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.
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.
I think this is explicitly addressed at the start. The question is not one of if certain cases should be prosecuted or if there should be certain rules that supersede the "vehicle in park" rule. The question is of the fact that the statement "no vehicles in the park" is violated or not. An ambulance is allowed to violate the rule, but it is still strictly speaking violating the rule.
The 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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving
The definition of a vehicle is quite broad and you've scoped it rather narrowly. When left so open people may scope it more or less narrow and land on differently scoped definitions.
I think there is certainly a middle ground when making rules(and laws). But this example purposefully uses an ill-defined rule to drive a point home.
> My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving itself along with one or more people (not necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold).
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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
My take is that most people cant resist the urge to assert what they think they rule should be, complicating the test. ambulances aren't allowed, but they shuld be. Drones are allowed, but they shouldnt be.
I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair.
I was surprised to see I got 100% agreement with the majority on each question. But I guess that means i would still disagree with most everyone on at least one question
My 0.02 but the airspace above the park is not the park or else you could take that to a logical extreme. A park is the land/waterways within a geographical bounds with a specific designation. It does not include the air above the park which is why planes flying over your house are not trespassing
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
”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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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".
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 ;)
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
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.
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.
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.
Adding more layers can add context, which can improve communication, which solves (or at least improves) the problem of conflict arising from poor communication.
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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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Obviously, no one expects the rule to cover all edge cases, so we have to extrapolate what the rule writer meant to say.
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.)
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.
I mean that in a serious way. It's very clear people lie on much more serious polls than this.
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.
Endless regress detected, redo from start.
100% agreement with the majority per question might put you in a very small minority, BTW.
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.
So... motorized wheelchairs are vehicles?
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.
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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.
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
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.
A lot of people are very excited about LLMs, because they can encounter ambiguity without halting. Unfortunately, what they can't do is resolve that ambiguity. We are still only able to compute context-free rules.
This 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.
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.
Mine was 70%.
In this game, in my state, bicycles would not be allowed unless the sign mentioned the law that allows them.
I would have expected it to be easier to strictly apply a simple rule, but it turned out that interpreting the intent of the rule was less contentious and easier to apply. Ambulances in the park are not a violation, not on the grounds that some other rule overrides the no-vehicles rule, but that they don't violate the spirit of the rule.
And I suspect that most would disagree they do that (because most people would have a hard time thinking of themselves as rule violators) which would then lead to something like "the rule is stupid" or "this is pedantic".
No Vehicles In The Park is super interesting.
The game would be more interesting if the rule were "Threatening speech is not allowed."
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.
Is in the first screen.
I got 100% because I assumed it was not written by a lawyer. Context matters.
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.
The fact that you feel you did it wrong is just a bonus for the author (and spectators like me!)
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.
Agreeing is hard but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules in the interest of the common good.
Similarly skate boarders and mothers with wagons don't have authority to violate rules but because the consequences (hypothetically imagined here) is based on weight then they can violate the rule with relative impunity because such a minor infraction of the rule only endangers them to passing enforcers to say "shame on you" to them.
At this point to me it seems the hard point is objectively applying consequences in a moderation setting. I'm not sure how to make a call that someone is being only a little bit of an asshole in anyway that allows an online community to function in a way that is cohesive.
But the game isn't about "should the rule be ignored?". That's a different game.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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".
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With how much matrix multiplication were doing for machine learning using the matrix approach now might be feasible.
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.
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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.
You are aligned with majority opinion, but you still disagree with most people.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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
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?
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.
“I'm a good driver, so my lifted F-150 is such a vehicle”
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.
If many trees fall in a natural disaster, can a tree removing vehicle enter the park?
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.
Exactly. Life and liberty, in that order
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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
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
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.