yes the tank is a vehicle” are not so interesting.
This line of thinking presumes that you are the legislator, judge, or police officer. But one can easily approach the questions as to likelihood of being hassled as a park-goer.
I'm not following what you mean by likelihood of being hassled?
Other park goers harassing you because they think you violated the rules and they think trying to deride you for it is a good idea.
See most "x while black" incidents.
How does that relate to "one can approach the questions as likelihood of being hassled", I don't understand it in this context.
"Is a WWII tank/pram/scooter a vehicle in the park?" - those original questions? Or my suggested alternative which was "should the police should intervene*"? Is the commenter they saying that people might answer based on whether they think they would expect to be hassled for doing those things? Or answer whether people doing those things should be hassled by passers-by? Or what?
Yes.
And for the ISS or tank in the park, the question is whether this would cause a brouhaha over the issue by people with nothing better to do with their time.
Whether or not you're going to be hassled or have to deal with a public hassle is a personally more interesting question than what would you enforce in the situation. Even if you're a police officer.
At this stage in my questions there is nothing to enforce, no rules yet. The original question set is bad because it's nitpicking a rule nobody chose but many people want exclusions to, despite the question saying no exclusions. Then we find "wow lots of disagreement". I think the disagreement is manufactured by the poor question design and not real, and if we had no rules yet, asked about various situations and found whether people approved/disproved of them in a park, we'd have much more agreement. And that there needs to be some skin in the game - to enforce a thing needs your tax dollars spent on police, and police time spent on this instead of something else, so do you still think it's worth making a rule for X situation?
So in the case of 'being hassled' you answer that the things you want to do are acceptable. And we find how many people agree/disagree.
You can't even know that, that's just inviting speculative fearmongering, and therefore won't be interesting results.
You earlier wrote: > a better question would be “for each case do you think the police should spend taxpayer money enforcing the rule?”.
It's this that I've been addressing.
There are very few brand new polities in the world today, and even then I presume the powers that be for most of them accept the previous laws as a baseline. Full law rewrites happen, but they're rare, even on internet forums. So basically everyone is stuck with a system of laws to which they did not agree, and which do not fully address the parameters of today. Thus, "are you going to be hassled?"
You're free to ignore the setup for the game. But that's what you're doing: ignoring it. And by ignoring it you're ignoring the lesson it's trying to teach which the entire blog post is based on.
And again, in moderating decisions this is not seen. I believe the problem is more the severity of punishments handed down with unelected moderating decision. But recall that even in elected democracies significant chunks of the population feel that their votes do not, or would not, matter.
Without stating my attitudes on the matter, I found it informative that the blog post of the original link mentions feminism and the trans issue.
So here:
This point of view is assuming the privilege of being heard and rules changing to address the majority concern.
No, you can't know that. Thus calling the police on a child selling bottled water on the street without a permit, and the counter-protests and doxxing against the caller as a response: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/permit-patty-alison-ettel-calls...
Since we were all privileged because this was just a game, I tried to make rules on what a vehicle actually is, instead of asking what are the odds a person would be hassled. But I think I've made my point that asking whether you are likely to be hassled is a legitimate method people use to determine what the laws allow. If I haven't, then just ask when do people disregard the speed limit on roads and when do they drive just below it.
Instead of vehicle, switch to 'listening to music in the park'. Quite often rules around public disturbance, such as loud music are enforced in highly discriminatory fashions. And example could be that listening to loud rock in the US midwest would be ignored, or listening to country in the US south would be ignored, while listening to rap at the same volume would attract ire from park goers and police alike.
I took the doubly pedantic view that the tank was not a vehicle simply on account that I was defining a vehicle to be a vehicle when its function is that of a vehicle (namely a tool for locomotion by means other than walking). Applying the principle that someone has to be able to ride on it or in it to count, I pedantically conclude that the tank is not a vehicle because it explicitly says in the question that it is not capable of functioning as a tank anymore. Therefore in effect the tank is little more than a vehicle-shaped-statue, not a vehicle per se. It is no more a violation of the rule than a painting of a car would be. By this reasoning, I counted the stroller, ice skates, and roller blades as violations yet did not count the toy cars, RC planes, nor the picnic wagon.
Is the pedantic answer really uninteresting if it leads to unintuitive answers?
See, but that's what makes it interesting. You can't just make the law equal to some ad hoc poll of "do I want my tax dollars used to discourage this" for every possible behavior within the park. At some point, for lack of better expression, the rubber has to meet the road. The gut opinion on what is appropriate in a park has to be translated into a rule for the park, and the question of if the rule was violated or not has to be able to be determined entirely on the basis of hard evidence should a ticket for it ever go to court.
At least part of the point of the exercise is that even for something where there's general agreement on the principle (like "people should use pedestrianized parks appropriately"), the translation into an obvious rule (like "no vehicles in the park") fails to capture that intent and the extent to which there actually is general agreement is inversely proportionally to how fully spelled out things are.
The park is interesting because its boring. Its not a hot button issue where people have disagreements on matters of principle like guns or abortion or javascript frameworks. So why is it so hard to write an objective, enforceable rule codifying the seemingly universally agreed and understood idea of what a park is supposed to be? If we can't even get universal agreement on something non-controversial, such as the rules which make a park a park, such as "no vehicles in the park", how can we expect any system of law to work more generally?
Yes, because then we just get to arguing "is my car no longer a vehicle once it runs out of fuel and cannot function as a car?" then "is it no longer a vehicle if the battery is empty?" or "If the alternator is broken?" then, "does the vehicle-status depend on how quick and easy the fix is?" which are all dragging away from the question of "do people want a WWII tank in a park or not?".
And instead of asking "is a WWII tank in a park breaking the rule regardless of whether you object to the tank?" we could directly ask "do you object to the tank?".
And now we're arguing whether RC planes count as vehicles, when people's objection might be noise in the park where RC planes with engines and drones are out, and RC electric planes/gliders are okay. Or people might think about safety - any plane near people is out, any plane away from people is okay.
Why not? We can poll people on every behaviour seen in the park in the last year, online, in a few minutes, and make a bylaw listing the OK vs not-OK behaviours, democratically chosen. We don't, but I don't see why you say "we can't just do that" when we could do exactly that. Why does it have to be a single rule?
I'm not accepting that we can't get universal agreement on "no vehicles in the park" by nitpicking on what a vehicle is. On the ambulance it can be that some people answer "it's a vehicle so the rule is broken" because that's what the question tells them to answer even though they want ambulances allowed, other people answer "it's not a vehicle" because they want ambulances allowed and that's the only way to get them allowed, so we have a manufactured disagreement even if everyone wants them allowed. I'm conjecturing that we could get near-universal agreement on whether ambulances are okay (yes) by asking "are ambulances okay?" not "are ambulances vehicles?". Or even asking "is it okay if ambulances break the no-vehicles rule?". Maybe there's agreement on most, or all, of the questions if asked like that instead.
I also suspect bikes would be different depending if they are pedal or ebike, ridden slowly by little old ladies, or ridden by a racing peloton, or ridden as a busy through-commute every day. "bikes: yes/no?" isn't enough to classify those things differently. Bike racing: yes, no? Bike commuting: yes/no? etc.
If your car runs out of fuel in the park, it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule, though it is now likely breaking some other rule about littering in the park.
My fundamental disagreement is that if you allow for rules to be enforced in terms of what they were intended to say rather than what they actually say, then there actually isn't a rule at all. There's a pretense of law but in actuality its a dictatorship of whoever gets to judge what was "clearly" intended to be.
Why isn't the WWII tank breaking the littering rule? Again your approach is leading to more and more pedantry instead of clearer rules.
So let's make the rule actually say what we collectively intend it to say, then that problem goes away. We're in this stupid situation where the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed" but you haven't given a reason why the rules cannot say that. "Emergency services are exempt from park rules". If there comes a time of an epidemic of off-duty emergency service workers driving WWII era tank shells modified with blue lighs and sirens and electric unicycle propulsion through the park at high speed on their commute to their second jobs, that's a bridge to cross when it becomes the next most pressing issue in the park.
It should be that we can get past the easy cases "ambulances allowed" and we should be struggling with "what counts as loud and annoying music?" or "are flying drones more fun or more noisy and dangerous?". But instead we're falling over at "are ambulances really vehicles?" and "are statues vehicles?" because of ... bad question design.
No we aren't. At no time is it specified that the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed". Merely it is specified that the current rules of the park "don't" say "ambulances are allowed". The game is explicitly putting you in the position of judge not legislator. The question of if the intent of having a park could be better codified with a different rule is also interesting, but its not the question the game is asking you.
The game could have gone down the rabbit hole of making a more complicated fictitious "Parks Act" and asking you to judge if each example is a violation or not. And sure this pedantic fictional law would probably better approximate what feels like the obvious intention of a park. But even with that, you'd still end up with surprisingly contentious disagreement when you ask people to apply the law. And you would still end up with people legislating from the bench, finding ways to judge the examples to fit their personal opinions of what a park is. And sometimes, even though the opinion of what a park is feels obvious and universal, it may actually be logically inconsistent and contentious in ways that you don't even notice until you sit down and actually attempt to codify the rules. If anything making the park rule itself an accurate-yet-complex piece of mini-legislation would distract from the point. The "no vehicles in the park" rule may be excessively coarse at capturing the intent, but as a rule it intentionally too short and direct for disagreement to stem from the inherent complexity of subsections and exception clauses.
So, I agree, the park rule can and should be codified better. And we could make our own game "park bylaw committee" about coming up with a set of rules for a park that actually match our expectations for a park. And I agree figuring out how to codify the intent of a park into meaningful rules would be its own interesting philosophical statement on the nature of law and systems of law. But its different from the point the game is making.
Unless you put some fuel in it. To get it out of the park.
But then that would be violation, so leave it there?
I think all this meta disagreement, and the diverse counterintuitive reasoning arrived at by different attempts at consistency, demonstrate how hard it is to reach convergent agreement.
The hyperlogical pedantic reading makes the most sence from a game rule perspective. But agreement on initial perspective is difficult to obtain, even given “clear” instructions.
Yes, but then you run into the problem that some people value taxpayer money a lot more than others. And some people have revulsion to valuing things with money at all!
There was a WWII tank in a park I would spend time in as a child. It was alongside an ancient fire truck and a steam locomotive. There were all totally awesome until they got fenced off for some reason.
I think this is the real point: it's not a test of whether people agree on what is allowed, but on how pedantic people are in an abstract setting.
I think agreement would be much higher if people were told to evaluate the "spirit" of the rule, and not the "letter" of the rule.
I think you are right. I think agreement would be even higher if you would be asking people what should happen as a result of the situation as described. There could be options with increasing level of seriousness. Things like “do nothing”, “send a park officer to ask them to leave, they get a fine if they persist”, “send a cop who asks them to leave and arrest them if they perist”, “send a cop to arrest them without warning”, “order a snipper to headshot them without any warning”.
I think asking if something is a violation is too abstract, and people are bad at abstract things. On the other hand when we make it concrete people will be better at expressing what they think should happen and you are more likely to see agreement.
Which sheds light on why moderation is hard, given moderation hinges on serious, but in practice necessarily subjectively interpreted, abstractions.
I.e. “freedom of speech”, “on topic”, “low quality speech”, “no hate speech”, “no harassment” etc.
Better yet, have them submit two answers for spirit and letter. Because it seems that people will ignore instructions that say to focus on just one.
The ambulance violates the rule, but few would care that it does.
Courts tend to care, when something goes wrong; e.g. the ambulance causing injury all by itself.
Courts only care about cases that are brought before them. They're not out looking for cases, that's what law enforcement does and LE is going to look at the context. If the ambulance is being driven by a carjacker they will cite it for being in the park even if it caused no damage. If the ambulance is driven by a medic and responding to a call they will likely overlook it. And of course they'll drive their own cars in the park whenever they want.
If that is how US police works then I can assure you it kind of make sense why you have people hating them.
Thats some Animal Farm. Can someone that knows US law confirm this?
What I mean is that the exceptions should be written in the law and there should absolutely not be a case where you cherrypick.
I'm sure police everywhere have discretion (whether enshrined in law or not) over who to charge.
Where do you live that you think police exercise no discretion at all?
Prosecutors also have discretion in who to prosecute.
Courts also make decisions on guilt.
The police generally have immunity from prosecution (forms extremely dangerous outcomes) and are not obligated by law to do their jobs.
I can tell you we have rules that supersede for ambulance drivers and such.
We have had many cases where a thief have been caught by the store owner and the store owner is the one going to jail for entrapment.
Where? Again, I highly doubt that the police there don't ever exercise any discretion in at least some situations.
I have an anecdote contrary to this - When I was in the US, a friend explained to me how drug dealers tended to live in private trailer parks in part because it was harder for law enforcement to get into the general area without a warrant.
Basically, the rule of that park was "no (police) cars in the park" and the police could in fact not drive their own cars in the park whenever they want - only whenever a judge wants them to.
I think there's a degree of US specificity to your comment. The situation in the UK would be different.
I think this is explicitly addressed at the start. The question is not one of if certain cases should be prosecuted or if there should be certain rules that supersede the "vehicle in park" rule. The question is of the fact that the statement "no vehicles in the park" is violated or not. An ambulance is allowed to violate the rule, but it is still strictly speaking violating the rule.
The letter or the intent though? Because if it’s the letter, we’d better throw in wheel chairs, surfboards etc. as well. The law does not specify motor vehicles, even though I would believe that to be the intent.
I went with the letter, and did in fact throw in wheel chairs and surfboards.
I tried the game after your comment and got 100% agreement with the majority.
My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving itself along with one or more people (not necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold). "In the park" means in the region of space where one could physically interact with people in the park, or alternatively in its legal jurisdiction; the airspace a few thousand feet above the park's topmost solid point is almost never under the jurisdiction of the park itself.
I agree with the overall point about moderation, but I find this a bad example because I think someone reasonably rules-oriented would settle on very similar rules.
So... motorized wheelchairs are vehicles?
And this is why we have videos of bicyclists yelling at parapalegics.
The test prohibits vehicles, not specifically automobiles, but basically everyone interprets the rule to only apply to automobiles.
Are motorized wheelchairs vehicles?
I’d say yes
Definitely. Just because they break the nominal rule doesn't obligate me to throw them out of the park. I wouldn't stop the ambulance either, but it's definitely breaking the rule.
Yes. But that doesn't make the rule just and doesn't mean it would be enforced.
I went with anything that moves unpowered or not that is not also a living thing is a vehicle so long as it falls within the light cone that could theoretically be projected from the park grounds directly upwards if it were in a vacuum.
Not many people agreed with me, but it’s a strict rule that I could imagine something like the military trying to enforce over a top secret area.
It blocks everything ambiguous so only the horse was not a vehicle.
Overall I think it’s a good experiment as it shows why it’s good to enumerate examples of what is and isn’t part of a rule in order to adjusted it the future.
Light cone? But over the park is not in the park.
What is the vertical limit of the park? If I build a ramp and jump off it in a vehicle, at what point in its arc is the vehicle "in the park?"
I look forward to bring my vehicle by navigating through my 4D tessaract to a place where I could not have had the information of the rule.
It's a good example exactly because it demomstrates how people will disagree about easy rules. All while they somehow remain unable to acknowledge this. That's the actual point to me.
Its hilarious that the top comment on this submission still doesn't "get it". Set theory and combinations get thrown out the window to loosely redefine "majority" to make a point.
Yeah, "I got 100%" therefore it's easy.
Endless regress detected, redo from start.
100% agreement with the majority per question might put you in a very small minority, BTW.
I got a 100% agreement with majority too. I did not try to define anything formally, instead I judged each case by itself, asking whether I'd consider that thing a "vehicle". Which ended up meaning "car" in practice.
You only go mad if you try to lawyer things. Or your opponent does, which means that this test lacks the thing that really makes rules-making hard: determined opposition, would to trust your every word.
The definition of a vehicle is quite broad and you've scoped it rather narrowly. When left so open people may scope it more or less narrow and land on differently scoped definitions.
I think there is certainly a middle ground when making rules(and laws). But this example purposefully uses an ill-defined rule to drive a point home.
The game would be more interesting if the rule were "Threatening speech is not allowed."
Many years ago I witnessed an interesting interaction on a gaming forum.
Player A was trying to recruit players for their group. Player B posted about some bad experiences they had with Player A being hard to work with in the past, which prompted Player A to reply with some vicious personal attacks. Player B then quoted Player A’s post in full with commentary to the effect of “Thanks for illustrating my point.”
When the moderator came in, they deleted Player A’s post attacking Player B, but left Player B’s post quoting it alone.
A quite common approach, yes.
As a moderator you often know know that somebody should be removed, but for the sake of PR it's often unwise to just have an internal talk, reach an agreement that "yup, this person is an ass", and then ban them seemingly out of the blue, even if there's a bunch of excellent reasons. It's easy for drama to erupt, especially when that person has been around for a long time and is a regular.
An easy solution is to watch out like a hawk for the right incident and do it then, and sometimes to even try to intentionally push things along so that it's especially obvious to all bystanders.
And leaving some evidence to show everyone why you did it also helps.
What you describe gets far closer to why moderation is tricky. The interesting question--to me at least--is whether some subset of people can apply such reasoning consistently.
Danluu is arguing that because a set of randomly chosen people cannot agree how to apply a simple statement like "No vehicles in the park" that moderation is impossible. If so, the same would no doubt be true of the following language in an NDA:
Yet, US courts would not have a lot of problems interpreting this language consistently because terms like "reasonable care" have definitions that anyone trained in the law would understand. [0] The fact that uninitiated people may not be able to do so is not relevant.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_care
I don't think this is correct, I think they're arguing that uncontroversial moderation is impossible. That moderation will inevitably lead to drama.
I think a big part of the point here is that it picked a seemingly boring, non-controversial case where you would expect agreement to be near universal but it isn't.
My take is that most people cant resist the urge to assert what they think they rule should be, complicating the test. ambulances aren't allowed, but they shuld be. Drones are allowed, but they shouldnt be.
I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair.
I was surprised to see I got 100% agreement with the majority on each question. But I guess that means i would still disagree with most everyone on at least one question
My 0.02 but the airspace above the park is not the park or else you could take that to a logical extreme. A park is the land/waterways within a geographical bounds with a specific designation. It does not include the air above the park which is why planes flying over your house are not trespassing
Planes flying over your house are not trespassing because they are far enough up that they are considered to be on public highway. If you hover a helicopter over my house and hang via a rope outside my bedroom window, you are absolutely trespassing even if you have not touched the building or the ground at any point.
And going to logical extremes is always going to lead to absurdity. Let's go in the other direction. A hovercraft doesn't touch the ground, so would a reasonable person also consider that to not be on their property when it's powered on in their front yard?
How about a hovercraft, which rides on an air cushion without actually touching the ground?
And/or discomfort and/or lack of understanding that real-life rules aren't exhaustive - they're meant to encircle a range of situations, but their borders are necessarily fuzzy, and borderline cases are, by design, to be judged on by humans on a case-by-case basis.
"No vehicles in the park" is a rule explicitly written for humans, and rules written for humans have reasonable and obvious exceptions which don't have to be explicitly stated.
If a convenience store says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service", no reasonable worker would refuse service to someone wearing a dress.
Odds are good they will if they disapprove of the dress, or if they disapprove of the someone’s wearing of a dress.
Because the rule is not actually about shirts or shoes, it’s about throwing out people considered undesirable. Those signs were invented to throw out hippies.
Similarly “please wait to be seated”, used to be only in high-end restaurants, lower end ones introduced them so they could ignore / refuse to seat hippies. It’s much easier to make a patron leave when they’ve been standing at the entrance for half an hour than when they’ve seated themselves.
What about when they say “long haired freaky people need not apply”?
I would argue that “no shirt, no shoes, no service” is not rule but rather a concise and simplistic phrase that communicates the spirit of the rule to a broad audience. The rule is that a human must have their feet, part of their lower and upper body covered or else they will be denied entry and/or refused service. The phrase is just a way to communicate that rule in a concise way
That's kind of my point though. Written rules sacrifice specificity for brevity all the time, and it works for most reasonable people most of the time.
The game is a bait and switch. I followed the directions faithfully, and said that the ambulance was breaking the rule. But then it seemed to lower my score. Turns out I wasn't supposed to follow the rule, I was supposed to guess how others would follow the rule. That should have been clear from the instructions.
You did what you were supposed to do and demonstrated what you were supposed to demonstrate.
The fact that you feel you did it wrong is just a bonus for the author (and spectators like me!)
1. The majority said the ambulance was a vehicle, so agreeing with that wouldn't lower your score
2. It's an agreement score, not an achievement score. All it does is measure how many questions you agreed with the majority on. The score does not convey a value or judge your actions, it's just there to inform you how closely you align to others' answers.
This is actually a deep philosophical and practical issue called the frame problem. It is not tractable to define all the axioms and presuppositions for any given set of rules. That's why the American system has a legislature and separate interpretive body in the judiciary.
It's often useful to invoke the fictional "reasonable person".
And yet this falls strongly on cultural norms and leads to a great number of issues where cultures mix.
This line of thinking does make me wonder if the path forward might be a system of authority and variable consequences instead of trying to find consensus.
Agreeing is hard but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules in the interest of the common good.
Similarly skate boarders and mothers with wagons don't have authority to violate rules but because the consequences (hypothetically imagined here) is based on weight then they can violate the rule with relative impunity because such a minor infraction of the rule only endangers them to passing enforcers to say "shame on you" to them.
At this point to me it seems the hard point is objectively applying consequences in a moderation setting. I'm not sure how to make a call that someone is being only a little bit of an asshole in anyway that allows an online community to function in a way that is cohesive.
But the game isn't about "should the rule be ignored?". That's a different game.
The game is a meta commentary on how moderation is hard.
My commentary is an orthogonal commentary on moderation using the game and previous conversation comment as input.
Interestingly enough, I realized that my thoughts is just a vague restating on how the criminal justice system is supposed to work (at least in the US).
You have laws and then some people are allowed to ignore them and some people ignore them because the consequences aren't sufficient to be problematic to them. Judges and lawyers facilitate and split hairs.
Is a modern shoe a vehicle? It provides a spring bounce assist to motion. If it is not a vehicle, then why would a pair of roller skates or even a bicycle be one? I answered that the roller skates were not a vehicle, and though it took some longer thought answered the same about the bicycle and wheelchair.
Mine was 70%.
My state has unambiguously defined bicycles as vehicles, perhaps to avoid exactly this question. It also avoids the need to rewrite the vehicle code to specifically include bicycles. There have been exceptions added to the vehicle code to allow bikes to do things or go places where other vehicles are forbidden but there was no need to rewrite the vehicle code to specifically require them to stop at red lights. They are vehicles, so must stop.
In this game, in my state, bicycles would not be allowed unless the sign mentioned the law that allows them.
The struggle here is ambiguity. That's a hard problem for computing, but not a hard problem for people. An ambulance can simply break the rule, because human rule-makers are able to make exceptions.
A lot of people are very excited about LLMs, because they can encounter ambiguity without halting. Unfortunately, what they can't do is resolve that ambiguity. We are still only able to compute context-free rules.
This may be because some people are assuming this is a rules-driven culture and some are assuming it's a principle-driven culture. (In real world examples we could also have a power-driven culture.) Understanding that a difference exists, what their effects are, and which you're in is important. Given insufficient information to clearly determine, people are not wrong to operate in either regime.
Played through it twice. Once judging whether the actions violated the letter of the rule, and once whether they violated the spirit of the rule. The first time every decision was hard and I felt like some contradicted my earlier decisions. The second time was considerably easier and I got a higher agreement score.
I would have expected it to be easier to strictly apply a simple rule, but it turned out that interpreting the intent of the rule was less contentious and easier to apply. Ambulances in the park are not a violation, not on the grounds that some other rule overrides the no-vehicles rule, but that they don't violate the spirit of the rule.
And I suspect that most would disagree they do that (because most people would have a hard time thinking of themselves as rule violators) which would then lead to something like "the rule is stupid" or "this is pedantic".
No Vehicles In The Park is super interesting.
Yes, the question is phrased poorly and people easily confuse "is an ambulance a vehicle" with "do you agree with banning emergency vehicles in parks".
However if you look at the statistics you'll see a lot of people consider a boats, skateboards, sleds and even RC cars as vehicles.
The game does not ask whether the vehicle should be allowed in the park. It only asks whether the thing is a "vehicle" and whether it "is in" the park.
”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. ”
Is in the first screen.
I got 100% because I assumed it was not written by a lawyer. Context matters.
Yeah, this was my thought exactly. Anyone who says an ambulance is allowed is not following the rules of the game, which say to only consider the "no vehicles in the park" rule. In a real scenario, there would of course be other rules (the WW2 tank would be there by permission of the park management, for example). But if you only consider the one rule (as you were told to) then the answers are imo quite straightforward.
I agreed with 93% of people when I played the game, so it sure seems to me like there's broad agreement on this.
Which is a pointless question to ask because that's not how parks operate.
This entire test is flawed, and any conclusions derived from it are worthless.
The article carefully analyzed the way in which people on HN oversimplified or misunderstood the challenge of "vehicle in the park". Whilst you can disagree with their counter arguments - at least engage with the counter arguments. This reads more like a response to the original post rather than a response to the this actual essay.