return to table of content

Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed

wccrawford
124 replies
3d3h

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.

pavel_lishin
35 replies
3d2h

The game explicitly says to ignore everything except the one stated rule:

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).
mikewarot
25 replies
3d2h

The game explicitly says to ignore everything except...

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.

hibbelig
13 replies
3d2h

I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it.

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.

pixl97
6 replies
3d1h

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?

hibbelig
3 replies
2d22h

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.

pixl97
2 replies
2d21h

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.

Tijdreiziger
1 replies
2d19h

They’d be tired of your shit because you’d be acting like an ass, not because you’d be breaking any game rules.

solveit
0 replies
2d9h

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.

rileymat2
1 replies
2d22h

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.

pixl97
0 replies
2d21h

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.

nitwit005
3 replies
2d19h

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.

TeMPOraL
1 replies
2d12h

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.

nitwit005
0 replies
2d8h

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

latency-guy2
0 replies
2d18h

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.

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.

Qwertious
1 replies
2d13h

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.

psychoslave
0 replies
1d20h

Just as chess is a political analogy of real war.

mikewarot
7 replies
3d

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

Dylan16807
6 replies
2d22h

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?

brewdad
5 replies
2d19h

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.

Dylan16807
4 replies
2d19h

You have to go out of your way to get to this game space, so that's pretty rude and hard to defend.

hmcq6
3 replies
2d12h

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).

Dylan16807
2 replies
1d22h

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.

hmcq6
1 replies
1d12h

If the author cared about getting accurate results they wouldn't be posting an anonymous online survey.
Dylan16807
0 replies
14h25m

"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.

bigstrat2003
1 replies
2d20h

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.

whats_a_quasar
0 replies
2d19h

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.

navane
0 replies
3d2h

So your saying, what if the game was not hypothetical?

stereolambda
3 replies
3d1h

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.

bee_rider
1 replies
2d23h

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.

Dylan16807
0 replies
2d22h

But if something is an exception then by definition it's breaking the baseline rule, right?

Zak
0 replies
2d17h

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.

xboxnolifes
0 replies
2d22h

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.

seeloops
0 replies
2d19h

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.

nitwit005
0 replies
2d19h

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.

lucianbr
0 replies
3d2h

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.

PBnFlash
0 replies
3d1h

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.)

pixl97
34 replies
3d3h

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.

moolcool
21 replies
3d2h

The presuppositions are what make the question interesting. It's an explicit test of pedantry.

jodrellblank
16 replies
3d

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.

anonymouskimmer
7 replies
2d20h

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.

jodrellblank
6 replies
2d19h

I'm not following what you mean by likelihood of being hassled?

yukkuri
5 replies
2d18h

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.

jodrellblank
4 replies
2d17h

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?

anonymouskimmer
2 replies
2d14h

saying that people might answer based on whether they think they would expect to be hassled for doing those things?

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.

jodrellblank
1 replies
2d1h

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.

"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"

You can't even know that, that's just inviting speculative fearmongering, and therefore won't be interesting results.

anonymouskimmer
0 replies
2d

At this stage in my questions there is nothing to enforce, no rules yet.

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.

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 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:

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?

This point of view is assuming the privilege of being heard and rules changing to address the majority concern.

You can't even know that, that's just inviting speculative fearmongering, and therefore won't be interesting results.

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.

pixl97
0 replies
2d16h

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.

IIAOPSW
5 replies
2d10h

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?

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?”

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?

jodrellblank
4 replies
1d18h

"Is the pedantic answer really uninteresting if it leads to unintuitive answers?"

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?".

"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."

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.

"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"

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?

"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?"

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.

IIAOPSW
3 replies
1d11h

"is my car no longer a vehicle once it runs out of fuel and cannot function as a car?

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.

jodrellblank
1 replies
1d2h

"it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule, though it is now likely breaking some other rule about littering in the park."

Why isn't the WWII tank breaking the littering rule? Again your approach is leading to more and more pedantry instead of clearer rules.

"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..."

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.

IIAOPSW
0 replies
20h6m

We're in this stupid situation where the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed"

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.

Nevermark
0 replies
1d10h

If your car runs out of fuel in the park, it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule

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.

saagarjha
0 replies
2d7h

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!

adolph
0 replies
2d15h

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.

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.

j2kun
3 replies
3d2h

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.

krisoft
1 replies
2d19h

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.

Nevermark
0 replies
1d10h

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.

Dylan16807
0 replies
2d22h

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.

bagels
8 replies
2d21h

The ambulance violates the rule, but few would care that it does.

barrkel
7 replies
2d19h

Courts tend to care, when something goes wrong; e.g. the ambulance causing injury all by itself.

c22
6 replies
2d19h

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.

danielscrubs
3 replies
2d10h

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.

bagels
2 replies
2d10h

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.

danielscrubs
1 replies
1d11h

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.

bagels
0 replies
1d9h

Where? Again, I highly doubt that the police there don't ever exercise any discretion in at least some situations.

rcbdev
0 replies
1d18h

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.

barrkel
0 replies
1d4h

I think there's a degree of US specificity to your comment. The situation in the UK would be different.

IIAOPSW
2 replies
2d12h

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.

mtrower
1 replies
1d16h

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.

IIAOPSW
0 replies
1d11h

I went with the letter, and did in fact throw in wheel chairs and surfboards.

jprete
15 replies
3d3h

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.

jcranmer
4 replies
3d2h

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

So... motorized wheelchairs are vehicles?

throwuwu
0 replies
3d1h

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

jwagenet
0 replies
3d1h

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

Are motorized wheelchairs vehicles?

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

I’d say yes

jprete
0 replies
2d15h

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.

bagels
0 replies
2d21h

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

true_religion
3 replies
3d3h

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.

gifvenut
1 replies
2d21h

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

wizardwes
0 replies
2d19h

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?"

saagarjha
0 replies
2d7h

so long as it falls within the light cone

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

lolc
2 replies
3d2h

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.

sangnoir
1 replies
2d21h

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.

anonymouskimmer
0 replies
2d20h

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

card_zero
1 replies
3d3h

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

Endless regress detected, redo from start.

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

reichstein
0 replies
3d1h

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.

Rapzid
0 replies
2d21h

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

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

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

hodgesrm
5 replies
3d3h

Ambulances, for example, are clearly vehicles, and if they're in the park, the rules has been violated.

The game would be more interesting if the rule were "Threatening speech is not allowed."

CrazyStat
3 replies
3d3h

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.

dale_glass
2 replies
3d2h

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.

hodgesrm
1 replies
3d1h

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:

Each Receiving Party shall: (a) maintain all Confidential Information in confidence; and (b) exercise at least the same degree of care to safeguard the Confidential Information that it uses to safeguard its own Confidential Information (but no less than reasonable care).

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

Qwertious
0 replies
2d12h

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.

I don't think this is correct, I think they're arguing that uncontroversial moderation is impossible. That moderation will inevitably lead to drama.

IIAOPSW
0 replies
2d10h

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.

s1artibartfast
4 replies
3d2h

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

cmaggiulli
2 replies
2d22h

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

ziml77
0 replies
2d21h

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?

nradov
0 replies
2d21h

How about a hovercraft, which rides on an air cushion without actually touching the ground?

TeMPOraL
0 replies
2d9h

I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair.

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.

moolcool
4 replies
3d3h

"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.

masklinn
1 replies
3d2h

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.

moolcool
0 replies
2d23h

What about when they say “long haired freaky people need not apply”?

cmaggiulli
1 replies
2d22h

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

moolcool
0 replies
2d19h

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.

lr4444lr
2 replies
2d17h

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.

grfhtsdfvv
0 replies
2d13h

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!)

Feathercrown
0 replies
2d15h

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.

kryogen1c
2 replies
3d2h

That's because these things are not defined for us and are open to interpretation.

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.

card_zero
1 replies
3d2h

It's often useful to invoke the fictional "reasonable person".

pixl97
0 replies
3d1h

And yet this falls strongly on cultural norms and leads to a great number of issues where cultures mix.

Verdex
2 replies
3d3h

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.

denton-scratch
1 replies
3d2h

but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules

But the game isn't about "should the rule be ignored?". That's a different game.

Verdex
0 replies
3d1h

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.

anonymouskimmer
1 replies
2d20h

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%.

brewdad
0 replies
2d19h

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.

thomastjeffery
0 replies
2d22h

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.

pkasting
0 replies
3d3h

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.

mike_hock
0 replies
2d6h

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.

jstummbillig
0 replies
3d2h

because they try to apply other rules that are not part of the game.

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.

goodpoint
0 replies
2d4h

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.

dazamarquez
0 replies
3d3h

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.

danielscrubs
0 replies
2d11h

”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.

bigstrat2003
0 replies
2d20h

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.

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.

arp242
0 replies
3d3h

The only judgements that we're asked to make are "What is considered a vehicle" and "What is considered to be in the park".

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.

andybak
0 replies
2d6h

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.

glitchc
56 replies
2d23h

I did the quiz, got 93%. The common sense factor should prevail in all circumstances.

First, An implicit assumption. No vehicle implies no motor vehicle.

Second: The purpose of the park, namely to allow people to enjoy nature.

Third, the rationale for the rule: A motor vehicle is much faster and heavier than every other entity using the park. Ergo, it has the capacity to cause great harm (ex. running over a soccer team).

One can deep-dive all manner of philosophical arguments, but the principle of least harm while allowing maximum freedom is the true, unspoken rule. Ergo, any vehicle that can co-exist without hampering or endangering others enjoying the park is okay.

whakim
25 replies
2d22h

But if you look at the graph of response sets it clearly isn’t “common sense.” Most people don’t agree and don’t come close to agreeing and, as Dan says, this is a fairly trivial example which doesn’t delve into corner cases.

lukan
17 replies
2d21h

My takeaway is, the rule was just bad defined. If you define crystal clear rules, things are different.

And they usually are much clearer defined:

- no cars

- no drones

- no noise

(emergency cars allways gets an exception)

The tank example was not clear whether they just put it there because they wanted to, or because they had permission. So yes, when you have unclear rules, you get Drama.

So of course there remain corner cases. But they can be the exception and not the norm. I do remember some fallout for example when at corona times a police car with high speed chased a teenager through a park for not wearing a mask - nope, this was not an emergency, justifying annoying and endangering normal people in the park. But usually this does not happen.

whakim
7 replies
2d21h

But you’re just moving the goalposts. According to your rules, a toy car should be banned. Should we define in excruciating detail what a car is? Should we define an exact decibel level at which the noise threshold kicks in? People will always argue about what constitutes a rule violation - for example, you don’t believe that the police car should have been allowed to chase a teenager for failing to wear a mask, but I’m sure there’s plenty of people who disagree. Should we define “emergency” to the nth degree? Does the park need a 13-volume rulebook?

lukan
6 replies
2d21h

"Should we define an exact decibel level at which the noise threshold kicks in?"

Possible, but usually not necessary. With noise, any unnecessary noise is meant. If a baby cries that is hard to prevent, but the parent will still try. If some hooligans howling around - that should not happen.

"According to your rules, a toy car should be banned"

My rules would - like usually - contain a symbol as well, making it clear with "car" a real "car" is meant. And toy cars that do produce loud noise - yes, I would ban those. They can be really annoying.

It depends what kind of park it should be. There are parks, where even playing kids are not wanted. (fancy castle parks) In a city park, it depends on what the people want - and yes, you can have text under the park rule sign, which is how I know it.

Usually the guidline should be common sense and not disturbing others - but for those cases where people disagree - then you can refer to the rules.

whakim
5 replies
2d21h

As long as you’re appealing to “common sense” at any level then people will disagree. 1 in 10 people think piloting a commercial airliner over the park violates a “no vehicles in the park” rule, which seems crazy to me but obviously logical to others.

lukan
4 replies
2d20h

"but for those cases where people disagree - then you can refer to the rules."

whakim
3 replies
2d19h

I'm pretty sure we're just going round in circles now. The point is that people disagree about everything, so anything you leave up to "common sense" will cause disagreement. Any you can't possibly define rules for everything either.

lukan
2 replies
2d19h

No, "common sense" is the default. And where that is not enough - you can have rules for most common cases, to settle any dispute. And if there are edge cases that frequently cause disturbance where no clear rules cover them - then those cases can be put into the rules. It is not that complicated.

joshuamorton
1 replies
2d19h

Now assume the park contains a billion people, some of whom are explicitly interested in doing things you wish to disallow, and some are explicitly interested in annoying you. Both of these groups continually do antisocial things not defined by the rules, even as you add more.

Then then start a political party to defend the parks service for discriminating against them when you create rules seemingly targeted at their legitimate misbehavior.

Is it still simple?

lukan
0 replies
2d9h

A park does not contain a billion people.

A very big nation does.

That is the slight difference in between the 2 things. The difference in simple and complicated. Because the more people you have, yes, the more complicated it gets.

sangnoir
5 replies
2d21h

My takeaway is, the rule was just bad defined

To reflect real life: there is a reason why rules aren't specific and allow for judgement calls. Your clearer rules for instance, allows for manned flying vehicles like helicopters.

lukan
4 replies
2d21h

- no noise

Also you don't have to specify rules that are covered by general law. In most states it is illegal anyway, to fly low altitude with helicopters over populated areas for fun.

Arainach
2 replies
2d19h

Talk about a poorly defined rule.

Cell phone goes off? Straight to jail. Your child asks a question and you answer? Straight to jail. Shoes squeak on the pavement? Believe it or not, also straight to jail. Rattling wheel on your stroller? Still jail.

lukan
1 replies
2d9h

I think this is the most pedantic discussion I ever participated in. Rules for a park do not involve jail time, but leaving the park for offenders. And if it is a park excplicitely of seniors sensitive to noise, then yes - low decibel rules apply. If it is a common park, then obviously no. All that can be specified if necessary.

sangnoir
0 replies
2d

I think this is the most pedantic discussion I ever participated

That's the point of the "No vehicles in the park" game! People interpret rules differently - some skew pedantic, others are more "spirit of the law" types, but to varying extents - which is why for any 2 random people, the chances of agreeing on 100% of scenarios is vastly less than 50%

sangnoir
0 replies
2d12h

- no noise

...and we're back in subjective territory: how many dBs would count as "noise"?

Even under your additional no-noise rule, electric autogyros would be allowed at the park, which is not populated if it's of the national-park-service persuasion)

Delk
1 replies
2d20h

"No noise" is certainly not clear-cut. It may seem that way from any subjective perspective of what counts as noise, and it can seem so obviously right, but it's certainly not objective or universal. Which, I believe, is part of the point of the post.

Apart from that, let me give a real-world example of how clear-cut things become not so clear-cut, from a legal or rules point of view. Where I live, vehicles and other means of traffic used to be clearly divided into categories:

- Cars are, well, cars

- A motorcycle is a motorized two-wheeled vehicle with an engine displacement greater than 50 cubic centimetres or with a maximum speed of more than 45 km/h

- A moped is a motorized two-wheeled vehicle with both engine displacement and maximum speed less than above. (It's still a motorized vehicle but the legislation is somewhat laxer in parts due to lower power and speed.)

- A bicycle is a non-motorized, human-powered vehicle with at least two wheels

- Roller skates, skateboards, kick scooters etc. are not considered vehicles, so any person travelling on them is considered a pedestrian.

There may have been some other categories but you get the general idea.

Cars and motorcycles aren't allowed on bike paths. That would also include parks. Mopeds may be allowed on bike paths by an explicit sign, although you aren't likely to see one on a park path.

Then someone comes up with the electric bicycle.

Since the bicycle is defined as non-motorized, and an electric bike clearly has a motor, does it count as a bicycle or a moped? Is it allowed on bike paths? Or in parks?

It's not entirely an academic matter of definitions either. An e-bike running 30 or 35 km/h may not be fast enough to ride on the street among car traffic, and most people probably wouldn't be comfortable riding one there. Also, it's slow enough that most car drivers probably wouldn't want those in the street. But in addition to being motorized by definition, such an e-bike might also be practically kind of fast for urban bicycle paths. People on bicycle paths started feeling uncomfortable with e-bikes zooming by, not to mention pedestrians on shared pedestrian/bike paths.

So, where do e-bikes belong? Where are they allowed?

And once you've solved that one way or another, someone comes up with the electric scooter. Their speed may also vary from somewhat faster than walking speed to something resembling fast e-bikes. Is the person riding one a pedestrian? A bicyclist, similarly to e-bikes? Is the vehicle a moped instead? Should you be allowed to ride an electric scooter going 30 km/h in a park? One with a maximum speed of 25 km/h? If not, what about the lycra-wearing dude on a bike going upwards of 30 km/h?

If all of the above are allowed, why aren't mopeds or motorbikes if they stick to riding no more than 30 km/h? Because of the noise? What if they're electric?

And this is while still staying reasonably objective. If the electric bicyclist or scooter rider is disallowed from parks or bike paths but a road cyclist going over 30 km/h is allowed, in some significant number of people that's going to spark a sense of unfairness. If their views aren't heard, that can lead to resentment. Some of the people who don't care for any two-wheeled vehicles and who just want to enjoy a stroll don't want to be scared by anyone going too fast.

What should or shouldn't be allowed, or indeed what's reasonable and what isn't, definitely isn't clear-cut in a sense that people in general can agree on.

Forum or social media moderation is certainly going to be a lot more up to interpretation than that depending on people's values, personal experiences, context, etc.

lukan
0 replies
2d19h

Well, you can have speed limits. Forbid ICE engines (noise).

Also forbid or allow skateboarding (noise)

etc.

"What should or shouldn't be allowed, or indeed what's reasonable and what isn't, definitely isn't clear-cut in a sense that people in general can agree on."

Yeah, it is not. It depends what the park aims for to please and what the majority of its visitors expect. But you can have clear rules that cover most common cases.

Same with social media.

No need to cover ALL cases. Reality is complicated. And if a edge case happens often - you can make a new rule.

glitchc
0 replies
2d20h

Just picking up on the tank example, I said no since the tank would need a motor vehicle to get there.

noqc
6 replies
2d19h

What don't they agree on?

They don't agree that you should take a common sense approach to moderation, provided that you are actually doing the job of moderation? Or they don't agree that those were the instructions of the "no vehciles in the park game"?

If the game has instructed you to "pretend you are an enforcement official, and your only official guidance is this sign, understand that the purpose of this rule is to keep the park safe, but you might get reprimanded if you kick someone out of the park and you can't convince a jury that they were breaking this rule". This would probably be sufficient context to get everyone to agree that none of the examples given were examples. It seems like a lot of caveats, but most of these are implicit if you're an officer, which is a fair context to apply to moderators.

whakim
5 replies
2d17h

If more than 1 in 10 people think that a commercial airliner flying an airplane over the park constitutes a "vehicle in the park" (which I think is ridiculous but apparently plenty of other folks don't!) I'm not sure how you can logically conclude that anyone would come close to agreeing even given your modified set of instructions.

noqc
4 replies
2d14h

Suppose I ask you to play the game as an extremely petty and literal dictator, whose goal is to give as many citations as possible, any tenuous justification will do. Can you find a justification for giving that airliner a ticket?

Since that parameter of the game is completely unspecified, it's at least among the explanations for why someone might have answered that way. I haven't logically concluded anything except that the experiment does a terible job of being an experiment.

whakim
3 replies
2d14h

Sure. But you're just moving the goalposts from "what counts as a vehicle in the park" to "what counts as a vehicle in the park using even the most tenuous logic you could imagine." And I'm sure people could disagree about that, too - does the logic contain even a kernel of truth, or is it totally specious? The game simply shows that whenever you make a rule that requires any level of judgment whatsoever, what seems like "common sense" to one person may seem ludicrous to another.

noqc
2 replies
2d14h

You don't know what moving the goalposts is. You're moving the goalposts when you insist that my claim is that it is easy for people to agree, when my actual claim is, and always has been, that the experiment is not evidence of this.

whakim
1 replies
2d13h

That's not actually moving the goalposts ;)

Feel free to run your own experiment - I can almost guarantee that people will disagree with statements that seem like common sense to you, e.g. "a space station orbiting above a park is not in the park."

noqc
0 replies
2d

Did you read what I said at all?

ronald_raygun
4 replies
2d21h

least harm while allowing maximum freedom is the true

According to who?

Is your quadcopter allowed to videotape and infringe on my right to privacy?

Is the added noise of someone having a BBQ party in the park a harm or not? What about people drinking?

Ergo, any vehicle that can co-exist without hampering or endangering others enjoying the park is okay.

So are cop cars allowed? Cops routinely drive into parks to harass homeless people or arrest drug dealers. Are you ruining their enjoyment of the parks?

hattar
3 replies
2d21h

right to privacy

In a public park?

So are cop cars allowed

No, but a thing about rules is that they generally only work if there’s someone who is able and willing to enforce them.

ronald_raygun
1 replies
2d21h

In a public park?

There is a reasonable expectation of privacy. So if you went around with a big TV camera and just started sticking it in people's face, that would get the cops called on you real quick.

master-lincoln
0 replies
2d19h

Some Karens call cops for all kinds of reasons and cops often believe their interventions are backed by law when they aren't. What counts to answer "is it allowed" is what a court would rule I think

brewdad
0 replies
2d19h

Somewhere your right to film someone in public crosses over into harassment, which is illegal. That line will vary in 100 small ways if you ask 100 people to define it.

l33t7332273
4 replies
2d21h

Can an ambulance enter the park to save someone in a life threatening emergency?

If many trees fall in a natural disaster, can a tree removing vehicle enter the park?

krisoft
2 replies
2d21h

Can an ambulance enter the park to save someone in a life threatening emergency?

But that is not what the question asks. Of course we should let an ambulance enter. Especially if they are there to save someone’s life. They violate the rule, but we ignore the rule for this specific case.

The text of the quiz explicitly asks for this: “ You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules;”

And “Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).”

Simply many people are realy bad at this type of thinking. They know what they think the answer should be, and they answer accordingly, instead of answering as requested a much more contrived and technical question.

lostemptations5
0 replies
2d1h

It's not that we are bad at this type of thinking-- but who cares? There will always be weird scenarios and odd things-- when I played the game I was like "Is anyone dying here?'

Aside from the Ambulance thing-- no. It's just a park. So let's relax. Content moderation is also totally imprecise with edge cases. Most likely no one dies from it well or badly applied.

Arainach
0 replies
2d18h

Fewer and fewer rules have discretion. Automated cameras, LLMs, plea deals, minimum mandatory sentences, zero tolerance in schools.

Relying on people to do the right thing fails. American government got two good centuries out of "assuming good intent" before the lack of written rules was weaponized. In a perfect world we wouldn't need an explicit code of conduct for supreme court justices, but we are not in a perfect world.

bagels
0 replies
2d21h

Usually these things are applied with discretion, even if not literally allowed by a sign.

__MatrixMan__
4 replies
2d21h

I often wonder about electric bicycles. There are certain trails around here that are very strenuous to bike on. As a hiker, I don't mind dodging the occasional cyclist on them. Instead I just respect that cyclist. This works because they are few.

Lately, there have been many more cyclists on this trail. Many of which are less experienced. When I witness an accident I often make bets with my dog: I bet it was an ebike in violation of the "no motor vehicles" rule. I'm usually right.

Do you think it's appropriate to consider this controversial notion when deciding what rules to enforce?

Cyclists on ebikes tend to be less skilled than other cyclists, in potentially dangerous ways.

Because it's really not about the vehicle at all.

Rapzid
1 replies
2d21h

You shouldn't really need to wonder about this. Trail systems are starting to specify if motorized bicycles are allowed, and most of them only allow motor assist bikes.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
2d19h

I'm not uncertain about the rules. They're not allowed here. I'm uncertain about whether I'd like to see those rules enforced.

Mostly, I don't want to see rules enforced except when the consequences are significant: Be good, or be good at it, either works.

I feel a bit weird compromising on this stance because I think ebike riders are generally not skilled enough to safely navigate these trails.

MacsHeadroom
1 replies
2d21h

In most jurisdictions e-bikes are motor vehicles. Frequently if they are under 1000 watts they are in a special class of motor vehicle, same as mopeds/scooters. Technically they are typically not legal to have on bike paths, as motor vehicles. But this varies by jurisdiction.

Over the 1000 watt limit (1200w or 1500w some places) they tend to be considered motorcycles and require a license and break lights at a minimum to be legal.

Basically everyone ignores this and treats them like regular manual bicycles though.

ianburrell
0 replies
2d18h

Most places have rules for ebikes with pedal assist and power below certain limit, 250W in the US, are treated the same bicycles. Throttle and more power aren't ebikes but electric mopeds.

hilbert42
2 replies
2d22h

Clearly the rule is too broad and thus it's ambiguous. Simply restating the rules in precise terms will solve the problem.

I've been in parks where a dozens or more bylaws are listed at the entry to the park. Thus little is left to the imagination. If a dozen rules isn't enough then just add more [detail] until the right level of compliance is achieved.

whatshisface
0 replies
2d22h

Adding detail to rules doesn't increase compliance. In fact, as fewer people become willing to engage with their length and complexity, it probably decreases it.

squigz
0 replies
2d21h

Do you really think most people read and comply with a dozen or more rules listed at a park?

bobbylarrybobby
2 replies
2d22h

Ergo, any vehicle that can co-exist without hampering or endangering others enjoying the park is okay.

“I'm a good driver, so my lifted F-150 is such a vehicle”

spencerflem
1 replies
2d22h

hampers them, they have to be worried about being run over

Arainach
0 replies
2d18h

Who defines hampering? I'm absolutely hampered by the plague of groups of parents filling the entire width of trails with strollers 3 across but have no illusions a majority would agree to ban them.

Eridrus
2 replies
2d22h

I got 100% agreement with the simple rule of "no driving car-like things into/through the park".

ronald_raygun
1 replies
2d21h

So no RC-cars? It is a car-like thing (in fact it is just a very-small-car thing)

Eridrus
0 replies
2d19h

You can be obtuse if you like, but the point is that if you try and think of what the most likely interpretation is, you can nail it on the head with no issue.

raverbashing
1 replies
2d22h

Pretty much this

Also, the articles tries to pull the "there's no majority opinion" which is a sneaky trick and it's false. Because no, you can't consider the set as indivisible and one set of opinions different from the other, when they only differ by something like "if a tank should be considered". This is a similar problem to the air force finding out there's no standard human

And I'd say that, as much as lawyers like to play gotcha with the laws, I think you'd find the average lawyer is more realistic and practical than the "actually" takes here on this park problem

ronald_raygun
0 replies
2d21h

What are you talking about? If you have the set {A, B, C} and {A, B, not C}, those are two different sets. And the difference is going to matter precisely when C or not C comes into effect.

Like imagine two parks - you have Central Park in nyc that is full of statues, sculptures, etc. And you have a National Park that is essentially a pristine nature reserve with some back roads in it. The majority opinion of "if a tank should be considered" is going to change drastically between those two parks

lolinder
0 replies
2d21h

The question of what hamper is or endangers others is far from objective, though. I would interpret the rule to ban skateboards and drones from the park if it were up to me because I find that they get in the way of my personal enjoyment of spaces like that, but I know plenty of other people who would disagree with that interpretation.

jml7c5
0 replies
2d21h

You are clearly in the majority. But let's pick another person at random — what is the probability that you agree on all questions? (Hint: it's not 93%!)

You are aligned with majority opinion, but you still disagree with most people.

---

There is some similarity to the problem the USAF faced when they wanted to make a cockpit that fit the average pilot:

Using the size data he had gathered from 4,063 pilots, Daniels calculated the average of the 10 physical dimensions believed to be most relevant for design, including height, chest circumference and sleeve length. These formed the dimensions of the “average pilot,” which Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 per cent of the range of values for each dimension.

[...]

Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

dan-robertson
0 replies
2d23h

I don’t think the problem is that people disagree on obvious non-edge-cases

airstrike
0 replies
2d22h

but the principle of least harm while allowing maximum freedom is the true, unspoken rule

Exactly. Life and liberty, in that order

dahart
25 replies
3d3h

The problem with the ‘no vehicles in the park’ example is that the question is intentionally vague. I feel like we do ourselves a disservice to hold this particular example up as a way to conclude that everyone disagrees and it’s impossible to agree and let’s throw up our hands. The way forward is to put more precision into the rule statement. And yes, there might be diminishing returns and ;it might even be impossible for every last person to agree, but that’s an actively harmful take-away if it’s possible to get 90% or 95% or 99% to agree by just being slightly more specific. A huge portion of the ‘no vehicles in the park’ questions are already answered by existing US aviation laws, for example. Another huge swatch of the questions would have been answered if the rule was ‘no motor vehicles in the park’. By intentionally withholding the actual rules, this survey doesn’t strike me as evidence that agreeing is hard, it seems like more of a trick question.

imadj
11 replies
3d3h

A huge portion of the ‘no vehicles in the park’ questions are already answered by existing US aviation laws

It's just an illustration of how a seemingly simple rule at first glance is open to be interpreted differently.

Sure you can add nuances and be more specific about edge cases, but every edge case has its own edge cases, you're not solving the problem by this strategy, only digging a bigger hole and increasing overhead for yourself.

The author could've used any number of rules and laws and still came up with edge cases where the audience would to fail to reach an unanimous decision. The US law is full of loopholes, adding more rules isn't a solution, it merely change the question. If you commit to that strategy, of eliminating ambiguity by adding more rules, you'd be playing catch-up forever.

dahart
10 replies
3d2h

What I’m objecting to is the binary goalpost of ‘unanimous’. We don’t need unanimous in order to statistically improve the level of agreement. I disagree that covering edge cases makes the hole bigger. The number of edge cases, and the level of agreement are two different things, and it’s possible to improve agreement even if the number of edge cases goes up.

The author could’ve used any number of rules and laws and still came up with edge cases

And yet, the author could have stipulated motor vehicles and a 400 ft FAA air ceiling boundary to the park, and most of the trick questions in that survey that generated disagreement would suddenly flip to everyone answering them correctly.

I don’t understand what your suggested alternative is. We already continuously refine our laws to cover edge cases. That is the takeaway for the contrived ‘no vehicles’ survey. Are you saying we shouldn’t be improving laws because it’s impossible, or what?

denton-scratch
6 replies
3d2h

And yet, the author could have stipulated motor vehicles and a 400 ft FAA air ceiling boundary to the park, and most of the trick questions in that survey that generated disagreement would suddenly flip to everyone answering them correctly.

Sure; but people don't read a screed of small-print legalese when walking into a park with a matchbox car in their pocket. And similarly, people don't read 20 pages of legalese terms-of-use before posting to a forum. The rules for getting on with those around us need to be as simple as the Ten Commandments. Violating rules about what's allowed in a park generally doesn't lead to litigation, so you don't need a litigation-proof legal code to express those rules.

Many schools have a small set of concise rules constructed by the students, and I wish national laws were more like that.

dahart
4 replies
3d1h

This is a new different goalpost, right? The survey was about how clear the rule is, about whether the rule can be understood, not whether people will read or follow it.

Btw I feel like I didn’t propose a screed of small-print legalese. I’m asking why the actual survey couldn’t say ‘no motor vehicles in the park, up to 400ft AGL’, and compare the results to ‘no vehicles in the park’. That statement without any legalese or fine print would have covered most of the tricky answers, and this whole survey could have been used to show how easy it is to make progress with relatively simple refinements.

denton-scratch
3 replies
2d21h

1. "In the park" shall be construed as meaning below 400ft.

2. "A vehicle" shall include:

  2.1 any conveyance with two or more wheels, suitable for transporting one or more adult humans

  2.2 any powered flying object, whether or not it is capable of conveying people of whatever size
3. This rule does not apply to the following vehicles:

  3.1 Emergency vehicles attending an emergency

  3.2 Wheelchairs, when being used by a registered disabled person
I could go on ad nauseam; you simply can't cover all the cases. You have to accept that rules have to be interpreted; and once you accept that, it's clear that simpler rules are better. Ideally, The Golden Rule would be enough: treat others as you would expect to be treated yourself. But a lot of people treat that rule as the specimen example that proves that rules are made to be broken.

dahart
2 replies
2d20h

Not sure if we’re talking past each other; I’m not arguing that “all” cases can be covered, nor whether rules have to be interpreted. I agree with you that simple rules are better, which is why I tried giving an example of one that is much simpler than your example (“no motor vehicles in the park below 400 ft AGL”). Yes it’s clear that you can, if you want, construct a very long and complicated list, but that doesn’t prove anything, right? Most parks and swimming pools and gyms have a longer list than your example. What would be interesting, and what I wish the ‘no vehicles in the park’ author had done, is measuring how much better adding 1 word or 5 words or 100 words is compared to leaving the rule super vague. I would predict there’s easy low-hanging fruit with just a few words that would correct the majority of their trick questions, and then diminishing returns with a longer and longer list. A carefully worded middle ground is probably going to best balance trying to maximize conciseness and simplicity and clarity while minimizing confusion.

That said, your example rule list above, if it was used for ‘no vehicles in the park’, would undermine the author’s point and answer most of the questions definitively without confusion. Your example would demonstrate that adding rules increases clarity and reduces confusion.

denton-scratch
1 replies
2d9h

My example was meant as satire, making fun of your "400ft AGL" amendment. And I don't think my example answers questions "without confusion"; the more specific you make the rules, the more cracks and gaps you create for litigious-minded park users to squeeze through.

As far as this applies to moderation: having simple rules, with an overarching "Use your common sense" rule, seems more practical than trying to make rules that cover all cases. Of course, that requires moderators that possess common sense.

dahart
0 replies
2d

litigious-minded park users to squeeze through

Again, new/different goal post, this wasn’t the question being asked. Litigious-minded people often aren’t arguing the rule was unclear, sometimes they argue the rule is wrong or the intent was misguided or the rule was clear but didn’t cover their needs. It’s a valuable question in real world parks, but not what we were talking about here, not relevant to the ‘no vehicles in the park’ survey or Dan’s blog post.

My example was meant as satire, making fun of your “400ft AGL” amendment.

I don’t get it, could you explain it? I don’t see how doing the opposite of what I suggested and adding a bunch of new rules makes fun of what I offered. That explanation just makes it seem like you didn’t quite understand my suggestion.

I don’t think my example answers questions “without confusion”

You should go back through the survey again and just see for yourself. You partially defined what “vehicle” means, and you partially defined what “in the park” means, and you carved out some meaningful exceptions. This fixes a bunch of the actual trick questions in the survey that depend on not having defined what those words mean. If your point is that the survey author could have asked other different trick questions, then you’re implicitly acknowledging that your rule set improved the clarity of the rule ‘no vehicles in the park’.

the more specific you make the rules, the more cracks and gaps you create

Are you suggesting that the size of the gaps doesn’t matter and that the coverage of the rule doesn’t matter either? Number of cracks is independent of overall rule clarity. The question is about coverage, about rule clarity. It doesn’t matter if you create more cracks and gaps, if they’re smaller, if the sum-total surface area of the cracks is smaller than what you had before, and if the clear and unambiguous coverage of the rule gets larger.

That said, I don’t think it’s even true that you’re creating more gaps. Think of it like this: every separate individual usage of a ‘vehicle in the park’ is a crack or potential exception to the rule. “no vehicles in the park” is not well defined, and it leaves a HUGE number of individual cracks. See it not as one large gap but thousands or millions of unique use-cases. Adding specificity to “no vehicles in the park” can limit a lot of the potential use-cases without adding any new ones. This is what adding the single word “motor” does - it rules out all motor vehicles without adding any new vehicles, because the prior rule was all vehicles. Adding “motor” doesn’t add any cracks or gaps, it removes thousands of otherwise ambiguous cases.

spc476
0 replies
2d20h

When I was in high school [1] students were given a rule book on the first day of school each year. It was always amusing to read the weapons rule: "No weapons are allowed, which include, but are not limited to ... " followed by a paragraph long list of "weapons." Many of the rules were like that, "blah blah which includes, but limited to ... " I can only conclude that such lists were the result of some student somewhere arguing that "this isn't a weapon."

[1] In the, at the time, second or third largest school district in the US.

imadj
2 replies
3d2h

We already continuously refine our laws to cover edge cases.

Exactly the author's point. There's no set of rules that clear every possibility. You just keep adapting, and the other side will keep involving.

the author could have stipulated motor vehicles and a 400 ft FAA air ceiling boundary to the park

Then there'd been new 'trick' questions with new edge cases where people are split too.

I think you might have misunderstood the expierement, did you get to the end where the author explain his intention? This set of questions aren't a challenge, just a game to illustrate a point.

dahart
0 replies
3d1h

did you get to the end

Yes, I did. The end is precisely the annoying part, and is making the same ‘it’s hopeless’ argument as the blog post here. The author said “Some people think there could be simple rules […] I want to problematize this.”, and “ pinning down a definition is usually impossible”, and “You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem”. He concedes that one can reduce the problem in the middle of paragraph 5 after stating over and over that the problem is insurmountable.

I think some folks are misunderstanding my comment; I’m aware that moderation and laws are hard, and that edge cases are fractal whack-a-mole. I’m pushing back on the summary take-away message, on the framing. It’s a subtlety, but I think an important one. I don’t think the right message to send as the top and foremost idea is that it’s impossible, and making it any better is a complete and total slog that introduces exponential problems. I think a better message is that words can be interpreted in many ways, so care is required, and with effort it’s possible to make significant improvements. And I think the ‘no vehicles’ in the park could have easily demonstrated that just a few words would have fixed the bulk of the issue, but the author chose not to in order to serve the framing he intended.

Dylan16807
0 replies
2d22h

Then there'd been new 'trick' questions with new edge cases where people are split too.

Yeah, and they'd be orders of magnitude less important.

Agreement across a selection of events, weighted by likelihood of actually happening, would skyrocket.

The amount of effort it takes to improve agreement by a certain amount is very relevant to the point being made.

ibejoeb
6 replies
3d3h

Yes, that's true. But in the act of crafting a deliberately ambiguous rule, it teaches others in the position of crafting real rules that they must be thoughtful in doing so.

It is easy to phone it in and act like "do what I mean, not what I say." If you're being thorough, you could iteratively refine the rule and replay those 20-something questions to see how each iteration affects the specificity of the language. A simple rewrite like "The operation of motorized vehicles on park grounds is prohibited" makes a lot of those questions moot, but there are still unhandled cases. I see how it can be a useful exercise, especially for inexperienced rule makers.

dahart
5 replies
3d3h

Yes, exactly! ‘no vehicles in the park’ should be used as a teaching moment, and not as an example of why we can’t or shouldn’t try harder. It would be really interesting if the survey had been A/B tested to find the minimum additional verbiage that brought maximum agreement. Don’t most do people know at some level that laws are hard to make and often have corner-cases, loopholes, or unintended consequences? We don’t conclude that laws are impossible to make perfect, we simply keep refining the laws, right?

Hasu
4 replies
3d2h

We don’t conclude that laws are impossible to make perfect, we simply keep refining the laws, right?

Uh, we definitely do conclude that it's impossible to make the laws perfect. And we have an entire institution with the responsibility for refining laws (the judiciary), and they disagree with each other all the time.

This is very strong evidence that it is, in fact, impossible to get people to agree on what's allowed. With a dedicated institution, you can get close enough for government work (literally) but people are still arguing over the meaning of the Constitution even after hundreds of years of refinement.

I think programmer-types think, "Well a detailed-enough specification of all the rules is just like a computer program" and sure, it is. Except that computer programs are written in unambiguous language and interpreted by machines that have perfect understanding, and we still write imperfect programs that don't do what we want all the time.

dahart
3 replies
3d2h

So you’re saying we should stop refining the laws because it’s impossible?

Hasu
2 replies
3d2h

I'm not sure how you interpret "It is impossible to make laws perfect and unambiguous for all humans everywhere" as "We should just give up on refining laws because we can't get to perfection". We refine enough to have a working system, which is nowhere close to having no disagreement.

dahart
0 replies
3d2h

What’s the point of saying something’s impossible? Why frame it that way? Should we keep trying, or no? Perfect isn’t the goal, and “impossible to make perfect” isn’t a useful summary, right? It seems like that’s what you saying, and I agree. The only reasonable question is whether it’s possible to improve, and the answer is yes it is possible to improve.

Dylan16807
0 replies
2d22h

I'm not sure how you interpret "It is impossible to make laws perfect and unambiguous for all humans everywhere" as "We should just give up on refining laws because we can't get to perfection".

Because the sentence you quoted was "We don’t conclude that laws are impossible to make perfect, we simply keep refining the laws, right?"

"conclude" here means a full conclusion, stop and do nothing else.

By quoting that entire sentence, and saying "we definitely do conclude that", it sounds like you're arguing we shouldn't bother with refining. And nothing else in your post praised the attempt to refine.

Even now that you've corrected that misreading of your post, it means you were arguing against a strawman. dahart was just saying not to give up.

pixl97
3 replies
3d3h

it seems like more of a trick question.

Eh, I don't exactly but this may be because I've hung around lawyers too much in my life. Everything is argued at the border between black and white, the size of the grey zone can differ pretty significantly. In addition your upbringing can have a significant impact on what you view as black or white in the first place.

There is a reason that in the US alone there are millions of pages defining laws and rules. It's the fact we cannot make simple rules that cover the majority of human behaviors. Humans will always push the grey zone either by intention or complete accident.

dahart
2 replies
3d2h

Right! We keep arguing about the gray areas, and in the mean time we make headway in refining them and defining what is black and what is white, little by little, right? Lawyers don’t usually argue over things that are well defined though, unless they’re trying to make a contrived point. They treat the ‘no vehicles in the park’ example differently than most people. The example invites assumption. It would be entirely different if the example said the park’s pathways are public sidewalks and as such are under the same laws. Then it would be more obvious that the survey results isn’t exhibiting disagreement, it’s exhibiting lack of knowledge and incorrect assumptions of the existing laws.

You’re right we have a lot of laws, but I’d argue the laws aren’t actually that complex, framing it as millions of pages might not be accurate for which laws apply to me. Each state has their own laws, the majority of which are similar. For any given topic, say driving in traffic, most of it is covered by a modest number of rules & pages. The large number of total pages in US law is more about the large number of topics and behaviors and technologies. It’s true that a simple shared rule cannot cover driving a car, copying a movie, getting into a fight, trading stocks, and food safety all at the same time.

Edit: for fun, I just looked it up and the US federal code is ~60k pages. It’s large, but it’s easy to see why looking at the list of 54 titles https://uscode.house.gov/ I don’t see page counts for any state codes I’d tried to lookup, but I’m not surprised if it’s similar. On one hand, to your point, it’s a lot of laws. On the other hand it’s almost surprising that state and federal laws combined are less than a million pages, considering the breadth and enormity of the topics that is covering hundreds of millions of people.

pixl97
1 replies
3d

This is also complicated by a few other factors, for example, what is counted as a law.

Are building codes laws? If we consider them as laws, you have to take those codes over 50 states, plus any differences in local municipalities in effect.

dahart
0 replies
2d22h

Yes building codes are laws, I’d say. You do have to take all of them, if your point is to show how many combined laws there are. You do not have to take all of them if your question is what are the rules about building a single-family home on this plot I own in Pasadena, CA.

This is relevant to all the laws. I’m not part of a bank or a factory or a railroad, and I live and work in one specific city in a specific state. Therefore, the vast majority of laws that exist don’t apply or matter to me right now. The sum of laws that do apply to me aren’t that big or that complicated. Lots of other people have different situations, and banks and factories exist, so this is why we need to have lots of laws. I’m hopefully just stating the obvious, I’m just saying having a lot of laws isn’t a problem, and doesn’t demonstrate the thesis that it’s impossible to agree on what’s allowed. All it really demonstrates is there’s a lot of people that do a lot of different things.

boredhedgehog
1 replies
3d2h

A huge portion of the ‘no vehicles in the park’ questions are already answered by existing US aviation laws, for example.

Which evolved by arguing about rules, because landowners had the reasonable and probably correct expectation that their property rights extended upwards to infinity.

Another huge swatch of the questions would have been answered if the rule was ‘no motor vehicles in the park’.

It's trivial that changing the rule to make it narrower changes the outcome. But then people won't agree about whether the change should be made. How annoying a vehicle is isn't determined by its method of propulsion.

ronald_raygun
0 replies
2d21h

This is why the tank example is the most interesting one. Because clearly by any standard it is a vehicle in the park, but clearly its function in the park is completely out of scope of what the rule is trying to achieve.

bee_rider
19 replies
2d22h

IMO another aspect that could have been highlighted is that really rule-enforcement is “part of the game,” despite any attempt to take it out, and people will engage in strategies that attack the rules.

There are lots of strategies that attack the rules in the pedantry space. One could post odious content that carefully is constructed to not break the rules. Or post odious content that breaks the rules in a manner similar to the rule-breaking of somebody you don’t like, to highlight uneven enforcement. Post rule breaking content, but of a type which is generally non-odious and general not banned. Try to find room to quibble about what exactly justified an exception.

I think the WWII tank is an interesting question. It is clearly a vehicle, so not allowed by the rule. But it is non-functioning, so it isn’t at risk of violating the most likely intentions of the rule (to prevent noise and injuries). It is an unusual artifact in that it is a monument to a war which is generally considered (to a basically unmatched degree) to have been just. If we allow the tank, do we allow an Iraq war or Vietnam war tank? We just need to solve the question of which wars are just, first, I guess, so to enforce our no vehicles bylaw we’ll have to solve all of politics. Or maybe add a “no war related monuments rule” which seems nice until a veterans group wants to donate a couple benches with little plaques on them.

anonymouskimmer
16 replies
2d20h

It is clearly a vehicle, so not allowed by the rule. But it is non-functioning

If it's non-functioning it can't be a vehicle. Even without thinking deeply about it this seemed obvious to me.

Reducing to the absurd, at what point can you strip down a vehicle until it is no longer a vehicle? Down to the powertrain? Down to the axles and wheels? Is a single uninflated tire without a wheel a vehicle?

whats_a_quasar
8 replies
2d20h

Well, this sort of illustrates the point, because to me an object that would be a vehicle if it was functioning is clearly still a vehicle. A broken-down vehicle vehicle is still a vehicle, even if it's non-functioning. A car doesn't stop being a vehicle while it's in the shop.

Perhaps there is another category for vehicles which are irreparably damaged and will never function again. But even then, I want to define it as a broken vehicle, a sub-type of a vehicle.

anonymouskimmer
5 replies
2d19h

A car doesn't stop being a vehicle while it's in the shop.

To me a car doesn't stop being a car, but it stops being a vehicle when it is not capable of a vehicular function.

But even then, I want to define it as a broken vehicle, a sub-type of a vehicle.

We disagree.

Would you consider the exterior armor frame of a tank resting on treads to be a vehicle, even if lacking all of the internal parts? Would you consider the internal parts to be a vehicle even if lacking all of the external framing? If it can't move (or carry people/objects) without mechanical repairs is where I draw the line. If adding fuel, oil, or any other consumable allows it to move then I'm fine calling a non-functional vehicle a vehicle.

The real question is how many people did it take to carry that non-functional tank into the park? If they moved it in with another vehicle then it's obviously a violation of the vehicle ordinance. But carrying it in (as long as they didn't use something like logs to roll it on) is fine.

pdonis
2 replies
2d17h

> as long as they didn't use something like logs to roll it on

Why would that be an issue? Logs aren't vehicles.

sundvor
0 replies
2d15h

B.C.'s Quest For Tires would beg to differ.

anonymouskimmer
0 replies
2d14h

When they're specifically selected and arranged for a vehicular purpose I see them as such. Just as I saw both the sled and wagon as vehicles

throwawayqqq11
1 replies
2d12h

Imagine being asked to count all vehicles in a picture. Would you count your dysfunctional tank frame too? I would because i would certainly lack the context knowledge of its interior. Others might not.

Imagine being asked to remove all road blocking vehicles from a park. Would you consider the sales trailer someone got somehow in there, even though it basicaly just a frame without engine too?

The point here is context and changing it does not effect your definition but your interpretation.

anonymouskimmer
0 replies
2d10h

Imagine being asked to count all vehicles in a picture. Would you count your dysfunctional tank frame too? I would because i would certainly lack the context knowledge of its interior. Others might not.

Here we were specifically told it was non-functional. Just as I wouldn't label an AI generated image of a person a picture of a person if there was a sign in the picture saying that it was AI generated. People make assumptions. But when told that a possible assumption is wrong from the beginning I assume I'm being told correctly.

Imagine being asked to remove all road blocking vehicles from a park. Would you consider the sales trailer someone got somehow in there, even though it basicaly just a frame without engine too?

I'd ask the person asking me to do this for clarification. For your specific example a trailer, regardless, falls under "vehicle" for me. Unless it's on blocks or something that would prevent it from operating.

The point here is context and changing it does not effect your definition but your interpretation.

What's contextually salient to me given the simple rule of "no vehicles in the park" is what is a vehicle and what is "in the park". Not the presumed purpose of the rule, because I'm not going to assume I know what that is. This is why I have long, long favored (for most of my life going back to K-12 schooling) people telling "why" as opposed to just "what" when it comes to rules.

No, I'm not autistic or on that spectrum. My assumptions just don't always line up with those of other people, and a general desire to be a rule follower conflicts with another desire to not screw things up because of rules or their lack.

throwaway11460
1 replies
2d18h

An RV that has last moved decades ago, doesn't have wheels anymore, has been built around (terrace etc) and is basically part of the land plot is still a vehicle?

Laws of my country clearly say it's no longer a vehicle if it didn't move for a long time or can't move anymore, and thus has to be registered and permitted as a building.

The laws also say it is a building and not a vehicle if it performs the function of one.

kurthr
0 replies
2d17h

If you file for PNO (Planned Non Operation) it is not a registered vehicle.

Alternately, if your car runs out of gas, it is no longer a vehicle.

There are a whole range of silly distinctions.

rini17
1 replies
2d20h

That's irrelevant. Someone leaving broken cars in the park or even only a few parts will certainly be considered a violation by a majority. To your objections they might say - it's littering anyway and we don't want that do we?

wisty
0 replies
2d20h

That's littering.

bee_rider
1 replies
2d11h

Well, ok. I think a non-functioning vehicle is still a vehicle but I should have known that calling something obvious in this context is the most sure fire way of kicking off some pedantry. In any case, I think it is just a matter of definition and not very interesting as a result.

anonymouskimmer
0 replies
2d10h

I think it sparked off some interesting discussions. So thanks.

MenhirMike
1 replies
2d18h

Somewhat related, that's how guns are classified in the US: The Gun is "just" the lower receiver. Even though that one is useless by itself, it is the foundational piece of it to which one attaches all the accessories. (And even then there's loopholes, like how a 80% lower receiver is just a piece of metal and not a gun yet)

With a car, I guess one answer would be "The part that has the VIN on it is the car", but apparently there's no universally agreed on location. I would probably go for the drive shaft.

LgWoodenBadger
0 replies
2d17h

“Lower” and “upper” receivers don’t apply to all guns, just certain types that were designed that way, e.g. the AR-15. I’d estimate more guns don’t have separate/distinct receivers (if the term even applies to them in the first place)

vunderba
0 replies
1d10h

To me, you're not qualifying your definition well enough. For how long does it have to be non-functioning in order to cease being classified as a vehicle?

For example, a car that is temporarily in an auto shop for repairs? If your intent is to say that it's no longer classified as a vehicle until it is once again functional, then I think you'll find that your definition deviates pretty significantly from a conventional dictionary definition (a device intended for transport).

That's a relatively large desync which will only hinder consistent communications with the vast majority of English speakers.

psychoslave
1 replies
1d4h

We just need to solve the question of which wars are just, first, I guess, so to enforce our no vehicles bylaw we’ll have to solve all of politics.

That one is easy. Just war is the one that bring many benefits to me and my friends (well, whatever you call my social intimate circle), while destroying those other evil dudes that cast some shadow on my stable predictable world resources exploitation, all that only at the cost of nameless plebeian peons.

Or said otherwise, war is unjust when it negatively affects "the mighty me who can unleash propaganda to manufacture consent toward whatever fits my agenda".

AndrewKemendo
0 replies
1d3h

Also known as “Might makes right”

mostlylurks
12 replies
2d17h

The presented trichotomy between no moderation, moderation, and federated moderation is false.

Moderation can also be accomplished via a user-level web-of-trust system, where each user can choose who to trust as a moderator, and this trust can propagate recursively to the people trusted by the people you trust, and at each level (even when manually choosing people to trust) this trust can be fuzzy (not full trust vs no trust, but potentially something in between those two), and rapidly decreasing the more distant you get from those you've manually chosen to trust. To solve the issues of spam, censorship, and convenience simultaneously, you simply assign to users some moderators on the trust list by default and allow users to opt out of that trust.

This approach is also applicable in the same manner to the similar problem of curation (i.e. choosing what to highlight instead of what to hide), where the same four approaches are also applicable with largely the same pros and cons.

pdonis
5 replies
2d17h

Does the system you describe actually exist and work anywhere?

lr4444lr
3 replies
2d17h

I'd say it works quite well here. The author is assuming disagreement on HN is some kind of failure. I don't see it that way at all, and sometimes even make comments on opposite sides of an issue within the same issue just because I recognize compelling points in a controversial topic. It's the topics that get monopolar responses that are the least useful and interesting to me.

pdonis
2 replies
2d15h

> I'd say it works quite well here.

Huh? There are only two moderators here and they aren't chosen by users, nor do users have to make any choice about "trusting" them. The HN moderation system bears no resemblance at all that I can see to what the post I responded to was describing.

CamelCaseName
1 replies
2d15h

Who's the second moderator? Dang and?

pdonis
0 replies
2d14h

Oh, that's right, dang is the only moderator now. There used to be two.

lmz
0 replies
2d17h

Sounds somewhat like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato#Trust_metric - not sure how well it actually worked.

ctrw
4 replies
2d17h

I tried building a reddit style baord using that. The main issue became that calculating weights was more expensive than everything else combined. At one extreme you have the trust matrix which you just multiply with itself to get the nth hop scores, at the other you had the linked list graph traversal. Neither were good solutions.

With how much matrix multiplication were doing for machine learning using the matrix approach now might be feasible.

zizee
1 replies
2d17h

If I am understanding correctly, did you consider the option of calculating weights in the client?

ctrw
0 replies
2d16h

I would be leaking all social graph data and all voting data to each person using the service. So it's a no go from the start.

simcop2387
0 replies
2d17h

That might work nicely with a lot of the sparse matrix research going on too, since I suspect that the trust matrix should be very sparse

TeMPOraL
0 replies
2d7h

The problem description sounds vaguely PageRank-y, so maybe similar trick can be applied?

Mentlo
0 replies
18h36m

For this to work you'd need both a high coverage of users providing feedback signal (not happening in real cases), a low penalty of initial no-moderation to allow the system to find equilibrium, and relatively high time-invariance of system to ensure the penalty doesn't recur.

The point of the vehicle in the park game is that complexity isn't always reducible to a tractable problem. Which is fine, and we should learn to engineer systems that embrace the fuzziness, rather than assuming the problem is tractable and solvable.

xeromal
10 replies
3d2h

I wish there was a button I could hit to format this site into something readable about 8-10 inches wide.

lucianbr
5 replies
3d2h

Un-maximize your browser window, then resize it to 9 inches wide.

xeromal
4 replies
3d2h

Too lazy to do that. Need a button

brabel
1 replies
3d2h

In Firefox (and I think many browsers) there's a button. It's called "reader view". It looks like a page with some text on it.

xeromal
0 replies
3d2h

Thank you this is exactly what I'm looking for

bigstrat2003
1 replies
2d20h

You have a button. It's that button right next to the window's close button.

xeromal
0 replies
2d20h

Got a screenshot? I don't see it. My screen reader shows me a minus and an X

fabianholzer
0 replies
3d2h

Copy your favorite classless css framework into this: https://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/make-bookmarklet.html - drag the bookmarklet into your favorite bar, and there you are :)

body { max-width: 9in; }

Could be a minimalistic starting point ;)

alexmolas
0 replies
3d2h

Some months ago I did https://danluucination.github.io/, which is danluu site but with some CSS

Retr0id
0 replies
3d2h

On Firefox, this button is Ctrl+Alt+R

5cott0
0 replies
3d1h

Something we can all agree on.

jedberg
9 replies
2d23h

I got 93% agreement based on a simple rule: It's a vehicle if it is touching the ground and powered with a motor.

And if I were moderating a community, which I have done a lot of in the past, I would clarify the rules as soon as this disagreement popped up. This isn't a great experiment because it doesn't involve any judgement calls -- you can apply a (pretty simple) objective ruleset here.

The main areas where I disagreed with the majority are a police car and ambulance. The police car and ambulance are clearly vehicles. People who said no were applying other rules. But again that rule is simple -- emergency services are exempt when responding to emergencies.

Moderating actual communities is a lot more difficult because there aren't a simple objective set of rules you can apply. Judgement calls are necessary. We ran this experiment on reddit for a while. We would present the user with a link and ask them "is this spam". It was rare for a link to get 100% (or even 98%) yes. Only the very most obvious cases. Otherwise most links would be closer to 60-70% if it were "spammy". And only things like wikipedia would get close to 0%. Everything else in between was a spectrum.

That is what makes moderating hard.

The conclusion of this experiment is correct, but I would say the methods are deeply flawed.

bee_rider
5 replies
2d22h

Is the tank a vehicle?

jedberg
4 replies
2d22h

The question specified that the tank can't move under its own power because it has no motor anymore, so no.

If the motor still worked and it was moved through the park with said motor, then yes.

The real question here is how did they move the tank? Most likely with a powered vehicle, which would of course violate the rule. But I'm sure there would be a permitting process for temporarily allowing certain vehicles in the park, such as construction equipment.

ronald_raygun
3 replies
2d21h

Okay so if we have tank with no motor is not a vehicle, and a tank with a motor is a vehicle then I have some follow up questions for you.

- Is a tank with a motor that doesn't function a vehicle?

- Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no keys in existence, a vehicle?

- Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no wheels, a vehicle?

- Is a tank, empty of gas (so unable to move by its own power), but otherwise functional a vehicle?

jedberg
2 replies
2d20h

Your questions are irrelvant. It didn't ask "is this a vehicle". It asked "is this a vehicle in the park". Is the tank touching the ground (yes) moving under its own power:

- Is a tank with a motor that doesn't function a vehicle?

No

- Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no keys in existence, a vehicle?

No

- Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no wheels, a vehicle?

No

- Is a tank, empty of gas (so unable to move by its own power), but otherwise functional a vehicle?

No

Because in none of those cases can it move through the park under its own power.

Like I said, there is no subjectivity here. The rules are simple and clear.

ronald_raygun
1 replies
2d18h

Your questions are irrelvant. It didn't ask "is this a vehicle". It asked "is this a vehicle in the park".

To be a vehicle in the park, it must first be a vehicle.

But your definition is bad. It basically hinges on it being able to move, which means it's "vehicle-ness" can come into an out of existence quiet flimsily (like if it's is out of gas, a tire gets popped, or the keys are lost suddenly an otherwise functional car/tank completely ceases to be a vehicle and just becomes metal?). So like you could imagine sitting there, putting gas into a car, siphoning it out, putting it back in, siphoning it back out, etc etc. Are you really in that process, changing something fundamental about the car?

Another interesting question, is let's say we go to a storage lot, and we find a car that's been in storage for awhile. It was working before, it has gas in it and keys and tires and all that. But we haven't run it for awhile, and cars sometimes breakdown over time when they are just left there. So before we have had a chance to verify that the car runs, there is some non-zero chance it doesnt work, some non-zero chance it does. Is that car a vehicle?

jedberg
0 replies
2d17h

All interesting questions, all totally irrelevant.

The entire point of the experiment is to prove that people have different definitions of things and that's why moderation is hard.

But my contention is that "is this a vehicle in the park" is not a good experiment, because there is an easily applied objective rule:

Did it touch the ground and move under motorized power?

To be a vehicle in the park, it must first be a vehicle.

Sure, but we don't need to explore every possible vehicle. We only care about the subset of vehicles that are capable of moving under their own motorized power. So we only have to determine if it is that subset of vehicle.

Your whole thing about taking gas in and out doesn't matter. If it's in the park and got there using its motor, it's a vehicle in the park.

The storage lot doesn't matter. It's not in the park.

The point is, this is a bad experiment. There is a simple rule to apply. This is nothing like moderating an online community.

It just happens to get to the right conclusion anyway, mainly because people refuse to apply the one and only rule that matters, and want to bring in all these extra rules an assumptions that aren't relevant.

TheNorthman
2 replies
2d22h

I think you're reading the chart wrong. The majority does say that police cars and ambulances are not allowed in based on that rule.

It is a bad chart though. I was confused too.

jedberg
1 replies
2d22h

Well I said yes and the bar was red, which says to me I disagreed with the majority. I assumed the bar indicated how many people said it wasn't since I said it was and the bar was red.

But either way, when I said "is a vehicle" it said I disagreed with the majority.

/shrug

blharr
0 replies
2d18h

Yea it's a weird graph. The bar is red if you answer "yes" and brown if you answer "no." The percentage of people who say "yes, it violates the rule" is the y axis

082349872349872
6 replies
3d3h
thaumasiotes
5 replies
3d3h

That's a terrible idea. Some problems:

- Agreeing on what's allowed is not the same problem as agreeing on what happened.

- If you can't tell what happened, why are you issuing a judgment at all? Look at the incentives: when nothing has happened, a policy of not issuing judgments means that someone who files a spurious lawsuit will win 0% of the time. A policy of "I try to break the calls evenly for both sides" means that they win 50% of the time. This has enormous costs (you're going to see a lot of spurious lawsuits, and half of them will win!) and no benefits.

082349872349872
4 replies
3d3h

- I agree that what's allowed is not the same as what happened, but I think the basic notion that a group of people can agree that a certain allowable subset is acceptable even if none of them personally would choose that exact subset is very similar to the basic notion that group of people can agree that they will all call certain things as fouls even if none of them personally would choose those exact things.

- One doesn't blow a whistle when nothing has happened. (indeed, one doesn't blow a whistle even when something has happened, but it would be to the advantage of the fouling party if play were to stop). It's easy to tell who is at fault with a spurious lawsuit, to wit: the filer.

The situation I was describing is one where it's obvious from the geometry that someone must have fouled (because otherwise the play would not have included an element of danger) but it is not obvious which player was responsible (because, especially among professional players, a significant part of the game is faking other players into committing fouls on you, so when you get two of these people in a play, each trying to sucker the other, determining which one was actually the victim becomes ... difficult*)

The sort order is not (arbitrary hash, justice), it's (justice, arbitrary hash).

* As a player, given that there are usually dozens of fouls called per game, if you want to win, you have to be able to win even with a couple of bad calls — because that's how everyone wins. A legal system is willing to take years to reduce (but not eliminate) arbitrary factors; a leisure sport accepts more arbitrariness in exchange for getting decisions made in under 5 seconds.

In upper league play, one has two officials on the field, who attempt to coordinate such that at all times one of them is looking down the axis of play and the other is perpendicular to it, and one official elevated as much as possible, who breaks ties in case (in a private official only discussion) the first two each call the foul on opposite players. Even with this set up, when the third may call "no foul", the third should call a foul (deciding for one of the field officials or the other, arbitrarily if necessary) in cases of significant danger. The role of keeping play safe is (for the officials at least, and we'd hope also for the players) much more important than the role of helping determine who prevails that match.

thaumasiotes
3 replies
3d2h

It's easy to tell who is at fault with a spurious lawsuit, to wit: the filer.

This directly contradicts your linked comment above:

> I once talked with a judge who told me "I try my best to be just, but when it's impossible to be just, I have to settle for arbitrary".

This is a terrible idea. It also makes this irrelevant:

One doesn't blow a whistle when nothing has happened.

You don't get to choose.

082349872349872
2 replies
3d2h

There's no contradiction.

It's not impossible to be just with a spurious lawsuit; the just resolution is to throw it out (and sanction repeat offenders).

Maybe there's a misunderstanding about what the judge meant? He was talking about how sometimes things are not as fungible as the law would like to pretend. So take Solomon and the baby. Solomon chose to award 1/2 the baby to each claimed mother. An actual judge would have to award a whole baby to an arbitrary mother, along with a monetary transfer from that one to the other one, which may be a lawfully equitable judgement, but lacks the justice of Solomon's.

> One doesn't blow a whistle when nothing has happened.

You don't get to choose.

Are we mixing the judges' problem with the referees'? I absolutely get to choose when to blow the whistle; I'm wearing it. (as mentioned earlier: as foreseen by the rules, if the fouling team would benefit, I should not whistle)

thaumasiotes
1 replies
2d20h

The judge has the same problem we've been talking about the whole time: he can't tell what happened.

You quoted a judge saying that in that scenario the right thing to do is to make an arbitrary decision. That is wrong. Very wrong.

082349872349872
0 replies
2d18h

The scenario is similar to Solomon's: the merits the claimants have are equal, but the thing they're laying claim to is not divisible/fungible.

An arbitrary claimant gets the thing and pays the other one half the value of the thing. If that is wrong (very wrong), what would be right? Should we be cutting babies in half?

I'm sure we must be talking past each other, but I don't see where. My original point is that people would like just outcomes, but are satisfied with impartial ones, which is (IMO) the mechanism that allows us to come to consensus on a collective opinion even when no consenting individual holds that exact personal opinion.

ribit
4 replies
2d22h

I am a bit confused by this since I got agreement with over 90% of people. Are others getting much lower scores? My result suggests that is indeed possible to agree :)

geor9e
1 replies
2d20h

You didn't get agreement from over 90% of people. That's not at all what it says. You agreed with the majority 90% of the time. If you don't understand the huge difference, let me illustrate an easier to understand example. Suppose 1000 people answered 1000 questions, and all answers individually are in a 50.1% vs 49.9% split. There's essentially no agreement at all in the group, but you got a 90% score yourself, simply by siding with the 50.1% majority on 90% of the questions. Suppose also all 1000 people each choose a unique set of the 100 to dissent about. So, you're in agreement with exactly 0%, the group itself essentially agreed about nothing, yet you still scored a 90%.

ribit
0 replies
2d9h

Thank you, I understand now!

mic47
0 replies
2d22h

The problem is the argument over those 10%.

Spivak
0 replies
2d22h

That's not the author's point. The number of people that agrees with all of your answers was likely very small. This is relevant to rule making systems because you have to make a decision on every situation yes/no, you can't leave undefined behavior, and the ruleset is adopted in totality.

If you were part of a huge zoning board for example and you proposed your rules the set of people that have no issue with it less than 1%.

pizzafeelsright
4 replies
3d1h

I have enjoyed the game, although I find that it is really inconsistent with reality. The reality is that there is a judge, an authority, an enforcing body, and contingencies for failures of each of those.

One example is that in my house, you're not allowed to use profanities around children. Who determines the profanity? I do. I'm the authority. I'm the judge. I'm also the enforcer.

In the event of a rule break, a warning is given, and if the rule is accepted, it isn't spoken of again. If there's pushback against the rule, it will include an explanation of the enforcement. For this to be successful, there has to be consistent enforcement, an explanation of the authority that I hold, and the prefect execution of judgment rendered.

My family knows that profanities exist, we patents use them at times privately, that people use them in different capacities, and for different reasons, yet under my direction they will not be used in my house. This isn't a value judgment of a guest's usage but one of teaching control over one's tongue while under my authority.

ronald_raygun
1 replies
2d21h

So when you're gone they can swear to their hearts content? (ie there are no laws if a cop isn't looking?)

pizzafeelsright
0 replies
2d16h

Playfully, yes. Verbal exclamations happen.

interestica
0 replies
2d22h

The reality is that there is a judge, an authority, an enforcing body, and contingencies for failures of each of those.

The reality is that interpretation can change over time. There are a few major court rulings that have been subsequently ruled differently. Heck, the fact that the Surpreme Court is not likely to be unanimous demonstrates that even the judges will disagree.

dambi0
0 replies
2d21h

Do you have a list of profanities that you share with your guests before they enjoy your hospitality?

codeflo
4 replies
2d23h

"You agreed with the majority: 100%"

Which proves it's not actually impossible, the majority opinion is actually sensible, and this take is incorrect. Case closed.

johnmaguire
3 replies
2d23h

The fact that you agreed with the majority answer to each of the individual questions, 100% of the time, does not mean that there is widespread agreement on the rules, which is part of what this article gets at.

codeflo
2 replies
2d23h

But there is widespread agreement. Looking at the graphs, the only questions where opinions are in the 40%-60% range are the bike and the tank memorial. Neither of those two is even in the 45%-55% range, and on everything else, there's an even clearer majority. So even this intentionally and unrealistically vague rule would work in practice. This proves the opposite point of what's claimed here.

johnmaguire
1 replies
2d22h

I don't think the rule was intentionally or unrealistically vague at all - to the contrary, it was extremely straightforward, and the directions ask you to ignore any preconceived notions, such as laws in your jurisdiction.

What's clear to me from the graph - and the author of this article - is that it's unlikely for any one person to agree with any other one person on how the rule should be enforced - in at least one (or likely many) circumstances, you will probably disagree.

codeflo
0 replies
2d21h

You think that any rule in any realistic scenario would be just a single sentence containing an ambiguous word without any known surrounding context, clarifications, examples, or rationale? I've never seen such a thing. This scenario is completely contrived, and still, it kind of worked.

booleandilemma
4 replies
3d3h

I think the park rule would work better if it were "Don't be an ass in the park".

I think most of us would agree on what that means. The guy parachuting into the park, for example, is clearly in violation, whereas the ambulance driver and kids playing with toys are ok.

renewiltord
0 replies
3d1h

What, I'm fine with the parachutist. This is totally consensus bias.

pixl97
0 replies
3d3h

And yet the world is filled with so many assholes of different sorts, in practice it would never work.

Karellen
0 replies
2d20h

Very few people think they're the one's being an ass. They have a perfectly valid justification for why what they're doing is not being an ass. It's everyone else that's the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

HPsquared
0 replies
3d3h

Most of "us", but what about "them" over there?

empath-nirvana
3 replies
3d3h

In general the way to get out of this successfully is to have a moderation team and a process that (enough) users trust, and the way you do that is to just _not_ try to make everyone happy and accept that some people are going to disagree with the moderation decisions, and it's fine if they just _leave_. It's one of the reasons that I think the best subreddits and smaller independent online communities like hacker news and metafilter remain so stable for so long.

Facebook and twitter and the like are doomed to be in this trap forever because their pursuit of global growth means they _have_ to make everyone happy, and in the process make _no one happy_.

And this is also one of the reasons why, wisely, most western democracies try and stay out of the business of regulating speech entirely.

richrichie
1 replies
3d3h

The objective of social media platform like FB or X is not to make you happy. You are actually the product.

pixl97
0 replies
3d2h

I was going to reply something along the lines of this.

FB/X are sites that want to have broad appeal in order to attract as many as possible to sell their eyeballs to advertisers. But attracting as many people as possible means you are going to have groups that do not and cannot agree which causes strife.

lazide
0 replies
3d2h

Platforms optimize for engagement (and ad spend), not happiness. Sometimes (long term), they can overlap. Surprisingly often (especially short term), they do not.

Also, life itself optimizes for self propagation, not happiness. Sometimes (long term), they can overlap. Surprisingly often (especially short term), they do not.

crystaln
3 replies
2d16h

If the question were, “how do you think this rule should be applied to a park in your neighborhood” I think agreement would much more achievable.

There is no clarity on what the context of the application of a rule is.

Is an ambulance a vehicle in the park? Of course. Should the rule apply to an ambulance on duty in an actual park? Of course not.

Is a memorial tank a vehicle in the park? Obviously. Would some people object the memorial? For sure. Likely because they don’t like tanks in the park, not because of the vehicle rule, however they may use the vehicle rule to object.

So - amazing data. Wrong question.

I propose that the differences in opinion are likely differences in understanding the ill-defined context of the question.

raynr
2 replies
2d15h

I propose that the differences in opinion are likely differences in understanding the ill-defined context of the question.

The whole point of the article is that *on large platforms* it is impossible to have policies on moderation, etc. that people agree on. Not small, interest-specific, geographically and linguistically focussed niche platforms.

The example is further perfectly illustrated by users here dropping their confident, just-so how-tos that would accomplish difficult tasks like moderation easily, and other users disagreeing with their equally confident, personally experienced difficulties in executing such just-so plans.

If you can define the question so narrowly as to make the answers obvious, you're not talking about the same problem anymore.

noqc
0 replies
2d14h

"pretend you are an enforcement official, and your only official guidance is this sign, the purpose of this rule is to keep the park safe, but you might get reprimanded if you kick someone out of the park and you can't convince your boss that they were breaking this rule"

This is all absolutely implicit context for many real world rules enforcers. I would bet money that if you reran this experiment with that prompt you would get over 60% of people in 100% agreement.

crystaln
0 replies
2d13h

Maybe that is the point of the article, however that is not the finding of the experiment the article is based on.

If the experiment was, "When should a park in your neighborhood apply the rule 'no vehicles in the park'?" I believe the outcome would have been very different with near universal agreement on the most important questions.

Maybe someone should try such an experiment.

bloopernova
3 replies
3d1h

This is partly why I really liked the idea of Slashdot's meta-moderation. Although it could probably be gamed by enough determined people.

Moderators should be moderated too, because just like humanity in general, there's going to be a spread of skill levels among the mods.

I wonder if there's ever been a site that has "moderator karma", a score/scores by which a moderator's "performance" can be measured. History of that score too would be interesting to see, potentially showing if a mod has deteriorated in their judgement lately, stuff like that.

It feels like there could be more done to find useful data about moderation decisions.

wmf
1 replies
2d22h

Slashdot had a rule that factually wrong posts cannot be downvoted. I disagree with this rule. If I exercise "moderator nullification" by breaking this rule, what are meta-moderators supposed to do? Should they follow Slashdot's rules exactly or should they also yield to their personal values? I don't think adding more layers solves anything.

throwawaaarrgh
0 replies
2d17h

Adding more layers can add context, which can improve communication, which solves (or at least improves) the problem of conflict arising from poor communication.

winwang
0 replies
2d23h

I've thought a bit about this. Some revenue sharing for top mods and corporate oversight (with statistical tooling) to incentivize continued good moderation. Public moderation actions and votes on them, etc.

richrichie
2 replies
3d3h

Moderation is a bad idea, especially on places like hacker news. Blasphemy.

jmull
1 replies
3d3h

It's hard to tell if you're joking but in case this is meant seriously or is taken seriously...

HN is heavily moderated and it certainly wouldn't be the place it is without it.

richrichie
0 replies
2d15h

Of course, it won’t be the place it is, it will be different. Whether it will be better or worse is a value judgement.

The fact that people downvote a different opinion here shows the degradation of the great tech culture that stood for freedom. Now it is dominated by coddled children who get offended at the drop of a hat.

geor9e
2 replies
2d21h

A bicyclist in Golden Gate Park once yelled at me for being on an e-bike, while pointing at a giant "No Motor Vehicles" banner at the entrance. I told him, actually, California vehicle code 24016 specifically states “an electric bicycle is not a motor vehicle.” He replied "You're a fu*king idiot".

gadders
1 replies
2d21h

Did you fight him?

geor9e
0 replies
2d20h

I think I said something silly like "alright im on a 100 mile trip, have fun in the park" and floored the throttle to 1300 watts

j2kun
1 replies
3d1h

His ultimate point:

No large platform can satisfy user preferences because users will disagree over what content should be moderated off the platform and what content should be allowed.

But he makes to attempt to say what we should do about it. In my view, we should not try to make explicit coding of rules so precise as to be automatable, but rather make it clear, to the communities the platforms serve, what the values are that underlie the rules, and to say "apply the rules in line with their spirit." This is the same sort of reasoning humans use in everyday life, it's why you don't get ticketed for jaywalking across an empty street, and it's why courts get flexibility with their interpretations of law.

The value underlying "no vehicles in the park" is that a park should be a place for recreation and all-ages shared use. This implies the space should be free from the danger posed by the regular traffic of a busy street. A motorized wheelchair doesn't pose this danger so it is allowed. Nor does a bicycle, unless we're talking about a large amount of bicycles representing a heavy flow of traffic, because that traffic would be dangerous to kids in the park.

bo1024
0 replies
2d19h

I think programmers and technical people are mare likely to think the rules are defined by whatever is written down in the rule book, as opposed to the rules being living practices of a group of people that are summarized in the rule book.

I think the main problem is not agreeing on interpetatoons, which humans have dealt with forever, but the particular undemocratic processes on the main platforms we have today (corporate controlled generally).

elevatedastalt
1 replies
3d

Is there an easy way to make sites like these more readable? With the wall to wall text on a 32" monitor, negligible margins, small text interspersed with giant graphs with giant captions, it's a bit hard to move past the form and focus on function.

Digit-Al
0 replies
3d

Try turning on reader view in your browser. This puts the text into a much more readable column.

efitz
1 replies
3d1h

The whole reason that we’re having such a disagreement on moderation is that moderation has been weaponized for political purposes.

This has happened over and over - Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, even here (try posting a skeptical take on climate news).

I don’t know what the rules should be. But I don’t think that we can have well informed people if a small subset are allowed to filter what ideas people are even allowed to consider.

lazide
0 replies
2d21h

Or it’s all a proxy for control over the identity of society, and what is and is not allowed - and who is in control for defining it.

It’s an ideological war.

Often these escalate to actual violence.

It’s also a common (real) thread behind domestic violence, IMO.

Incompatible world views coupled with inability to actually integrate them successfully in a workable way.

alexmolas
1 replies
3d2h

If you look this from a statistical point of view it turns out that people agree a lot. Out of all the 2**26 (~26M) possible sets of opinions only 9432 different opinions are generated. We have data for around 37k users, so if users opinion was so special we would expect around 37k different opinions, but we only have 4k.

It would also interesting to see how many different opinions are there if you allow fuzzy matching. Users disagreeing in only 1 or 2 questions probably have the same idea of what the rule means.

rvnx
0 replies
3d

Once you do the test, you understand that "Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed" is actually the opposite: a proof that the vast majority of people manage to agree even on ambiguous or unspecified rules.

So the whole promise "this is a proof that moderation is impossible" is actually unproven.

yawboakye
0 replies
2d22h

at the core of this is language, which is both a lossy medium for transmitting thoughts and-appears to be designed to be-ambiguous. it doesn’t help too that we don’t study it anymore, and seem to be slowly gravitating towards a small core vocabulary that is called into all sorts of services. our words are in tension at all times. on common sense, i’d define it as the substrate of all of one’s experiences through life. it’s empirical. there’s no absolute common sense where there’s no absolute experience. and that’s why education and other forms of civilization-preserving socializations are important. where you find yourself in firm possession of common sense that your interlocutors seem to lack, be curious and learn about their life experience.

throwawaaarrgh
0 replies
2d17h

If everyone could agree on behavior in a common space, we wouldn't have politics, or even government. We would just all agree on something and then go about our lives. Internet moderation is just governance for the private sector.

thenoblesunfish
0 replies
2d8h

In retrospect at least this should have been obvious, because for hundreds (at least) of years we have had various systems of laws, and in all of them we've had to rely heavily on precedent and the rulings of human judges and juries.

smitty1e
0 replies
2d21h

the propensity of humans to pick on minute differences and attempt to destroy anyone who doesn't completely agree with them hasn't changed

This invites the question of whether the proximal cause for destroying The Other is the issue, or merely a pretext for destruction.

These situations can be as icebergs, with quite a bit going on out of view.

saurik
0 replies
2d19h

This article purports to be a defense of moderators against people who complain about rules not being specific enough, but I think it is equally valid to shove this argument in the face of a moderator who points at a rule and shows you the door for why their supposedly simple rule should never have carried such weight in the first place: no, it is not at all obvious that this thing you didn't like was a violation of your rule, as your rule was inherently vague and apparently encoded some hidden value system. It also, to me, strongly argues that computers and automation have little place in moderation and any such usage--in either direction--must be carefully and routinely scrutinized and evaluated by humans and preferably only used as tools by decision-makers (as opposed to first-line decision-makers in their own right).

The lesson that I think more people need to take from this is thereby to have more compassion for people who broke some supposedly-clear rule, by (at least) reconceptualizing the role of moderation by: 1) having multiple checks and balances on moderators, including both an easy way to appeal decisions to a preferably-higher and necessarily-separate power and a way for users to hold moderators accountable for their actions; 2) insisting that enforcement happen in public; 3) providing numerous examples of what has been allowed or not in the past (precedent is not to be confused with epicycles); 4) offering a way for users to ask, without judgement, whether a specific thing would be allowed before they take an action (transferring liability on the punishment off of the user, even if later on the action is deemed an offense); and 5) instead of focusing on listing simple "rules", spend your time documenting what your goals are along with your philosophy of enforcement.

Note: I actually am an elected government official for a local government--not the Recreation and Parks District, but I do work closely with them--and I am the chair of our policy committee, in addition to having spent a decade as a key moderator of a very large ecosystem of software developers, working on rules for both the software people could distribute/sell as well as doing live moderation of chat rooms. In so doing, I got to work with other people whose opinion on moderation I came to trust deeply, and spent an incredible amount of time just having discussions about how to deal with moderation in general as well as how to balance it inside of a system where I also insisted that I could not myself become a centralized dictator, which is how people always seem to want to approach the problems of content moderation, ignoring any chance to empower users in their own paths. I thereby want to be clear: I come at this as someone who isn't trying to blanket defend people who like to abuse either the system or other people... and yet I also don't think the way most people approach moderation actually solves that problem in a reasonable or principled way.

I thereby think it is worth trying to use this analogy a bit to show how current moderation systems seem to often work: you want to bring your toy car to the park, but see a sign "no vehicles in the park", and you want to be a good citizen so you call the office of the local park district to ask if this is OK; 99% of the time, you get an automated message to read the sign, and 1% of the time you get a person who says "I am sorry but if I told you whether or not that toy car is a vehicle, then bad actors will destroy our park". You then show up to the park with your toy car -- sure it couldn't possibly be a vehicle -- and a police officer shows up, throws you in jail for the day, and tells you you are banned from the park for life. You ask what you did--"OMG, was it the toy car? I am so sorry I didn't think it was a vehicle"--and the officer looks you dead in the eye and says they can't tell you what you did; or, if they do say it was the toy car, they refuse to engage in any form of discussion of why this toy car is somehow different from all of the other toys you see strewn around the park at that same moment.

reissbaker
0 replies
2d20h

I think this is overstating the problem by comparing unique bundles of policy opinions, rather than looking at agreements on a per-policy basis. Out of 27 policies in the game, 20 policies had overwhelming support (>70% agreement) one way or another [1]; those are obvious candidates for moderation rules. And of the seven controversial policies, there was still >60% agreement on five. There's certainly room to disagree on the controversial policies, but I think painting this as meaning there's less than 10% agreement overall, or that moderation is impossible, isn't really accurate. Most people agreed on most things.

After all, we live in a society where we have ambiguous rules like these all over the place. Occasionally someone will get a weird-seeming enforcement action, or a weird-seeming lack of enforcement (compared to what the rules say — for example, while it might seem weird that SF does not punish thieves for under $900 of stolen goods from a common sense perspective, it isn't weird from a letter of the law perspective: that's the actual law); but in my opinion that's fairly rare per-capita.

But maybe I'm biased since I had 100% agreement per-policy with the majority ;)

1: https://postimg.cc/SjMbNMKW

psychoslave
0 replies
2d2h

The question is, why do you want people to agree on what is allowed in some kind of absolute fashion?

In the park example, the important is that most if not all users should be satisfied with the experience they live in the park most of the time. If your park is the sunny nudist Valley, probably the expectations of rules won't be the same than those who live on the demure cold hill. And as far as everyone is free to go live wherever the rules feets best to their own general tendencies, you don't structurally design your society to generate drama about mundane frivolous topics.

Of course if you want to be the platform that bind them all, for example because you think people are brainless cash cows, you are going to face soon or later the fact that rules for demure nudists doesn't grab a very large audience.

The article does mention a bit fediverse, but then conclude that if you can't have everyone in the same park, you failed. Having a single park with the same permanent rules for everyone will not satisfy even a single individual, because people have moods and interest that evolve over time. Yes it has a cost to go from one park to an other. Compare it with the cost it would imply to have a single park for everyone.

praptak
0 replies
2d20h

You would definitely get different results in another language. My best known language is Polish and the best translation of "vehicle" (pojazd) carries different connotations than "vehicle". For example a plane or a boat is definitely not a "pojazd".

noqc
0 replies
2d19h

The experiment is bad because it has hopelessly convolved a number of different causes of disagreement, some of which have nothing to do with difficulties in moderation.

If you're interested in "people disagreeing on what should be allowed", then you must state the rules in a way that allows them to establish the intent of those rules.

Instead the experiment was not evaluating people on their ability to agree on the intent of the rule "no vehicles in the park" but on their agreement over the meaning of the rules of the experiment itself.

Since these rules were intentionally left hidden, you should expect there to be lots of disagreement on what they are. Which was evident in the original comments section.

mihaic
0 replies
2d1h

The vehicle game is poor metric, since it measures the general population, and doesn't up-front make it clear whether the spirit or letter of the law should be applied.

People need some minimum life-experience as well before they can pass judgement, which many in the "audience" simply don't have. I for instance find it easier to talk about a start-ups problems to someone that had run a restaurant for a few years than to a developer.

All that means is that moderation can be achieved, it just costs a lot and may not scale easily.

lr4444lr
0 replies
2d17h

The first footnote just turns me off: zero moderation means everything becomes 4Chan? How about the usual systems of vote ranking, reputation scores based on voting history to enable or disable posting power, etc? I think that a community can easily hit 90% of quality with just a few simple rules, a tiny number of human mods to handle a few egregious cases where someone obviously but cleverly circumvent said rules (like when people started spelling racial slurs through 1 letter tweet replies stacked), and a massive amount of crowd distributed power to reward what a critical mass wants.

lazide
0 replies
3d2h

My experience is that the fundamental issue is that people agree or disagree on things for the most part based on their perceived location relative to ‘the group’, not based on if they think the thing itself is actually reasonable or not. At least within some (surprisingly large) bounds.

Some people will fundamentally ‘center’ on what they think the group will think, others will ‘go more’, others will ‘go less’, and some will ‘go opposite’. A few will go ‘fully independent’, but they’ll only take ‘independent’ directions no one else has taken, which isn’t actually independent.

If modeled out with one set of ‘group thought’, I’d be surprised if it followed anything but a bell curve.

It’s why things are so all over the place right now online - the same process is happening, but with infinite apparent ‘groups’. So it’s scattering things more randomly than would historically have happened. Maybe even an inverse bell curve, actually.

Rationalization then happens after the fact.

It’s the Overton window, but what happens when there is not a single window - but everyone nearly has their own, custom window.

lawrenceyan
0 replies
2d21h
joshuaezra
0 replies
1d

My abstract reading of the rule: we should minimize negative externalities while maximizing positive ones, while curtailing selfish behavior. IE, the ambulance is there altruistically; a riding lawnmower, similarly. The airplane has few negative externalities (to the visitors of the park), whereas a drone has more negative externalities and few positive ones. An ambulance that rides over the grass and tears up the soil better be in pursuit of an urgent need, a police cruiser similarly driving over the soil to stop that drone pilot has inadvertantely created greater negative externalities in pursuit of enforcing a problem. The rule is simple: don't be a jerk, think about others, don't be oblivious.

jiveturkey
0 replies
2d22h

obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.

not obvious. there could be weight limits such that heavy vehicles like that could become trapped.

jimberlage
0 replies
2d22h

A reasonableness test (like what a court system uses) makes this quiz really easy to answer. Basically everything is either allowed or a margin case except for the person driving their Civic in the park.

TBH, I think if you have this quiz to a non-engineer, they would come away wondering what the point is.

Perhaps the answer is that content moderation should just let a judge make a decision and maybe appeal?

jdougan
0 replies
2d18h

I wonder what percentage had my response, which was to read the first question, say Unsuffucient Data, and stop doing the quiz.

There is no such thing as a singular rule. They are embedded in a host of other rules either explict or as (cultural?) assumptions. What is a park, what is a vehicle, what is 'in'? There are domains, like math, where effort is made to be completely explicit, but that doesn't work everywhere.

interestica
0 replies
2d22h

A bit more info on the origins of this. The original that David draws on is a hypothetical proposed by H.L.A. Hart in 1958. The original is looking specifically at law and the fact that even for 'settled meaning' of a term or phrase there will still be the "penumbra of debatable cases". (The penumbra being the almost-shadow between light and dark).

If we are to communicate with each other at all, and if, as in the most elementary form of law, we are to express our intentions that a certain type of behavior be regulated by rules, then the general words we use – like “vehicle” in the case I consider – must have some standard instance in which no doubts are felt about its application. There must be a core of settled meaning, but there will be, as well, a penumbra of debatable cases in which words are neither obviously applicable nor obviously ruled out.[1]

I'm most fascinated by it from a UX perspective in public space: how will a user respond to 'penumbral' or edge-case data? Can that be used to refine wayfinding signage? How will a user react or change pathways when encountering information that doesn't fall right in that expected area? (Yes, I'm actually wondering of the implications of actual signage, not just hypothetical.)

We see it often in transit systems. It's where someone might misinterpret a sign or information (in a predictable manner) and latter blame themselves once they learn of the 'intended' information (which will seem obvious in hindsight). Yet, they are not to blame.

[1] Harvard Law Review Vol. 71, No. 4 (Feb., 1958) - H.L.A. Hart - Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals [p607] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1338225 (note: it wasn't hard to find a copy via Google)

igammarays
0 replies
2d17h

This is essentially a debate on legal interpretation. There are 3 traditional approaches:

1. Common law (determined by precedent), the UK system.

2. Civil law (determined by textual interpretation of a code), the US system.

3. Qadi law. (determined by a local judge who rules according to the local societal norms and current context, neither by text nor precedent), the Ottoman/Islamic system.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/qadi

hayst4ck
0 replies
2d20h

I think the core problem with the authors analysis is that it does not ask for intensity of opinion.

I think when looking at "choice" * "intensity" results would be much more homogeneous.

I think if the author accounts for intensity, results would be homogeneous and therefore the thesis of fractal disagreement would have to take backseat to a more dominating thesis, such as: It's hard to decide what's allowed because those with power don't want to have power exercised against them and use their power to gain concessions via technical readings of law rather than intent based readings of law.

fargle
0 replies
3d1h

this shows why it's impossible for "HN" readers and like-minded people to agree on anything. the entire rest of mankind isn't bothered by such nonsense:

- the bureaucrat that comes up with the sign does not carefully consider the wording of the sign nor the ordinance, it's frequently more than a little vague, but it doesn't matter. his point is to assert control over something, no matter how trivial. a long complicated, precisely worded sign is unhelpful to him, simple words and having a good amount of ambiguity are both to his benefit.

- the guy that does whatever the sign says not to on purpose parks his lifted truck on a boulder in the middle park after ripping up the grass a little. if the police were around he wouldn't do this, but they aren't, so he is definitely not a coward or a conformist at all. his girlfriend regrets her choices.

- the police are who enforces the rule, so it's irrelevant whether they are breaking the rule or not. the other emergency services operate, in the police's opinion, under their protection/direction, so they're usually ok too.

- the pedant pulls out the oxford dictionary and argues about whether a stroller or the aircraft or tank on display technically violates the rule. nobody notices unless another pedant shows up and starts quoting HN statistics or arguing the virtues of webster's vs. oxford. it's irrelevant anyhow because neither of them know how to drive, which is honestly the ethical thing. an argument breaks out about whether the reason it's ethical is because of pedestrian fatalities or global warming.

- nobody cares whether the tank is a violating the rules because it weighs 50 tons (ok damnit you pedant 42 tons), the owner is the city who isn't going to fine itself, and nobody is going to tow that thing.

- karen shows up and tries to tell a much more socially adept mom that her stroller is a vehicle and against the rules. when the karen is first ignored and then told exactly where to stick it, thanks to tik-tok the community has an ad-hoc emergency real-time vote about the issue and the consensus is that karen is burned at the stake, metaphorically (usually).

- everybody else notices (or doesn't) the sign, doesn't read it that carefully, and just mostly does what everyone else does anyhow.

- the park department eventually puts up bollards that effectively define "vehicle" as things that do not get stuck on and fit through the bollards. Excepting the things that got lifted in there by a crane or have the key to the gate.

in actual fact, everybody does sort of agree in real life. even the assholes that don't follow the rules usually know it (i mean, that's the whole point). a few folks are truly oblivious, but they usually just do what everyone else does anyhow.

eviks
0 replies
3d3h

It may be impossible, but those contrived games don't illustrate that. For example, it sternly warns that the responders should disregard all rules from their day-to-day lives, which would simply not happen, people don't clean their minds for some games and will apply other those other things when making decisions. Also, as is common in these games, they're underspecified, so a lot of "disagreement" is just differences in terminology. So you can be in agreement on the policy (that this type of vehicle/non-vehicle) should be allowed in the park while disagreeing on the definition

Also, if your failure mode is for someone to "called for her to be physically assaulted, doxed, etc.,", then agreement is irrelevant, you can be in total agreement on rules and still call that for non-rule-specific reasons (people are complicated and have emotions)

But the main fail is in reducing agreement to a binary, so that's why "Exactly. There is a clear majority in the answers" is correct an a recipe for having a broadly popular moderation policy

epivosism
0 replies
2d21h

This is nearly identical to a thought experiment I created on manifold markets about a real boat marina which has a sign saying "Boat Owners Only"

https://manifold.markets/Ernie/boat-owners-only-sign-correct...

  78% You can go in if your boat is in this marina right now.
  77% If your boat here sinks can you go in?
  71% If there is a fire and your boat stored here burns up partially and is not seaworthy, can you go in?
  71% If your boat is here and you contracted a spot, but all legal record of that burned in a fire, and the only one who remembers who is still alive is you, and you paid cash, are you allowed in?
  69% If your boat is here and you contracted a spot, but all legal record of that burned in a fire, are you allowed in?
  66% If you owned a boat which is here, but it's been molecularly exchanged for identical but different atoms by aliens, you can go in
  57% Only official owners of a specific but unspecified boat located on the dock are allowed through
  56% You can go in if you own a real live seaworthy boat now anywhere in the world.
  56% If you privately own the company that owns the boat, you may enter
  53% The dock owner is not allowed to go in, unless he is or is with a boat owner
  52% If you stole a boat, parked it here with a legal berth lease contract, then left, and return, can you go in?
  50% If you are a shareholder in the company that owns the boat, you may pass
  50% If California becomes officially Marxist, where ownership is an exclusive right of the state, can you anyone go in at all?
  50% If the 24 hour video surveillance of the marina is disabled, that invalidates that sign immediately above, creating a presumption that all the signs on the fence are false, and making it the case that only non-boat owners are allowed.
  50% You can go through if you open the gate
  49% You can go in if you own any kind of boat in any condition in the world, including toy boats, model boats, Lego boats, virtual boats in baldurs gate etc.
  47% The gate will prevent all non-boat owners from passing. Guests and passengers must swim
  46% The sign isn't about who is allowed through, it's about the contents of what's on the other side. Everything beyond the fence is a Boat Owner.
  45% You can go in if you have no boat, but plan to buy one someday and have a contract for a reserved berth space
  44% If you own 1% of a boat here you can go in
  39% You can go in if your spouse is a boat owner
  38% If you own half a boat stored here legally you can go   in
  34% You can go in if you own a Binary Oxidizing Acetylitic Thermometer.
  34% Bonus: people who own three boats stored here can alternate sleeping arrangements so that in any seven day period they never sleep in one more than 3 days, legally?
  34% This market will entirely be excluded from leagues
  34% You can go in if you are a former boat owner but have converted it to a sailplane, which is here.
  34% You can go in if you are a leashed dog that doesn't own a boat, but is with a boat owner
  34% You can go through if you have a contracted and paid berth here.
  34% You can go in if you have a berth contract but are behind in payment.
  32% You can go in if you have a rental boat stored here.
  32% You can go in if you are a guest of someone who is a boat owner.
  31% Ghosts are allowed because they say B.O.O. (Boat Owners Only), which is the password
  25% You can go in if your grandpa is a boat owner
  20% You can go in if you are ex navy.
From being on that site for about a year, I learned a lot about how people think of laws, judgments, legalism etc. There isn't a consensus and it leads to lots of arguments. I personally am a lot less positive on legalism as the answer to everything, yet don't really know any other systems I feel safe with, either.

dgreensp
0 replies
2d10h

The idea behind the site is that it's very difficult to get people to agree on what moderation rules should apply to a platform

There's a big difference between "what moderation rules should apply" and "how do I interpret this one vague rule." Questions like "can I play with a toy car in this particular park" are answerable. If some people want the rule to be different, that's another story. People's ability to interpret a vague rule out of context doesn't really bear on the question of how hard or easy it is to agree on rules for a community, or to write good rules that are easy for moderators to apply.

Not every single person in a community needs to like a rule. And if rules are not specific enough, they can be made more specific.

danjc
0 replies
2d12h

Content moderation decisions are like fractal edges.

You think you can see all the edges until you zoom in and realize each edge is multiple edges, recursively.

dang
0 replies
2d23h

Related:

The rule says, “No vehicles in the park” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36453856 - June 2023 (1186 comments)

creer
0 replies
2d20h

A converse to this is "Don't be the person that gets a new rule named after them." I find this one interesting. It's a meta-rule that actually aims at the spirit of the rules. (And requires a violation or meta-violation to come into effect.)

coldtea
0 replies
3d1h

The "No Vehicles in the Park" game is not so much about the impossibility to agree on what rules to set (like "no vehicles in the park"), as it is about the ambiguity of rules (what is a vehicle? where does the park begin and end? are emergency vehicles OK?).

Using a common sense intepretation, solves most of the "insurmountable" issues it presents, even though the way the game is setup is supposed to prove how that's impossible, in practice, real parks, with real similar restrictions, don't have those problems - or extremely rarely, and mostly with individuals with mental health issues which would contest the rules whatever they were.

Apparently when it's not about contrived scenarios in test form, those issues don't really occur.

cmaggiulli
0 replies
2d22h

The vehicle in the park game seemed very obvious to me with a 100% result. I’m having a hard time imagining what others could have disagreed with.

A vehicle is loosely defined as a human-sized ( but not necessarily human operated ), generally functioning motorized transport device. Emergency vehicles in the park technically violate the parks rule ( even though the violation is basically rendered meaningless ).

A tank would be a vehicle even if it was inoperable, but not if it was intentionally made inoperable. It ceases to be a vehicle and instead becomes a display piece, memorial, etc.

In the park means any land or water within the parks geographic bounds, but definitely not airspace.

A toy is a toy. It may be a replica of a vehicle but it is not a vehicle. A bike, skateboard, rowboat, etc are not motorized and are therefore not a vehicle in the most common colloquial usage.

chirau
0 replies
2d14h

I love the kind of games like the 'no vehicle in the park' one.

Please someone send me more links to games like these

bdw5204
0 replies
3d1h

The next most naive suggestion is to stop downranking memes, dumb jokes, etc., often throw in with a comment like "doesn't anyone here have a sense of humor?".

The fact that forums that don't aggressively moderate for picspam (so-called "memes") become dominated by picspam is exactly why any moderated forum needs to aggressively moderate such content if it wants to be a platform for intelligent discussion. On large social media where you're effectively doing the moderation yourself (think Twitter), that's why you have to mute or unfollow users who regularly post picspam.

To make an online community usable, you have to moderate it to systematically exclude low IQ users or the entire community becomes low IQ and completely unusable. Stupid content gets enormous amounts of engagement. This wasn't as big of an issue in the past when the internet was less mainstream because stupid people weren't on it in significant numbers.

A badly moderated community moderates for a particular set of opinions that the mods agree with rather than for IQ. That means it becomes filled with stupidity that people on that side agree with. Most moderated communities go that route because it's easier to filter for opinion rather than intelligence but it makes them worthless for any kind of serious discussion.

Moderating for civility is one filter that works somewhat well because many stupid people resort to ad hominem attacks (think stupid nicknames for political opponents) as if they were arguments. But intelligent people are sometimes uncivil especially if they run out of patience arguing with an idiot. Things can also get heated between people who are friendly and intelligent if they have an irreconcilable disagreement on a topic both feel strongly about. Such debates often get wrongly confused for flame wars by mods so you do have to be careful about applying civility rules.

Of course, any social media platform that wants a large mainstream audience is not going to follow this approach to moderation because you'd be systematically excluding at least the bottom 85% or so of the population to maintain a platform that's usable for high IQ people. If you assume 2 standard deviations above average as the minimum to be capable of intelligent thought, you're looking at excluding 98% or so of the population.

In short, I disagree with the author's opinion that most people don't want a social media completely dominated by stupid "jokes" and picspam. I think that's exactly what most people want which is why platforms that value user growth and engagement over quality of discussion tend to converge on being dominated by stupid comments, pictures and videos. The next step after that is to remove or shadowban stuff the advertisers don't like which results in moderation based on viewpoint. Reddit is Reddit because that's what is most profitable for Reddit. The only way out of that vicious cycle is for a community to not rely on ad revenue and care about maximizing intelligent conversation not engagement.

anonymouskimmer
0 replies
2d20h

On moderation in general. I think the main political problem isn't agreeing to any set of rules, and what those rules apply to, but when one group's definitions trump other groups definitions by fiat.

andybak
0 replies
2d6h

dag - can I request a temporary pass on accusing people of not reading the article? I jest of course - but this comment thread seems to contain a lot of posts that appear to have missed the point (especially the "vehicles in the park" responses where few acknowledge the sections that call out HN specifically)

I wonder if there's something about the points raised in this article that the typical HN denizen is constitutionally predisposed to "not getting". The overall conclusion is along the lines of "stuff is complicated and throwing rationalityh at it won't help" and "the solution (if there is one) would be a messy, partial, human solution".

User23
0 replies
2d19h

The classic approach is precedent. That way once the call is made, for better or worse, everyone knows how the rule applies in that case.

TulliusCicero
0 replies
2d20h

I agree with the principle of what he's saying, but using the game as an example exaggerates the level of difference here.

People disagreeing on whether an ambulance is violating the rule are mostly disagreeing on a technicality of whether it counts as a vehicle in the park if you only have this one rule, but in practice almost everyone would allow it as an exception. Thus, it doesn't represent true disagreement for most.

It's similar to how most message boards have some rule about civility and not being hostile/insulting, but if someone shows up who's unironically like "wow Nazis sure are great right??" then nobody has a problem with posters telling that person to fuck off.

CamelCaseName
0 replies
2d15h

The problem most people here are missing is that even if moderators create a rule set that are clear and understood by 95% of people, the remaining 5% will still become an unbearable headache.

Add to this that spaces that are worth being highly visible in will have their rulesets attacked and rules stretched to the maximum, plus the fact that users individually are not worth much, and that most publicly visible moderators are unpaid, and you have a recipe for user misery and moderator indifference.

The solution is to pay your moderators so you can attract higher quality talent and more stable labor.

Or don't, if enough users will use the platform anyways.

AndrewKemendo
0 replies
2d23h

See also, the impossibility of AI "Alignment"

I think about this problem of coordinating human action pretty much constantly, and IMO it is the foundational challenge of all of humanity.

It's beyond clear to me that aligning human desire (and codifying them) is mathematically impossible even within the same individual over the lifetime of the person.

Why? Human desires and actions are not coherent, predictable or consistent, even to the Human making the actions. Self reported desires and goals will diverge in extreme ways through the lifetime of an agent.

As a result, the foundational requirement of a stable and coherent system is an impossibility because the indivisible unit of measurement: The human, is not consistent with their goals.

If the individual agent's goal criteria is not known, or worse is unknowable for future time steps (my claim), then there is no possible system that can be codified which does not impede an individual's action vector in favor for some other structure that promotes another individual's action vector, provided there is variability in the agent's goal vectors.

Someone is going to be prevented from doing what they want to. Unfortunately there is no way to objectively determine a set of action-contexts that can be objectively agreed to satisfy all persons intended action-vectors, because of physics.

People have attempted many ways at addressing this.

Non-hierarchical formal structures rarely coalesce into long-lasting organizations because the actors typically reject any reduction to their autonomy on behalf of a larger organization. As a result they don't grow and are very susceptible to environmental "shocks." Examples of these are the existing small mutual-communities that generally never get much larger than the Dunbar's Number of whomever the most powerful organizer in the community is (~few 100 people).

Hierarchical formal structures encode an opinionated version of how the agents within the system are limited in their actions to the benefit of a larger organizational structure. This has the benefit of growth and accretion of resources that would make the organization more robust to shocks, however in every case there are significant limits on the action-vectors of the agents in order to be part of the organization. Examples of these are religious faiths, which require significant adherence to social behaviors, and often have significant limitations on the behaviors of the actors to benefit from the group resources.

There really isn't anything in between unfortunately. History shows that the latter types of groups will overrun all of the former types of groups when they are in competition for growth in some physical space.

There do not exist social structures that are robust to significant changes in the composition of the criteria for success that do not create social divisions that realign power.

I honestly don’t know what to do about this because it seems intractable to make a future society that is coherent and stable given that the foundational unit of society is not coherent and stable.