I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended.
To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
(To be clear, I think content moderation rules are often difficult to figure out when to apply. I just think the vehicles-in-park rule is much, much, much clearer than many content moderation rules.)
> Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Now you're assuming the intent.
The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them. If you're the park ranger and the local police come into the park in their car chasing after some criminals, and the local police are your buddies, you say they haven't violated the rule because the intent isn't to apply to emergency vehicles. If the exact same thing happens but you're having a dispute with the local police, now they're violating the rule and you can come up with something like the park isn't in their jurisdiction.
It's the same rule. It's the same action. The only difference is if you like them or not. And that's the problem.
That's true but without assuming intent you end up blindly following rules.
Something struck me when first moved to UK from Turkey: Every rule in UK seemed to have an intent and that's why I think Turkey is full of rules which no one follows but in UK the rules are less numerous but followed. In Turkey, Turks like to think that the rules are not followed because the fines are too small or that the government is incompetent and can't enforce the fines. I disagree, I think Turkey is a chaotic society because rules are not built around intent. Did you know that up until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures?
For the first few months until I got my white collar job, I did some part time jobs in London as a waiter etc. and worked at some high end venues and hotels. In these places there are some equipments(like climate control of the wine cellar) which are operated through control panels which are accessible to everyone and they didn't put signs that say "don't touch", instead the signs said "you have no reason to touch this". They were able to keep curious hands away from buttons that shouldn't be pushed by those who don't know what they are doing by simply emphasising the intent.
Intent is extremely important, in fact everything is about intent. Every human action is with an intent. Great UX is built by designing around intent.
No, it's not assuming, it's interpreting based on prior experience in communication.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff.
Then the sign would mention that, simple as that.
> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.
I agree with you here, it happens all the time, is a problem, and perhaps the test is useful to those, who haven't figured this truth so far. Probably not that many in the HN crowd…
I'll add that there's a problem with the test: "does it violate the rule" is not very meaningful. It could be understood in two ways:
- does it technically, strictly speaking, "violate" the rule, meaning, it does something the sign tells you not to do,
- or is the example acting against the intent of the author of the sign.
If the test asked "should violator be punished?" I think it would be more meaningful, otherwise it's just synthetic and the controversy is just about semantics, it doesn't incentive a discussion about our worldview and the rules we put in place, it just provokes to argue pedantically about how we phrase a message.
Moreover it possibly misleads people to think they disagree on something they really don't.
If a vehicle entering the park would directly endanger lives--rather than just being a nuisance--the sign would (should) give the extra context to make a stronger discouragement.
Otherwise, it is fair game to assume the "intent" of any such sign is to make guidelines to enhance the public's mutual enjoyment/safety at the park, and that such guidelines may be discarded when lives are endangered (police/ambulance).
As an alternate example where the rule itself is related to safety, "no campfires" would not be expected to be followed if one became lost and needed to make smoke signals to be rescued.
You pretty much have to assume intent, though? To mind, language doesn't exist without intent. You are correct that you may be wrong on the underlying message that is being communicated, but that is basically boiling communication back to the measuring problem. You measure what is easy to measure, you say what is easy to say. (As a fun counter to your example, so it would be ok if I bring a jack hammer and start pounding away? Or a shovel and dig to my hearts content?)
The silliness in this is that it boils everything down to a single rule and expects that you can define the words of the rule in a way that makes it obvious that some other meaning may be inferred. That isn't how language works. In no small part because language isn't static.
Put in a way that programmers know, decently. Regular expressions can describe context free shapes of symbols. These are usually concise and people feel like they can have a hold on them. Context free grammars, though, are typically not concise and lead to all sorts of interesting theory and problems to keep them going. And, much to the frustration of near everyone, colloquial language does not have a context free grammar, even. To try and take it out of the context is to lose.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
Have you ever looked at the warning signs on water heaters? They make it instantly clear what the dangers are and how bad they can be. A "No vehicles in the park" sign in that situation would be the equivalent of just putting "Caution: Hot" on a water heater.
Similarly, parks have signs with people literally drowning and being killed to make it abundantly clear how dangerous they can be.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
I live in a city with Trams. Whenever they replace tram rails they remove the surrounding concrete and asphalt. It would be dangerous to drive there. In those cases they explicitly hang a “road closed” sign with an extra sign “including service vehicles”.
In the real world signs (especially common ones) try to be reasonable descriptive. Nobody is helped if you argue about the meaning if something goes wrong.
No, that's not the problem. That's human nature, and human nature is most definitely not the problem. Humans make the world we live in and we individually get to influence it, but we don't get a veto on how others influence it.
To me, the quiz answers depended on common sense, and I was reminded by it that my common sense is not others' common sense, and so what? That's life. We deal, because there's no other choice when we live in society.
Well, every rule and law in existence, that I can think of, has an assumed intent. That's probably a necessary condition for rules, whether it's a sign in the park or a government regulation or anything else.
If people do not have, to some degree at least, a shared intent (e.g. let's have a conversation here about topic X, let's have a park to have fun or relax in, etc.) there is probably no set of rules that can specify sufficiently what can and must not be done. If you did manage to craft such a sufficiently detailed set of rules, it would be too large for people to read and understand.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
That would be a terrible phrasing then. It should have been phrased something like "Landslide hazard, no weight more than 1ton allowed anywhere in the park." or something in that vein.
Where I live, vehicles like police cars have the letters "xmt" on the left side of their license plate. That's because they are exempt from rules like "no vehicles in the park". Per the questionnaire, if the SWAT team drove their tank into the park that would be a vehicle in the park, but they get a pass.
This is a great anecdote for the need of intent. But, you also need context. Without either of those it’s very, very hard to agree on rules. And agreeing on either context or intent, let alone both, in a small community is hard. Doing so across the internet is damn near impossible and that was the point of the article.
Minor point perhaps, but there's no question about whether the police are violating the rule when they drive their car into the park: they are.
The question is whether it was justifiable and that's not what the original game asks you to evaluate, but it is the much harder question because it is almost always subjective--as you point out. In justifiability you can start asking about intent, weigh the various costs of the action, etc.
And that’s why education, and an educated society, are so important.
An educated person can make a much better assessment of intent.
For instance, if danger exists to a police car due to loose soil or not.
The more important point here for me is not “how should we best design and interact with the rules” (that’s a pretty authoritarian question) but rather “what fundamental human conditions, like education, tend towards more productive interaction with the world, including any rules that exist”
> If you're the park ranger and the local police come into the park in their car chasing after some criminals... If the exact same thing happens but you're having a dispute with the local police
It doesn't matter, the rules on police and emergency vehicles usually supersede some local rule about a park.
The park is not some absolute ruler of the land, sure it can put rules for general/everyday use but a lot of things are rules at higher levels
The funny thing is, the game itself assumes intent. And even you assume intent.
What is a vehicle? "a thing used to express, embody, or fulfill something" is one of the definitions. So, no books allowed.
But then, the rule doesn't say vehicles aren't allowed to enter the park.
It simple describes the state. That there are "No vehicles in the park."
> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.
At the very least, the other point is that it's challenging to come up with a rule that can't be misinterpreted even when being pedantic.
"No vehicles in the park."
No, there are no books current in the park. Just a bunch of cars.
This goes right to the discussion in the first couple chapters of _Promise Theory_, laying out the difference between a promise and an obligation. An obligation requires global knowledge, whereas a promise is local in scope, necessarily voluntary.
It might be a problem, but it is also an inescapable part of the human condition because, at the end of the day, rules are imaginary and all that really exist are human actions. It is pretty hopeless to complain about rules from this point of view.
Assumption of intent is critical to pretty much all social functioning. In this particular case, I think its outrageously reasonable to assume that if some unusual circumstance were to prevail in the park relevant to the definition of vehicle, the sign would explicitly indicate it. And that, without further clarification, the obvious answer is the one intended.
From computer programming we know that strict rules for complex systems become unmaintainable messes, with countless edge cases that result in things either just not functioning or - worse - allowing people to bypass the rules entirely to, e.g., run malware.
So the complaint about rules that involve human discretion strikes me as extremely hollow. We know what trying to write no-discretion rules looks like. We know it almost always still ends up allowing plenty of abuses of the system. To prevent that we need more eyes and more human judgement on things, not less.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
They really need to work on their signage wording.
In a lot of countries intent is in fact everything. It's common for developed countries to be more governed by written law and have that interpreted as such in court, but in many developing countries it's all about what you are trying to do.
Communities are built on intent and learning the culture of the group. Anyone who does not understand this should get into law, not internet moderation.
>but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules, because they are. The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.
This of course is a paradox, as a rule is something that you are forbidden from doing, and being allowed to break the rule means you're allowed to do something you're forbidden from doing, which when interpreted literally is an oxymoron.
The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules , and some rules are more important than others.
You just made me look up the rules in germany. The wording is somewhat particular. "An emergency vehicle following a higher cause can invoke special rights ("Sonderrechte") indicated by blue flashing lights. These special rights authorize the driver of the vehicle to divert from the regular traffic laws as long as done safely." Interestingly, this is separate from the "Right of the way", which can be ordered on top using a siren. This is why they need to run the siren for 2ish seconds before running a red light for example.
So yeah, an ambulance speeding to save a life is breaking the traffic laws, but they are allowed to.
Interestingly, if the ban of vehicles in the park had an additional reason - like a safety concern of unstable collapsing ground - an emergency vehicle in the park would be barred from invoking their special rights to be there, because then the driver would endanger bystanders without good reason.
> I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules
I think the ambiguity here is not what the rule means, but what "breaking the rules" means.
IMHO it should have been phrased as "would you refuse entry to" i.e. whether you would enforce action based on the rule.
If you would not bar entry to emergency vehicles, that would be the same as what others mean by "not breaking the rules" i.e. it is implicitly allowed.
See, even there for me it's rather a "firefighters/police have an exemption to the rules". For you it's "firefighters/police are breaking the rule but it's fine".
I answered in the same way. I chose to interpret the rule as "no functioning registered terrestrial road vehicles", in which case emergency vehicles are violating the rule.
In my country ambulances are allowed to run red lights, but not speeding. Actually they have their own rules that allow speeding in certain roads if the are in an emergency over their own limit: they are limited to 90 kmh in the motorway, but can go up to 120kmh, like any other car, in an emergency. Over that, they could potentially get a ticket. But AFAIK they can never go over the limits a normal car has.
When I read "obviously" in your parent comment, I though: well, not so obvious. We don't know why the vehicles are banned from this park (extreme cases: there are vehicle mines remains from a war that explodes under big weights. Park is built so ir can't stand so much weight and big vehicles would get trapped), so maybe police and ambulances must proceed on foot for the last hundred meters.
I answered the same way as you. Because there are rules and there are laws. The only reason park rules have any weight is in a larger context of laws. So, if the only park rule is "no vehicles in the park", then clearly the rule is violated by an emergency vehicle, but it will be that larger context that determines whether anyone cares if the rule was violated.
> The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.
I think this is just a way of saying that they are not breaking the rule, simply because the rule doesn't apply to them.
> The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules
I prefer the following quote as an explanation: "There are no rules, only consequences." There are no consequences for an ambulance entering the park because everyone agrees it is right that it should do so.
Exactly. There is a clear majority in the answers. Sure, there are edge cases, but they are edge cases.
But I also want to say this is a really cool website. I love how he used this experience to set the table for what is otherwise essentially a blog post. Very cool.
But to hone in a bit more:
> It was about content moderation. Specifically, some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply.
His experiment not only doesn't prove this because of the observation you made (there is a clear majority opinion), but also because the "simple rules" people want ARE simple in contrast to the current standard of assuming you need to be a moral authority. The supposed simple rules aren't simple because they avoid controversy. They are simple because they don't avoid controversy. They are minimal. Basically just take the stuff virtually everyone agrees on, or is illegal/possibly illegal. Yes, there are gray areas there. There are always gray areas. But the gray areas surrounding "we need to shape productive discourse" is a lot more controversial than the gray areas surrounding "is this legal?" Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.
And before someone says "well if you have offensive content then advertisers will leave," I want to point out that is not a content moderation problem. That is an advertiser attraction problem. If the goal is advertiser attraction then we are playing a completely different game and you should remove everything that is remotely controversial. Or consider that your business model is inherently bad for speech.
> Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.
Are you suggesting that section 230 is meant to discourage Internet intermediaries from moderation?
The original intent of this law was to stop requiring intermediaries to choose between adopting a passive conduit role and having legal responsibility for content. The legislators hoped that providing a general protection from liability for user-generated content would encourage more moderation by intermediaries.
That might not have been the most pro-speech policy option overall but it was notionally very pluralist (with different platforms potentially having very different standards, purposes, goals, rules, communities, etc.) and it did manage to temper the previous somewhat paradoxical incentives, as well as providing a lot of legal certainty to facilitate the creation of new platforms of various sizes and models.
Pretty much everyone on the Internet is frustrated by moderation and sees pathologies and biases of moderation, intermediaries putting their thumb on scales, and so on. On the other hand, what we haven't seen is the enormous volume of litigation against intermediaries that would occur without §230. I expect people would literally be suing Y Combinator over HN moderation decisions. I can think of HN moderation decisions that I really disagree with, but it's impossible for me to imagine that having had those turn into lawsuits would somehow have been better for anyone.
It fully agrees with the majority interpretation in all cases despite the rule being minimal and requires taking the inferred intent into account. LLMs for machine moderation are probably rolling out very soon, I doubt Reddit and the like will even allow for human moderation in a few years (if prompt injection can be solved robustly enough).
The problem with having humans as rule breaking judges is that we all have our ever changing biases and motives. Most everyone has an experience with a power tripping mod deleting their post or comment because they had a bad day and needed to take out their anger on something. An LLM can parse these variable situations with ease and can also be tested for those biases. Since it'll never deviate from its training data it always acts as impartial as possible within the rules' limits.
Good point. The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion. I wonder how much consensus there would be if the intro asked you to go by the intent of the rule as you understand it, rather than what it literally says.
The first time I went through the quiz, I followed the instructions and had to think about definitions a lot. Then I read your comment and went through the quiz again and just used common sense (dangerous phrase, but I believe it worked in all 27 cases). There was only one violation: someone drove a Honda Civic through the park. What was that person thinking!
On HN we've always tried to avoid hair-splitting arguments by appealing to general values rather than trying to nail down the precise list of disallowed behaviors [1, 2]. Trying to be precise seems like a ticket to bureaucratic, soul-destroying hell [3]. I'd rather just say that there aren't precise rules, just an intended spirit and a few pointers, and yeah that means there's a lot of interpretation involved. There's going to be a lot of interpretation involved no matter what you do, so why pretend otherwise? Just make it clear up front. Then you can say "someone's got to interpret the rules, and that happens to be my job, and I'm interpreting them this way". People will get mad, but people are going to get mad no matter what you do, and at least you won't have to argue about whether a bicycle is a vehicle.
That doesn't mean there aren't edge cases and disputes about which calls are fair. There are tons of those. But if you don't try to be precise then at least you don't get into semantic hell. Except when you do. Boy this work's hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11301437
> The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion.
...and yet in this very HN discussion we have large numbers of people disagreeing about the intent of the small, clearly written intro, with each side convinced that their interpretation is the obviously correct one. I feel this does as much to support the author's thesis as the game itself.
> People will get mad, but people are going to get mad no matter what you do, and at least you won't have to argue about whether a bicycle is a vehicle.
The quiz epilogue said something along the same lines. Basically the point was to prove with these questions that corner cases always exist, and the system can never be perfect, and therefore we’re screwed and might want to give up. “pinning down a definition is usually impossible” … “You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem.” … “Maybe you will decide to live with the nebulosity, but have more sympathy for the refs. Maybe you will decide that you would prefer to live with the consequences of less moderation. Maybe you will think really hard about decentralization (which is not a panacea). Maybe you will give up on social media altogether.”
I do have sympathy for the refs, Dan, and I think you do an amazing job at a Sisyphean task. I’m also okay with nebulosity too.
However - I want to push back a little on the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t try to be precise, at least not as the most significant summary bit. We should try to be precise when we can, and provide examples when we can’t. I don’t buy the author’s argument/implication that the existence of a corner case somewhere means we shouldn’t be attempting to define the “epicycles” of the rules, especially when it’s really easy to say something like the park boundary is 200m above the ground, or insert ‘motorized’ in front of vehicles, which immediately eliminates like 50% of the supposedly hard to answer questions. Include the other rules, and add details to the quiz questions and almost all of them can become unambiguous. The point of all this is to provide clarity whenever possible and minimize the corner cases and reduce the number of people getting mad, right? It matters whether it’s just one or two people flaming each other versus everyone. It matter whether there’s only one or two crazy accidents in parks versus thousands or millions.
There’s a real difference between public safety and online forum opinions, of course. Yes, with a Grand-Canyon-sized gray area in between. But whether an airplane can fly through a park probably deserves a lot more bureaucratic attention than nailing down how people talk about Pi and religion on HN? Maybe I’m conflating law and forum moderation, maybe you were only talking about forum moderation, but I’m thinking about law as social moderation and how the quiz should reflect on social moderation in general. Our laws currently are in the process of building a larger and larger decision tree of both vague and specific language about what activities and behaviors are socially and legally acceptable, trying eternally to be more precise, and for the most part it “works” by some definition to keep the system manageable. We do try to get precise with speed limits and what kinds of death deserve what punishment and what constitutes insider information and whether badly compressed mp3s constitute copies. Even when it’s hard to pin down, we keep on trying, in order to reduce mistakes.
It’s kinda fun this little quiz of ambiguous questions caused so much discussion. Maybe it happened primarily because of the ambiguity, so each one is a little bike shed. Clearly the author said answer literally and most people just didn’t. But I somewhat feel like (maybe to the top comment’s point) that the contrived ambiguity backfired a bit on me. The problem with the quiz is withholding context and details in order to argue that it’s hard to draw lines. Context and details matter and they always exist in the real world. There isn’t only one rule, and a lot of the questions that seem ambiguous have actual right and wrong answers depending on details (e.g., altitude of the airplane & country of the park, or whether any country on earth asserts air & space rights hundreds of miles above their parks.)
That's a fairly culturally specific interpretation of common sense. Where I live it would for sure also include e-bikes and scooters, quite possibly regular bikes too (this is assuming "park" here means something on the ground and not e.g. a roof park where there might be weight limits).
The HN approach makes things simpler for moderators in much the same way that being a monarchy makes lawmaking simpler for the king, but writing down rules isn't about making the enforcer's life easier, it's about making the subject's lives easier. They're more numerous, so their needs should have at least some weight.
Independent of that argument, precise written rules and a process for updating them are valuable for several reasons:
1. Whilst people might still get mad, they get mad at the written rules and not at the interpreter of them. This takes a lot of the heat out of the situation because a document can be improved easily relative to improving a person, so discussions about bad outcomes become de-personalized and more constructive.
2. The act of writing down rules forces mental clarity. Contradictions and unhelpful biases that may not be obvious when free-floating in one's head can become apparent immediately when trying to write it all down.
3. Because the rules are clear, violations are less likely to happen to begin with. People who aren't on-board with the values of the community stay away.
The generic HN prohibition against "flamewars" is a good example of a rule that could use a rigorous clarification. It doesn't work to assume the intent or definitions are obvious, because flamewar is a purely online concept that doesn't have any clear analogy to the physical world. Actually it's the opposite: in physical debates there's a general understanding that anyone who turns up and takes part will engage in emotional self-control. If they lose it and start getting angry or raising their voice, they're the ones expected to leave, regardless of what argument the other side was making at the time. HN's approach inverts this standard social convention and blames the person who remains calm for the behavior of angry respondents!
The thread you linked to (from 2015!) is a good example of this. The original post is something about pi and the Bible. It's phrased calmly, isn't obviously in bad faith and is at least somewhat interesting yet is flagkilled, then you threaten to ban the user for conducting "religious flamewars". That user quite reasonably asks what it is that makes his post a rule violation and gives several possibilities e.g. is all discussion of religion banned? But you reply that it would be "soul destroying" to answer his question that specifically! He wasn't asking for a mechanical algorithm but getting more specific than "religious flamewar" and "spirit of the place" doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.
What I find really amusing is that the top comment (yours) is about how obvious the interpretation of the rules is, but there are dozens of subcomments disagreeing with your interpretation and each insisting how obvious their own interpretation is... exactly like with content moderation ;)
In my view, there's always an obvious initial purpose and interpretation (the Honda Civic), and you always have those that will pedantically insist on the most literal Draconian interpretation (the ISS), then you have those who stretch the rules to fit their agenda (bikes), but, most importantly, you have some class of common edge cases which spark significant disagreement (emergency services), even if we all agree on 90% of the point (which is that yes, emergency services should be able to drive through the park during an emergency, regardless of whether the rule is broken).
> even if they are allowed to break the rule they are still breaking the rule.
This is exactly right, I think, and in fact those who are focusing on the "intent" of the rule or on whether a violation of the rule is justified seem to have missed the clear wording of the instructions:
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
So the only questions that ever enter into it are (a) is this object a vehicle?, and (b) is the object in the park?
> a park sign that says no vehicles also applies to bicycles and skateboards.
Interesting, my dividing line was that a bike is a vehicle but a wagon, rowboat, or skateboard are not. The majority seems to think both a bicycle and a memorial tank (??!) are not vehicles under the rule.
I think it really depends on where you are located. I can't imagine personal wheeled vehicles like bikes and skateboards being prohibited from a park in the Netherlands unless explicitly stated so. On the other hand in suburban Florida biking places is so far out of the norm that it might make sense.
> police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
The question was not about whether the rule ought to be followed, but whether it was violated. Content moderation can work under these circumstances, too.
The setup in the beginning even tries to take the ought out of the deliberations: "Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated. You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules [...]" an even goes on to mention other sources of norms. It explicitly then says: "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
You are mimicking local jurisdiction rules. You don’t even know why they disallow vehicles. Let’s say because of subsidence or weight load. Then even emergency services should not go in as it would give more risk to them. Instead they need to walk in or use a helicopter suspended in mid air.
More surreal maybe it is above that cave in Lost and even an ISS or plane should not go over that location.
> So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
The game gives a super simple 2-paragraph-instruction that I feel could not be any clearer, but that you chose to ignore in favor of your own interpretation of what is being asked (because you deem the intent "crystal-clear").
The nuance on that one felt odd. I said that it did violate the rule (even the spirit of the rule, being a large motor vehicle), because it was a binary question. I also felt the rule violation was justified and that they shouldn’t be called out on it.
I agree with this take. Most questions were very obvious when thought about from the angle of "what is the intent of the rule", which is likely to be "let people enjoy the park by not allowing large, noisy, smelly conveyances".
Bikes, kites, monuments, Radio Flyers, etc. do not violate the intent. A tank is clearly a vehicle but doesn't violate the intent because it does not interfere with people enjoying the park. And rules do not apply to on-duty emergency vehicles.
Clearly not everybody thinks about the intent, and many people focus on discussing the nitpicking corner cases of the rules, or thinking about the definition of a vehicle or "being in the park" (see also "what is a sandwich"). That's okay, and that proves the author's point that moderation is not a mathematical problem with a single formally provable solution.
Bikes do annoy people with small children because some people try to ride bikes fast where not appropriate, and this is dangerous when small children change direction unpredictably.
This is only true until an old grumpy lady is sitting on a bench in the park and don't want to hear any more skateboard noise. From that point on there is someone who considers skateboarding a violation of this rule.
I think we are all proving the author's point here.
For my decisions, the assumed intent of the rule was slightly different than yours: no potentially fast-moving objects that might cause severe accidents.
So: no cars, no bikes, no skateboards. RC toy cars with low mass are okay. Rowing boats are not okay because they might harm swimming people. The surfboard on the beach is okay because it is not moving fast within the park. Etc.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
By "doing their jobs", you presumably mean "responding to an emergency call", right? Because, e.g., cops in normal transit from A to B are "doing their jobs" but letting them drive through a "no vehicles allowed" park in that instance is probably bad. Or if they're on a high-speed chase - definitely "doing their jobs" but not something you'd want to happen through a park.
> an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow
You've amply demonstrated this by creating a huge muddy mess around "emergency services doing their jobs".
Your attempt at making it black and white fails. When you say "obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign."
Does this mean that if police are code 2 en route to a crime 10 miles away they can use the park to save time? What if they are code 3?
Part of doing the job of firefighter includes conducting drills. Can they choose the park as their drill environment?
Further, even if they are responding to a crime in the park, are police allowed to drive on the sidewalk because someone has broken the littering ordinance?
Even ignoring these grey areas and focusing on your own statement, there is a philosophical dilemma. Are the first responders who "don't have to follow" an inherent part of the rule, or is the rule absolute and they are merely permitted to break it? in either case, by legal or by social convention?
just an FYI (going out on a limb) but nobody knows what this even means "Does this mean that if police are code 2 en route to a crime 10 miles away they can use the park to save time? What if they are code 3?"
if you could either explain the lingo or dial it down, that would be great for the rest of us to understand your argument
> So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
Because you assume one following them does it out of good will and good intentions.
Now imagine the moderator that needs to adhere to such rules doesn't use them as guideline but as something to work around to remove the things they personally don't like. And they don't need to explain to the public why they thin it falls upon, they can just silently remove it, or put a comment "removed because rule xyz" and comments to that disabled.
Now imagine rules like /r/games, "No content primarily for humor or entertainment" or "No off-topic or low-effort content or comments". CLEARLY meant to stop memeing and spamming random game screenshots, but oh so easy to attach to nearly anything.
Same with title formatting rules. Should you copy-paste clickbaity title of the article or editorialize it to mean what the article says about? DOESN'T MATTER, if mods don't like the topic they will find an excuse. So the post gets removed but someone links to a different article with normal title that links to that as source ? Nope, LOW EFFORT, removed, should've linked to the original one (that's actual situation I saw on that subreddit, mods really don't like VNs there, and it wasn't about porn one either)
This is a great take. I thought the author was only trying to demonstrate problems that occur when moderators act in good faith. Since the only forum I use is HN, I forget that plenty of moderators do not act in good faith.
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
Thus IMO emergency vehicles violate the rule, although they should be allowed. Same thing IMO with the tank. Sure it's inoperable but it's a vehicle, in the park.
Agree. Emergency vehicles don't automatically get a "free pass", there are separate rules that apply an exemption. So the question and rule, as written, says that the emergency vehicles do violate the rule IMO. In the real world, there would just be other rules that would apply an exemption.
(IANAL, but have been driving emergency vehicles for 15 years).
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I agree with this obviously, but I feel quite strongly that you must answer "Yes, this violates the rule" to the emergency vehicles questions, because the rules of the game at the beginning clearly stated that you should answer about the violation itself, not about whether it should be allowed.
I think the author should have made the statement "A sandwich is an item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with meat, cheese, or other filling between them".
And then asked questions like:
- Is a grilled cheese a sandwich?
- Is two pieces of bread with a third piece of bread in the middle a sandwich?
- Is a hotdog a sandwich?
- Is a taco a sandwich?
- Is a breadbowl a sandwich?
- Is a poptart a sandwich?
- Is a calzone a sandwich?
- Is a burrito a sandwich?
- Is a pizza folded in half a sandwich?
Having asked these questions to many folks over the years, I promise the answers are much more split.
Now what if the pizza crust is toasted enough that, while it was not your intent, it breaks evenly at the seam during the act of folding it in half, and then you proceed to collapse the two halves before taking a bite. Did you have a sandwich for lunch?
I don't understand. If you walk into an establishment and ask for a sandwich, and they bring you any of the items you listed, you and me and everyone would be upset and confused. So no they are not sandwiches.
Fascinating that the first comment entirely disregard the very simple game rules (“it’s not about your jurisdiction“ and “it’s not about wether the rule should be disregarded in that case“).
Is it just because that way you can feel smart having “solved“ the game? Or do you think there’s a moral imperative to say an ambulance isn’t breaking a rule even in an abstract word game? Do you understand abstraction, and that this isn’t really about a park?
I did read the instructions and I also assumed that I should use my judgment to determine whether the intent of the sign was violated. If the author had wanted otherwise, they should have said something like "Forget everything you about how laws are written and interpreted in the real world and simply take the most literal interpretation you can, with no regard for how ridiculous the outcome might be."
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Cue ambulance crashing through a wooden bridge over a river because it was never intended to carry the weight, or getting stuck in a tunnel, driving over pedestrians that can't get out of the way because there is no space left, ... . Blindly ignoring a rule because you can is not always a good idea. You might be able to ignore the rule, but you can't ignore the reason why it was put in place.
What was your percentage of agreeing with the majority? Greater than 50%?
I think your response to this exercise actually proves the author's point. I see people disagreeing with your take in the comments or making (to their perspective) reasonable arguments in favor of their choices.
Whether you found it personally "crystal-clear" to answer the way you did says more about your personal confidence and way of understanding rules than about the task itself being unambiguous.
>> Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Obviously? Really? Not only do I find it non-obvious, the rules of the game specifically say to ignore outside context which would IMO include ignoring municipal laws or rules that might say emergency vehicles can go anywhere they are needed. That is huge part of the issue they are pointing out - an ambulance violates the rule, but context makes it OK.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
Most likely true. But to me the answer for the question itself is not about whether the rule can be overridden by any other rules. It’s purely about the rule itself.
The intro supports this:
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
There is a difference between a rule being violated, and whether the violation of the rule is allowed. Like they say in that intro text.
Therefore, all of the examples with police motor vehicles and ambulance motor vehicles are to be answered as being in violation of the rule.
I think the website is very disingenuous because it purposely asks the wrong question. The question is not "is the rule technically violated", the question is "should they be fined for violating the rule". If you asked the latter question, then 99% of people would agree on all questions.
> "To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear."
I'd be interested to see more grey-area things like a group of fast amateur bicycle racers, e-bikes, classic pedal-mopeds, electric stand-up scooters, electric sitting moped/scooters, Vespas, ice-cream tricycles, pedal delivery vehicles, I think there would be a lot more differing opinions about those.
Given the spiel at the beginning about how this place is different from where I live and that in this place, there are no rules which trump the park's rules, I can't agree that it's obvious that police, ambulances, and fire trucks obviously don't have to follow the rules. To me, it seems that the framing all but says that they do.
Police, ambulances and fire trucks are if anything some of the clearest violations. They are unambiguously vehicles. They are unambiguously entering the park.
It was really surprising to me how many so explicitly ignored the instructions for them.
There are two ways to approach the problem. Either to be dogmatic about the wording or to be practical. I ended up with only one "is a vehicle" because I was enforcing it the way I would enforce a rule like that in real life, a practical rule. If you were being dogmatic about the wording you would undermine the likely intent of the sign by kicking people out of their wheelchairs and having to shoot down the ISS. Rigid adherence to bad (or even just badly worded) rules is its own form of tyranny, one that is even more insidious because it has a veneer of legitimacy. Much evil has been perpetrated throughout history by people who were "just following orders".
In Europe our driver education contains a legal definition of a vehicle (and motor vehicle). You'll find almost all parks with drivable roads will have a clear definition at the entrance what's allowed and what isn't.
If in Europe there was a sign that says "no vehicles", that disallows skateboards and bicycles too. Signs will always make it clear if they mean "motor vehicles".
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
The test explicitly asked for answers as to whether the rule is followed, not whether its ok to ignore the rule in a given situation. Very obviously a police car or an ambulance is a vehicle in the park.
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
Wasn't the point of the experiment not that you could come up with answers that seemed sensible to you, but that different people came up with different answers that seemed sensible to them? I too felt the line was fairly clear in this case, but I was very surprised that others thought differently.
It isn't mentioned in the discussion on the results page, but one facet of effective moderation this shines a light on is as follows: each of us may find the moderation task easy, but few (or none) of us would be a moderator who would be universally trusted.
Yes, but then the experiment kinda proves the opposite of the point it was trying to prove. As it were, people largely agree with each other as to what's reasonable and what is not.
No, police and ambulances are vehicles. They're not allowed in the park. It's a violation. Maybe they can get away with the violation but if you're following the rules it's a violation.
This is why the real rules say "Emergency vehicles allowed", and then usually "No skateboarding, roller blading, scooters".
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I disagree due to the instructions on the page before starting the quiz: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
The game is specifically asking us not to make a judgement call on whether a violation of the rule should be permitted. So, police are violating the rule (even if we think it's allowable)
And police is like one super clear example of violation, everybody can agree car is a vehicle, and it's clearly written that you answer whether it's a violation not whether it should be, ignoring your local laws.
And yet it is top comment, with many confirmations in the replies. I had to scroll really really long to find somebody quoting short instruction which the parent is ignoring.
So long story short, amazing job with that game. It's seems really hard to present the case for how difficult moderation is any clearer. Fascinating stuff.
Also, I'm too lazy but it would be nice to see LLMs answers.
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. [...] please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
You:
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
Even having read your reply it is not obvious to me what you answered. Did you answer yes, the police etc. are violating the rule only adding a note for us tha, or did you answer no, thinking that this doesn't count as a violation?
To me the overall discussion, but especially the disagreement about emergency services and bicycles proves the point of the original article.
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
For other people too, but for them maybe the right answer is different.
Intent is clear until it is not.
Cars obviously aren't allowed. Bicycles are not, either. But can I walk through the park pulling my bicycle ? (I want to cut through the park to avoid a long detour). Some will say that the intent is to avoid have people _driving_ vehicles through the park because it is dangerous, others will say that if that was the intent the rule would be "No driving of vehicles in the park".
What about toy cars ? The extreme cases are easy, an hot wheels car is obviously fine. Something like this [1] I would say not, too fast and dangerous. What about the middle ground ? Are tricycles fine ? Toy car with pedals ? A car-like stroller [2] ?
It is less clear and you will have different complains from different persons. Some people will be pissed off that they can use their vehicle while other can use their. Some people are petty and will try to have any kind vehicle banned "because the rule says so", just to make the life of others miserable.
And this is only about what constitutes a vehicle, we are not even talking about what means "in the park".
You can give moderators (law enforcement, in the park example) freedom to act according the intent ("when I see it I know if it is allowed or not"), but the more freedom they have, the more potential for trouble there is.
Of course people will be disgruntled also if the rule is too specific and inflexible, because that may mean not being able to do something that it "obviously" was meant to be allowed. You need to find a good balance, and the ability to update the rules for the thorny cases.
There was no reason to assume either the police car or the ambulance was doing their job. There was no mention of a medical emergency, just an EMT driving an ambulance. Police officers may or may not have jurisdiction in the area and there was no evidence the emergency was even a police matter. The EMT driving through the gate to watch the music festival, and the police officer driving through the park during mid-2020 (when the entire world had declared COVID an emergency) would both qualify.
And that doesn't even address the bigger issue that even if they were justified in breaking the rule, they were breaking the rule.
Yes indeed. “In a justifiable emergency, X breaks the rules — does this break the rules?” Is a very clear “yes”. It doesn’t ask whether X should be punished for breaking them.
> There was no reason to assume either the police car or the ambulance was doing their job.
The prompts were: "In an emergency, Neil, an EMT, drives his ambulance into the park" and "In an emergency, Laurie, a police officer, drives her police car into the park."
Ehm. I answered that the cop and ambulance were in violation of the rule, but it’s sometimes okay to break the rules. That doesn’t mean they didn’t break the rules — it means they were justified in breaking the rules.
in other words, there's two pieces here, 1) the rule, 2) the consequences of breaking the rule.
It is agreed that the rule (1) is broken by emergency vehicles. It is unknown that (2) is in effect (it is not described in the scenario), but people would assume that there's no consequences for emergency vehicles breaking the rule.
If people don't agree on it, then the clarity you feel is an illusion. The point of rules is common understanding of what is acceptable. Notably, you pulled a bunch of special cases and refinements from thin air. The way I read the setup, it was "crystal clear" that the rule was violated by emergency services, even if we could agree afterwards not to enforce it there.
And, yes, of course, moderation questions are much harder. At least with the vehicle thing people aren't usually aren't deliberately constructing tricky cases.
I feel the same way as the above comment. If you were an actual administrator in charge of fining people for violating the rule, almost none of these examples should give you pause. You wouldn't be trying to give a ticket to planes flying overhead, for example. With these examples, there really isn't much disagreement on whether action should be taken, so any discussion of whether a rule is technically violated is moot.
I fully agreed with the GP for the same reasons: in my book everything except the Civic was OK, because that matches the intent of the sign.
In both law and real life, there is a common understanding (to use your term) that rules may be violated for the greater good. Does driving an ambulance into the park violate the letter of the rule? Yes, but it's still OK because we give emergency vehicles wide leeway to break rules so they can save lives. Judaism even encodes this in a general principle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh
I'm with the parent comment, as I think the context is important here.
If you think the emergency service vehicles violate the rule, how about a park maintenance vehicle or a park ranger vehicle? Would you say "no vehicles in the park" rule applies to them too, so they would be violating it?
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
isn't that the exact thing this points attention to? When you have power, everything is clear. But _your_ clear isn't necessarily same as anyone else's clear
The intent isn't super clear. Personally, I don't think that emergency vehicles are obviously exempt, we don't know why the rule is there. I don't that bicycles are obviously exempt either, they are clear vehicles that go faster than normal human speeds and the line between motorcycle and bicycle is rather unclear. (Ask five of your friends and associates whether ebikes should be allow on a bike path, then ask about ebikes that hit 45mph, then ice mopeds, then those e unicycle things, then the faster versions...)
Likewise with boats, it seems that there are many cases where no watercraft at all should be allowed, and other cases where a motorboat is fine even if they don't want cars and whatnot in the park. And while flying aover a park is arguably not in it, a helicopter hovering a few feet over a field obviously is in the park and far more disruptive than the other vehicles.
And if i want to say no skateboarding, roller blading, scootering, pogoing, or any alternative in the park?
I agreed with 11% of people, but that is 1 in 10 who agree your take isn't correct. (granted i think a small wagon is ridiculous to enforce under like 90% of circumstances)
What did you answer about bicycles and roller skates? It wasn't one of the questions, but I bet razor scooters would split the vote close to 50/50.
And what if the fire marshal is visiting the park to evaluate the maximum occupancy of the office — can they drive their official vehicle into the park for that?
For me, it is obvious that police and ambulances in emergencies violate the rule.
They may have some higher-level rule that says "in emergencies we don't get punished for violating this category of rule", but the rule is still there, and requires the drivers to demonstrate that there was in fact an emergency.
A hierarchy of rules is why normal people don't get to act like cops, or perform amateur heart transplants.
Bikes are a more interesting edge case for me; I think they are, as I expect the reason for the rule to be some kind of environment degradation, possibly easily damaged lawns or similar. But they might be fine. Depends on the reason for the rule.
The website closes with a graph objectively showing how people disagree with each other on these questions. People thinking that interpretation is obvious and that there is no reasonable disagreement is exactly the problem.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
They have to acknowledge that the rule exists, and then deliberately break it, because their task takes priority over the rule.
If the question is "does this break the rule?" then the answer is "yes, but". If the question is "will it stay out of the park?" then the answer is "no". The real world doesn't work exactly like if (cond) statements in code.
I interpreted the ambulance and police as breaking the rule, even though it wouldn't be persecuted. Of course the important thing isn't the rule, but people's reaction over time. A vehicle might cause unwanted noise or damage park grounds. Even without the rule, people might get upset if people use vehicles to degrade park quality. On the other end, if the park is many miles across and it has large paved trails, people might perceive the rule as unjust. So it's ultimately this negotiation and power between participants (including the park owners) that determines acceptability. An arbitrary rule which is easy to break but without real harm, in enforcing it, creates more harm than it prevents. So, I don't care about the rule but how it's enforced. Another concept useful to these situations is Taleb's intransigent minority: those who care will win over those who don't. With content moderation, we will always have a battle between those who perceive harm and those who don't. Problematic rules must be fought just as problematic content must be fought. A systems ability to adapt rules over time will ultimately determine its useful life. Change or be replaced.
So which side of the vehicle/nonvehicle line did you choose for these? Wagon, wheel chair, skateboard, surf board, parachute, roller skates, ice skates, shoes, socks.
It's not that hard. You have to understand a "park" is usually primarily some pseudo-preserve of nature, with varying degrees of permitted human recreational uses. That is what a "park" actually means.
Users of parks generally know there will be varying usage rules for the park based on the park. But generally speaking, things that will destroy the "natural perserved" aspects, things that will disrupt other people using the park, aren't allowed.
And, like moderation, if you don't understand the context of what a park is in society, you should either go there with someone that does, ask the authorities in charge of the park, or DON'T GO.
So the answer to the question is "what activities are supported by the park, do you know other people that use those implements there without controversy".
You socially interact to know. If it is a grey area, ask either someone that may know, or the authorities.
This isn't Zeno's paradoxes. You aren't asking if the vehicle is every technically being used at the park because the atoms are repelled by the electromagnetic force and things never actually touch each other.
It isn't something that needs to be solved philosophically. There are people with authoritative knowledge, and you ask them the questions, and they give a "yes or no". And you either obey their judgement, or you break the rules.
If the AI (because this HAS to be about AI, why else is this dribble here) can't understand the context, it won't effectively moderate.
It's crystal clear until it's not. In the UK a bicycle is, rightly so, considered a vehicle. I know this, but I'd guess many British people do not. I also understand why bicycles are considered vehicles and, when on my bike, tend to follow the spirit of rules and designs that appear to prohibit vehicles.
I would not ride in the park, but would walk my bike in the park. I'd be breaking the rules but adhering to the spirit of them.
This is funny because others probably answered differently but feel the same way. So the site is actually achieving what it was created for. Discussion.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Not so obvious. I identified them as having violated the rules. If an exemption was intended for emergency vehicles it should have been included in the sign. Many signs regarding rules for vehicles include "except for emergency vehicles". Without such an exemption I would apply the rules to them.
> Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Is that every year multiple people in the U.S. are killed by police driving their cars onto beaches and running over unsuspecting sun bathers. So there’s a strong argument that the signs intent is to ban even responding emergency vehicles.
My takeaway was similar — the problem is one of how we define "vehicle". Is it anything that moves, anything that carries a person, is it a toy model of a vehicle, etc., etc., etc..
Without that definition, almost anything resembling an edge case becomes an argument.
Similarly, without specifying the intent, it becomes impossible to decide the argument, because easily two people can have legitimately different views; e.g., the rule is to prevent anything putting more pressure on the ground than a footfall (so basically anything w/wheels is a problem, including emergency vehicles, but a sled might be is OK), to anything fast-moving and massive (so toys, airplanes, & spacecraft are OK), to some arbitrary rule from a psycho-dictator owner...
I.e., if you want people to make sense of the rules, they need to start with a simple clear definition (this does OK in that dept.), specify the extent (what to include and exclude) specify the intent, and maybe provide examples of how to decide edge cases so that others can reason about them.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
An emergency or service vehicle in practice could have an overriding exemption rule (or not and just ignore some rules without retaliation), but they still violate "No vehicles in the park".
Same here. I looked at the intent of the rule given the context. Rules are enforced by humans not robots and are meaningless without context.
When you do try to enforce rules literally, you end up with kids being expelled because they brought an action figure to school, or teenagers being executed because they fell into a flower bed.
It's also an awfully simplistic vision of moderation/rules, whereas the answer in real life should be "it depends". Should an emergency vehicle be allowed through the park? Yes. As another comment says, is there a known risk about things collapsing in the park? Guess what, that kind of stuff is either displayed prominently at the entrance, or told in advance to the few people that might legitimately have to go through the park.
Simple solutions do not apply to such an extremely complex as human behaviour. In the same way, moderation can not rely on simple, inflexible rules. Yes, sometimes you're gonna ban someone who's just skirting them. Yes, a few dumbasses are going to complain. Ignore them, ban then too, whatever.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Obviously? I disagree there and marked those as violating the rule. If we are to take the rule literally and logically, then those examples clearly violate the rule. Nowhere in that game did it say that police, ambulances and fire trucks get a free pass. There isn't anything obvious about that. You're bringing your own context and knowledge/interpretation of the world into this. The game also clearly stated that we should ignore our own local laws (and religion) when answering the questions.
What was your answer on the wheelchair? Same as for bicycle, or different? If different, what about a wheelchair but the person in it doesn’t need a wheelchair, they just enjoy the sporting aspect of arm-powered vehicles?
The other way I would “problematize” (to borrow the author’s wording) your crystal-clear understanding is to ask about the matchbox car, then the remote control car, then one of those kid-size toy cars that the kid drives around (then a small one-person electric car, then a full-size electric car).
I suppose another angle would be, are bicycles okay? What about battery-powered bicycles? Does it change if we add a small petrol motor to recharge the battery?
>obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
It's still breaking the rule though.
Legally I suspect it varies between jurisdictions whether the sign doesn't apply to them, it does apply but conflicts with another rule, or whether it's argued as an extenuating circumstance.
Then there's the edge cases like bikes and horses.
Are they vehicles? It's completely reasonable that they could be deemed to be.
We've got the same kind of argument going on with e scooters at the moment.
Ultimately I answered a lot of these based on what I would expect to see in a park, and what I think is reasonable. But they aren't objective measures.
There is being rational, using principles to interpret a statement.
And then there is being rational to the extent that you are in complete denial about that the fact that your rational faculty is located within a spongy organ in the cranial cavity of an ambulatory meat bag.
There doesn't need to be an objective measure for you to take a position on the intent and meaning of a linguistic construct such as a rule. It is just a thing that bipedal meatbags do.
If one meatbag has a different view than another meatbag then they are in a political conflict. There are ways of resolving the conflict which range from friendly chat, through formal debate, right the way to genocide. Generally speaking, well adjusted members of civilised society can resolve things through the former. Sometimes we go fucking bananas and end up at the latter.
Not sure why so many find it so difficult to grasp, or feel the need to apologize that they are mortal, they can't derive the answer from a set of universally agreed-upon axioms and carve it in to a stone tablet like some old-testament god ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To me, a bike is clearly a vehicle. To double-check, I've searched for "list of vehicles" on Google, all the lists I have seen include bikes in them (and I didn't expect anyone to disagree with this).
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
That's not particularly surprising. But you may be asking the wrong question.
If you want to know whether the rules are clear then I think that the right question to ask is not "Are the answers crystal-clear to you?" but "Will different people produce the same answers?".
If we had a sharp drop in the graph at one point then it would suggest that most everyone has the same cutoff; instead we see a very smooth curve as if different people read this VERY SIMPLE AND CLEAR rule and still didn't agree on when it applied.
In the Highway Traffic Act of Ontario "vehicle" is defined as:
“vehicle” includes a motor vehicle, trailer, traction engine, farm tractor, road-building machine, bicycle and any vehicle drawn, propelled or driven by any kind of power, including muscular power, but does not include a motorized snow vehicle or a street car; (“véhicule”)
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
One of the points of the exercise is that there is broad spread (though far from a uniform distribution) of responses, so the fact that the correct answers are clear to you only goes so far.
It might be interesting to see how additional statements about intent would affect the distribution (though to the extent that the statements of intent take the form of lists of determinations in each special case, the interesting outcome would be the distribution continuing to be broad.)
I felt the exact same way. I found there was exactly one example of a vehicle being in the park, and everything else was fine. That didn't seem to be their intent
You clearly didn't understand. It's mostly not able how easy or not you found it to apply the rule, it was about how whatever you decided was actually quite different from other people. In fact, you finding it very clear makes the point apply even more.
I felt it was easy too, but I felt that almost every item listed was a vehicle and in the park. If it helps here was my reasoning. To start with I checked the dictionary for a definition and it appears that a vehicle is "A device or structure for transporting persons or things; a conveyance". Then it was a matter of categorizing.
The only one I had to deliberate was the horse, because while it transports persons or things it isn't a device or structure. I ended up saying almost everything was a vehicle and in the park.
> … obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
They are indeed violating the rule. Whether that rule is enforced against emergency vehicles is considered by the enforcing agent. I believe most people in that position would allow the emergency vehicles to do their jobs without citing them for violating the rule.
I'll argue that the police can enter the park with their vehicles, but they'll be violating the rule when they do so.
But if we're ignoring local rules and the only question is whether or not they would be violating the rules, then yes they would be, and whether they can anyway is out of scope.
In that scenario the duty to help citizens in need simply supersedes the rule that vehicles are not allowed in the park. So pedantically the EMT and police officer are breaking the rule, but breaking the rule of idly standing by in an emergency is worse.
The reason to allow emergency vehicles to go through the park must then outweigh the benefit of the ‘no vehicles allowed rule’. Something trivial like a pedestrian illegally crossing the street should not warrant the police going on a car chase through said park.
> the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
"Obvious" for you that is. I had a different interpretation of the obvious rule, so came up with a different set of answers.
If you add this, you clarify the intent and can meaningfully declare exceptions like "no rules in the park because people come here to relax. Of course if a vehicle is necessary to e.g. stop a wildfire or stop a criminal from shooting people, a vehicle is more than welcome"
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
That’s not so clear IMO. It depends on the severity and urgency of the accident, and whether there is a really prohibitive issue that entirely prevents heavy vehicles from entering, like quicksand or muddy ground that will get an EMT stuck.
I think it's more intended to be a proof of how people have a difficult time applying clear-cut rules without relying on their prior biases. That (conceptually) is a really good exercise and one that we could all benefit from. The implementation, explanation and result transparency otoh, are garbage.
> but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer
There is no sign. Nowhere in the question does it mention a sign.
What the question does say, however, is this: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
Which is pretty much the opposite of what you conclude.
It's obvious that the spirit of a rule that says "no vehicles in the park" actually means "do not cause inconvenience or ruin the serenity of the park." A person in a wheelchair, nor an astronaut passing overhead do those things. A guy driving a Toyota around does.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I agree, but in the sense that it’s okay for them to violate the rule. However, they are still violating the rule, and thus the correct answer in the game is “yes, this violates the rule”.
>(and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
In some countries they can ignore such signs only when under an emergency and rights have been given by a central or a local station. A police car can't just turn on flashy lights and drive into a park.
You didn't follow the instructions. He specifically says forget all existing rules you may know. There are no vehicles allowed in the park. That includes ambulances, fire trucks, orbiting space stations that pass through the border of the park, etc.
I may have answered differently from you (I would say the police violated the rule) but I think we actually agree on the point that the rules do not apply to emergency workers. In essence, the data collected isn’t reflective of peoples actual attitudes.
I considered the emergency vehicles to be violations of the rule, but that they were defensible exceptions. To borrow a legal concept, that they are emergency vehicles was an affirmative defense, meaning I had to first admit they violated the rule.
Yes I'd say it's "unclear to follow" to adversarial (or just nitpicking) people
(Also) because we have a context of a park and of general rules. (Also if you think the ISS is a vehicle on the park you're welcome to try to enforce that)
While I agree, I marked the emergency vehicles as being in violation of the rule. My interpretation being that such a rule would not be enforced even though it was technically violated.
the child in the electric toy car is probably the real dividing line on the question of what is a "vehicle"... the ISS orbiting is the line on what is "in the park"... and the police car in an emergency is where you're supposed to bend the definition of the word "allowed".
I think the answer to the survey is "I want to talk to my lawyer".
you give emergency vehicles an exception to the rule, that was specifically mentions as not being the intent. the rule is no vehicles in the park, an ambulance is a vehicle so it broke the rule. if then punishment is applied and what is something else, in the basis it's a vehicle in the park.
I came away with the exact same takeaway. If you really want to convince people that content moderation is a hard problem, just ask them to listen to this Radiolab episode about Facebook's struggle: https://radiolab.org/podcast/post-no-evil
Is this some dumb philosophical thing? It's just contextualized language, with fairly well established context.
You have a "park". You have a rule about "no vehicles in park".
If you have been to enough parks, you know that they generally will entail some sort of separation of nature from the more general technological society around it, and certainly from one of the major aspects of that technological society, big ass heavy noisy smelly destructive annoying vehicles.
You will also know that parks are managed and funded by some authority, who may have necessity to enter and maintain them with "vehicles" that they know and are trained to operate and use properly in the park, likewise with emergency services and their vehicles.
So let's look at content moderation in this standpoint. Almost always, content moderation is within a context of a forum, where there is a subject matter and a set of germane topics. The subject matter often has implicit constraints, a lot like a park.
The other interesting thing about a park is that you arrive at one, and you can generally tell what is acceptable behavior in a park without the rules by observing what other people are doing, and "conforming" to that behavior. And if you don't know, you ask people around you and they will tell you yes/no/dunno and whether they are knowledgeable.
I can see a forum or subreddit kind of the same.
If a person was going to the park asking these questions, the actual answer after about four or five questions is "you probably shouldn't go to a park, or do whatever it is you want to do there, because you don't understand parks very well"
Similarly for something that is content moderated, after about four or five questions that clearly show you don't understand the subject matter of the forum or how to interact with other people involved in the subject matter, the answer is "you shouldn't post or say anything in that forum".
The ACTUAL corner cases in this are "well, can I take an electric bike into the park?" "Can my personal dog-robot follow me into the park?" "can I ride my electric blade scooter in the park?" "Okay, how BIG of an e-bike can I bring in?" "Is the no-vehicle policy about loud dirty ICE engines, or is it mostly about size?" because electric vehicles will ACTUALLY stress that stuff out.
I think it does a fair job if you realize that the entire thing is semantics.
Every prompt is asking either one or both of these questions: "Is this a vehicle?" "Is it in the park?"
So you have to ask yourself what is a vehicle? Most people would not classify shoes as a vehicle. So why would attaching wheels to shoes make them vehicles? The definition of vehicle is rather vague, basically "something used to move people or goods, especially on land". Which skates kind of are. They use a machine, the wheel, to multiply work done.
Even though a matchbox car has all the appearances of something normally accepted as a vehicle, does the fact that it is incapable of transporting anything significant change that fact?
Then you get to "in the park". What is "in" the park as opposed to "out"? Yes, the grounds as defined by the property lines are definitely "in" the park. Someone driving a Civic through the grounds is definitely "in the park". Basically, do you count the airspace of the park and if so, where does it end? If something hovering 4 feet above the ground is in the park, then why isn't an airplane at 33,000 feet "in" in the park? Is it because we can't reasonably interact with it? If that's the case, do the boundaries of the park change depending on the height and reach of those in it? If no one is in the park, and you jump a Civic completely over the grounds, were you ever "in" the park?
Moderation is an attempt to define things like this. Sometimes more abstractly, sometimes way more directly. For instance, if you have a forum about sandwiches, you're going to have to have a rule about hot dogs. Whether or not they count.
You see it here all the time when someone asks "Why was this posted here?"
So if you have a rule that says "No slurs". That seems simple enough. But now you have to define what a slur is. If I call someone a "fucking idiot", is that slur or just an insult? What if I just said, "Americans, right?" Calling out someone's nationality shouldn't technically be a slur, but it's kind of the implication that turns it into one. Because I'm saying something about people from America, saying they all share a negative quality by virtue of where they are geographically from.
Do we just make a list of slurs? Do we try and account for tone? Where is the line between heated debate and a flamewar? Or even an engaged discussion and a heated debate. Even here, you can get rate limited for just interacting too much. Conversations killed because people were conversing too much.
But that's how they defined a vehicle, that's where they drew the lines of the park.
I agree 100% with the spirit of your point and I think imagining a forced bet scenario can help to clarify things. There are three main concepts we want to interpret within the context of the phrasing of the rule: (1) the intended referrent of 'vehicle'; (2) the intended meaning of 'in' the park; (3) the actual intention of the rule regarding emergency vehicles.
This is the scenario: imagine you're forced to wager a nontrivial sum of money on the following bet. You have to write down how you interpreted (1), (2), and (3). Then we randomly pick a real park that has this exact rule phrased in this exact way (I'm hopeful there'll be at least one out there), find the person who wrote the rule, give them your written interpretation, and ask if they agree. You lose if they don't. Notice we're not asking them to also write down a longer interpretation and comparing word-for-word. Just whether they think you got the gist of it.
I would write down that 'vehicle' was intended to refer to motorized passenger vehicles, 'in' was intended to mean that the vehicles shouldn't be in/on water or land within park boundaries, and that the rule wasn't intended to restrict passage to emergency vehicles responding to emergency situations. I expect most people would write something similar if they had real money on the line.
The trouble with the horrible website is it's trying to prove that nebulosity makes content moderation difficult by forcing people to disagree, but this disagreement almost entirely pertains to a point that has nothing to do with nebulosity: the park rule would only ever be written within a wider legal framework and doesn't make sense in isolation.
If I take my answers to (1) and (2), I'm forced to conclude that the emergency vehicles were violating the rule within the ridiculously artificial scenario presented. However, I'm also confident that this rule would only have been written verbatim within a wider legal framework that provided exceptions for emergency vehicles.
Consider self-defence in the context of murder or manslaughter. In the UK at least, the first thing the court does is establish whether the defendant would fit the criteria for murder / manslaughter ignoring the self-defence aspect, because otherwise it's a moot point. Once this is done, they would then establish whether the defence of self-defence also applies, which would then negate the conviction. If you wanted to prove that law is complex because it's hard to define words, would you really make a website that says "Ignore everything else you know and suppose that murder is only defined as killing a person" and then think you're being really smart when people disagree on the scenario involving clear self-defence? Hopefully not, because they're really only disagreeing with being forced to invoke your artificially-restricted definition.
That said, the website demonstrates the real reason why online moderation is hard: because it disproportionately attracts the sorts of people who answered 'yes' to the ISS question in this quiz. So you often end up with lots of users sharing a reasonable consensus on what the rules mean being moderated by a tiny group of... we'll say 'non-representative' moderators. It's a common problem with any banal form of authority, and isn't specific to website moderation at all.
I think you would lose a lot of money. Bikes and skateboards alone are going to have tons of violations. Also, I feel like if i had to bet money, boats aren't going to be included unless specified in most but crucially not all circumstances.
The number at the end is unclear - it says I agreed with the majority 11%, but then it shows a bunch of charts. Yet the three I said were vehicles (the car, the police vehicle, and the ambulance) are the only 3 above 50% support, so it seems I agreed with the majority 100%. I even opened a second session in another browser and hit yes to everything to see if the numbers in the chart was the amount that agree with me, and no, the numbers didn't invert so it seems the chart is measuring yes answers.
Same, the only three I marked as violating the rule were the car, the police and the ambulance. And it told me I agreed with 11% but showed a bar chart showing that basically everyone agreed with me. It was confusing.
Also breaking a rule is fine for an emergency vehicle.
I also took away the opposite of what the author tried to convey.
But I also got a bad impression of their argumentative integrity because they tried to use a strawman to illustrate their point - only it backfired anyway.
An ill defined rule that lacks examples and definition is not a good way to prove people interpret a good faith attempt at rules differently.
And the longer explanation at the end simply dismisses the notion of giving any examples or even trying to give a clear rule by hand waving and basically saying a motivated person can find ambiguity in anything.
So because a rule or law can’t be defined to perfection without the slightest ambiguity then we should just have anarchy? I’m sorry for the bluntness but that’s asinine.
Am I crazy/dumb or is the chart super confusing? I really had to stare at it to figure out how to read it, and I'm still just guessing the vertical scale is percent of the whole that think each item is a car.
The problem is that I also got 11% just saying yes to everything. It would seem surprising to me to have the same percentage of maximalists as there is for people who are in the majority on every question
What, exactly, is the graph showing? % of people who said "Yes this is a vehicle in the park" or % of people who agree with you ? It's very difficult to tell as I said yes only to the car and the memorial...
Your first interpretation is correct. No one thinks a kite is a vehicle. Everyone thinks a private car is a vehicle. Everything else is in between.
If your answers were consistent with a consistent population, there would be a threshold above which all your bars turn red. Any churn in that consistency (my last six bars are a mixture of red and green) shows a deviation of some kind, but I don’t know how this accounts for when there is no overall consistency and everyone disagrees.
You can get not-11% by choosing to skip before the end. IF you skip after 7 questions, it's "You agreed with the majority: 29%" — same whether I say yes to all or no to all.
So I don't think it's related to yours answers. It's just the weighted average of what people said for the set of questions you answered, or something like that. Not actually your score at all.
What it appears to be actually calculating is that 1/9 of items had majority consensus that they were against the rule. It doesn't appear to take your actual selection into consideration, only the amount of questions answered
I also got 11% and think that number may be a result of some kind of flawed calculation. The final chart distribution of each "vehicle" paints a much clearer picture.
Yeah, I don't get what the score means. Also saw 11%. Clearly the number means something other than what people think it means, which is maybe the real test.
To me, if I see a rule trying to ban "vehicles" without defining "vehicles", I take my concept of "vehicles" by deduction: I think about all the ways that things that I know of as being "vehicle-esque" could be problematic in various different ways such that you'd want to ban them — being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example); property damage (skateboards, dirt bikes) — and then I guess that the "spirit of the law" is to put whatever requirements in place would be required to reduce the instances of those problems.
The banning of certain explicit classes of vehicles is only a byproduct, not the end-goal, of such a rule; and so it doesn't actually matter what is or isn't a vehicle — the word "vehicle" in such a rule is acting as a conceptual stand-in for whatever things cause uniquely vehicle-in-the-park-ish problems; and anything that doesn't cause such problems, isn't "a vehicle."
I find that this lens on rule enforcement is a useful guide, because whatever the text of the law ends up saying, the enforcement of the law will hew to the spirit that the text of the rule is being interpreted to have, by those charged with its enforcement. (I.e., the non-working tank is almost certainly a "vehicle" by any definition a bylaw would pose, but if they deliver it to the park on a non-damaging sled, let it sit there for a while, then haul it away on the same sled, then it's not causing any of the problems that "vehicles" cause, and so it's very unlikely that any bylaw-enforcement officer would actually ticket the owner of the tank for having it in the park.)
The problem is that it won’t always be enforced that way.
For example: in the city of Melbourne, there are sometimes signs instructing cyclists to dismount (e.g. at railway level crossings), or that you aren’t permitted to cycle in such-and-such a place (e.g. railway platform). Their illustrations always depict an upright bicycle. I ride a recumbent tricycle, which the Road Safety Road Rules considers to be a bicycle. The reasons for dismounting simply don’t apply: my wheels won’t get caught in rails and I won’t fall over, and in fact dismounting will make matters worse. And the reasons for not cycling in most of the so-marked places are seriously diminished and heavily counterbalanced: I can easily and safely travel at pedestrian speed, and I will be far more of an obstruction on your thoroughfare if you require that I stand up and awkwardly push my vehicle along, steering only with difficulty (normally mostly by nudging one of the front wheels with one foot as I walk), taking up a lot more space and not going straight or at the same speed as others. Common sense says I should ignore such signs and assess each situation individually. But I tried applying common sense like this on a railway platform once and was severely threatened with a fine. Meanwhile, mobility scooters are really pretty similar to me in contextual characteristics (my vehicle interacts in such situations much more like one of them than like an upright bicycle), but they’re fine.
(Aside: in the state of Victoria, the road rules classify my vehicle as a bicycle; but in New Zealand, the road rules classify it and bicycles as cycles, and only mention bicycles in one section, about wearing helmets. No attention is drawn to the use of a different word, but it’s clear that tricyclists are genuinely not legally required to wear helmets—which does actually make some sense, as the majority of scenarios where a helmet is beneficial to a bicyclist either don’t apply, or apply vastly less often, to recumbent tricyclists.)
Sounds like the railway staff are indeed enforcing the spirit of the law by allowing mobility scooters on the platform. If I had to guess why your tricycle was not allowed it's because the staff perceive your tricycle as a potentially very fast moving obstacle on the platform which the mobility scooter obviously is not. They are probably more concerned about the safety of others than yourself when they apply that rule. In my opinion analysing the intent of rule is the right way to go about enforcement even if it means different people will arrive at different conclusions.
>Common sense says I should ignore such signs and assess each situation individually.
Does it? How is it different from Car A driving the speed limit and Car B driving 20 over because "I have a big SUV/racecar/motorcycle"?
Laws are normally made knowing there are situations where it will not always seem common sense, but if we follow your logic we would have hundred of thousands of rules, like a complete set for each type of car, bike, etc. I see it as common sense that of course the same rules apply to your tricycle, unless it is for a disabled person.
We recently had this problem in Sweden: There are parking spaces where "Caravans" or "Campers" are forbidden (because they either tend to stay there all day or sleep) - we have a VW T4, it is considered of class "car" in Germany. We still sleep in it. Are we allowed to stay on these parking spaces? We decided: No. Our interpretation was that overnight-stays are unwanted by the local population or government. But the sign wasn't clear. The pictures on these signs also showed no vans, just big campers.
But rules are a "contract" between two parties. The people who put up a sign are trying to fix a problem and they care about the intention behind the sign. But the visitors need to try to follow the rules, so they need to decide of the activity they were considering is allowed.
This ambiguity can cause issues. In a perfect world it doesn't exist. But in reality it usually does because you don't want to hire a lawyer to help you understand if the 30-page sign prevents you from bringing a toy boat into the park.
To put it more succinctly: the sign itself isn't the statute or bylaw! it's just a quick reminder.
Everyone is trying to interpret one line of text. But that line ks just a stand in for a much longer text that should answer all of the questions.
E.g. for emergency vehicles, there is certainly a statute somewhere that grants them exemption, if that is appropriate. We don't need to torture ourself wondering.
The sibling who mentioned his recombinant bicycle not fitting the intent of the bylaws should petition the relevant authority to update the text to clarify this detail. But that doesn't mean they're going to change the signs or graphics.
But this depends on "in what context am I being asked whether a rule is violated"? I didn't start out knowing I was doing content moderation for a website or I might've answered those differently.
Nitpick: The summary at the end labels your choices as "You think it is not a vehicle" or "You think it is a vehicle" based on whether or not you said the situation violates the rule, but some of the scenarios were clearly about whether or not something was in the park, rather than whether or not it was a vehicle. I can think a plane or a space station is a vehicle without thinking it violates the rule about not being in the park.
Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
That seems like good analogy to content moderation. You have to ask "is the forbidden content actually on the site?"
For example you can have a rule like "no sharing pornographic content", but then are people allowed to share links to forbidden content? Links to sites that are 100% links to forbidden content? Links to sites that have one link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? Links to sites that have one extremely prominent link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? How prominent? Etc etc etc.
That is a pretty clear distinction. A separate site has separate administration, can be blocked separately, etc. Otherwise you have additional rules: disallow direct links to forbidden content that causes it to render on the page, disallow linking to specific forbidden content, disallow links to on blacklisted domains, allow only whitelisted domain links.
Given that the whole exercise was about meticulous line drawing I think this bit of nitpicking is entirely appropriate. Clearly “is a vehicle” and “is in the park” were the two major axes that each question needed to be plotted on.
Interestingly, some people added others that weren't explicit in the rule. For example, the person riding a skateboard was considered a violation by roughly twice as many people as the person carrying one, despite both being identical on the "is a vehicle" and "in the park" axes. I suppose unless someone's definition of vehicle depends on it being in use.
Similarly, the question asks "does it violate the rule" not "should the vehicle be allowed in the park". Of course driving an ambulance into the park violates the rule - but it's ok the break the rule for emergencies!
Which of course illustrates that in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply. Especially in content moderation.
The instructions explain that, so it shouldn't interfere with the decision making, but the thing that the instructions don't talk about is whether the park extends indefinitely into the sky. One need not even consider the legal aspect of this (airspace rights: historical versus modern) but merely consider what it means to be in the park! Personally, I think that if the vehicle is making contact with the ground then it's "in" the park, but if it's not making contact with the ground then it's "above" the park.
> Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
No actually I do think it does and is captured beautifully in the game. Things that clearly once vehicles are arguably no longer - like the war tank.
Like Michelangelo's David, is the nudity porn? is it obscene? for who? Is this a website about art? or a porn site? education site? a site for children?
Each one of those sites have differing views of the exact same thing.
It's exactly the point of the exercise. Whether something is a vehicle and whether said thing is "in" the park are both separate dimensions of logic that each individual applies differently towards their decision making. This is exactly why content moderation has trouble to stay consistent and rarely pleases everyone, because so many nuances from non-intersecting aspects of logic/context/culture/opinions are forced to consolidate into a binary choice (violation vs. non-violation).
Same - I used the simple "rule" that basically everything that's in the park and used to carry people or goods is a "vehicle" at least by some people's standard. But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
> But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
But you were specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction, and that's why this can happen. The 15 countries it flew over are members of the ICAO, which delegated some of their sovereignty to the common good of easy air travel. It could have easily worked out some other way; fly over our country without stopping for immigration, and we blow up your plane. (You can see this in action if you fly your plane from Canada to do a low approach over the White House. You probably won't be home for dinner.) Similarly, in the US, the FAA decides who can fly over your property and how low. These are not universal constraints on existence, just actual laws that people wrote down because nobody could agree on the details. I'd venture a guess that if you asked the average property owner if airplanes could fly over their property and stare at them in their hot tubs, they'd say "no". However, the law simply doesn't agree with them, and a satellite is photographing your underwear as we speak!
You can fly a plane across the globe but the plane's flight path must be approved by each of the 15 countries before it is allowed in their airspace.
The countries often ask for passenger lists and manifests before they allow your plane to do so and have, in the past forced planes to land to get to passengers or suspected passengers on the plane they have an interest in.
The plane question stated the plane was `over` the park which implies it is not in the park. If the question instead said `through` the park, the answer would differ.
Humans carry all kinds of goods and often carry people. Even if we limit "goods" to exclude our personal effects, someone carrying takeout across a park—especially for someone else—could be considered a vehicle by that definition.
Additionally strollers, wagons, and other baby or child conveyances would also qualify.
Posting “racial epithets” is banned on social networks but if I post a video of a politician saying a racial epithet to raise awareness. Does that violate the rule? We aren’t debating whether or not it was a racial epithet.
I was thinking along these lines as well but after reading the explanation at the end of the game, I’m not so sure.
The rule is no vehicles in the park. I’ve also concluded that an ambulance or police responding to a call didn’t violate the rule but saw that a lot of people seemed to think it did. And it made me think.
The rules say to not apply any other rule but the stated one. And if you follow the rule to the letter, a police car in the park is a vehicle in the park , violates the rule. It’s dumb but it does.
Common sense says it shouldn’t but the rule says it does and the instructions say to only consider the rule with no nuance.
The instructions beforehand were very clear that you should answer whether the scenario violated the rule, not whether it should be allowed.
I suppose that's the beauty, intentional or not, of this exercise... Since the point was to highlight human behavior your response is still a valid, important datapoint despite you "failing" to complete the exercise according to the instructions.
If "in the park" is meant as an analogy for "on the platform" in content moderation, then curiously enough Twitter suspended @RealDonaldTrump for off-park action (Jan 6).
Nobody provided the definition of vehicle either. The summary references lawyers using a variation of this game, but most legalese I've seen as a layperson usually starts by defining terms.
Yes, defined terms are critical. As the exercise went on, I kept refining my mental model of what a “vehicle” was in the context of the park sign.
I eventually came up with a mental model that was something like “an artificially powered or mechanically advantaged means of conveyance or transport, especially one that creates negative externalities to other park goers inconsistent with typical use and enjoyment of public park space.” But that wasn’t absolute - the non-functional tank was, in my mind, quite obviously a vehicle, and so was prohibited. Someone at a higher pay grade is going to have to make an exception there. The skydiver - ehhh, it was a stretch to call him a vehicle, but by my heuristic he broke the sign’s rule.
I don't think it really matters. The point I guess was that an ambulance or police car is obviously a vehicle, and obviously in the park. And yet enforcing this seemingly simple and logical rule becomes so absurd that some people would decide that a police car is not a vehicle just because it should be allowed in.
No, I felt a bit "betrayed" by this as well but also probably the point of the exercise? I dunno. Obviously there is rhyme to reason as to why you're offered to skip after 7 questions. I'm not sure why, but somewhere after 10 I started to feel like I wanted to go back and re-answer.
Did this change? For me it says "You think it is (not) a vehicle in the park," which doesn't match with your description of your issue with the results.
The "pulled a wagon" one is another aspect. Is the answerer assuming a vehicle pulled the wagon? I immediately wondered if the wagon was pulled by hand or animal or a vehicle.
What this highlights is that online we have lost - or at least eroded - social norms. If I see a sign that says "no vehicles allowed", it's obvious they don't mean wagons and strollers. In almost all cases the police and the public are 99% in sync. Online, though, the moderators are forced to do a careful study of every action and become asinine literalists lest a horde of boundary-pushers ruin it for everyone.
Social norms are quite culture-specific. Online people from all countries and cultures interact, and that's where some misunderstandings come from.
It's not a big problem if everyone is civil and existing moderation mechanisms aren't overwhelmed; people quickly learn from online faux pas and the online social norm is restored.
I think it goes even beyond that. Online you can get a lot more socioeconomic, age-related mixing than IRL. On some websites there is a large contingent of actual children/college students who have never worked or don't understand certain social norms due to inexperience. Or, if you live in a bubble of highly paid professionals like many on this site (honestly, including me), you can be completely shocked seeing how the working class people you see but don't actively converse with (beyond pleasantries) think.
Also, on pseudonymous sites, you may not even be able to know this at a glance. Sometimes on reddit I have been baffled at the replies I've received, until I realized it was coming from a child, or an older conservative person living on disability.
To me the issue is one of pragmatics: the instruction say "ignore your local law" but they don't say "ignore reality".
Taking the ambulance example: it would indeed break a literal interpretation of "no vehicles in the park" and would also fall under the instruction "ignore your local laws". The issue, however, is that 99% of all parks in the world would allow ambulances, and those that don't would have a specific clarification as to why (archeological site, dangerous, etc). At that point, if it didn't allow ambulances then it would almost certainly not be a park either.
If I wanted to get agreement I would specifically write "forget what you know about the human experience and pretend you're a cold robot with no feelings and no idea about social contracts".
I think what it highlights is that the meaning of words depends on context and stripping all context from a rule and situation makes that ambiguous. Reading more into it than that seems silly.
Thank you! Language, specifically legalese, tries to make precise something that can't ever be. It's why "language prescriptivists" annoy me because it's not even a preference difference it's simply impossible, you can't define any word completely. Worse even if you could your definition is only good for a point in time.
Even simple things like chairs, you can't write down a definition that includes everything that humans consider chairs and excludes everything humans don't consider chairs.
The majority of comments and people participating in a forum generally both have common sense and are good actors. It's the borderline cases that are difficult, and of course there are boundary pushers of all sorts persuasions. Some are right, some are bad actors.
two people are tried for the exact same crime, the lawyers used the same responses, questions, etc. all the discovery and testimonials are equal. The only thing different is the judge, jury, defendant, prosecutor, and defendants lawyer.
could one of these people be acquitted but the other not? Say if one committed the crime so did the other, ie everything being equal except personality and demeanor of key players.
I think the police and ambulance examples are interesting. To me, they're clear and blatant violations of the rule. To be sure, I certainly think it's ok that they broke the rule, but they still broke the rule. Yet some (45% of respondents) clearly think the rule wouldn't apply to them in the first place?
The instructions for the exercise tell you straight up to ignore any and all exceptions, yet 30% of people chose to apply their own judgment in the police and ambulance case because it felt right to them. Very telling.
If you believe that the spirit of rules is more important than the text, then those people were obeying the spirit of the rule to not include exceptions, not the text.
One thing that makes this exercise fairly useless is that any real world law or rule would have exemptions for such circumstances, and a definition of “in the park” and what a vehicle is… not just one sentence with no clarification. Beyond that, also a history of previous legal interpretation to which one could refer.
I actually disagree. I assume every law is subject to "at the discretion of the DA/judge" (or whoever is in charge). Do you think everyone needs to account for every emergency circumstance possible in every law? In real life, there's the law and then there are mitigating circumstances.
(A few years ago I could have said "we don't get ticketed by an AI that only follows the rules it was given." Well, we do now in many places and that's a problem.)
This exercise is not about a court of law but any random online forum, for example the kind we are on right now. If you look up the HN participation guidelines you will find they are exactly as vague as the rule in the exercise and open to endless interpretation.
My reasoning was that in emergencies, typically, certain rules don't apply to certain groups of people if their actions are related to the emergency. Therefore, a police officer driving a police car into the park (assuming they're doing it because of the emergency) is not a violation of "no vehicles in the park" because for that officer, in that situation, there effectively is no such rule.
In the real world, we might debate whether it was actually an emergency and so on, but here we're told straight up.
The exception for emergency vehicles is just another rule. And even that rule can be more complex, like a police car could be not allowed to drive on railways. Or military rules that are above emergency vehicle exceptions. A police officer is not above the rules.
And in the given case we had none of them. It was just one simple rule - no vehicles inside the park.
I agree with you, but also the first time I did it I started answering in a different way, before realizing I should change my interpretation.
I started answering by interpreting the choice as "is this allowed in the park", not "does this violate the rule".
I'm not sure if this page makes its point better or worse if you know what it's testing. It's interesting though how explicit you have to be if you want people to not add any additional context. But also, so much of the questions rely on context. So it feels like an unfair test, but it's hard to say exactly why.
I think a questionaire telling you to ignore all preconceived notions about a topic in a note and then ask fairly unspecific questions about that, will have a lot of people answer without ignoring their preconceived notions about that.
I'd assume the answers would be different if the questions was phrased differently, restating the assumptions and some of the consequences, e.g., that there might be exceptions, we just don't look at them yet.
Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
Uncle Jim Bob trying to drive his Buick around is what's obviously prohibited as that's the vehicle/driver most likely to cause harm...
> Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
By this logic, it’s ok for a police officer to drive through the park’s green on his way to work, with no emergency.
I said no to every question as even in the cases where a vehicle did enter the park, it was only one and the rule says "no vehicles". Remember that the No Homers Club was allowed to have one Homer.
You're overthinking this. To recap the rules of the game:
1. Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park."
2. Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Your job was to determine if rule 2 ("this rule") has been violated. By playing the game, you are fulfilling your job and thus the rule is never violated.
I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is. In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed. This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.
I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.
I'm not sure if you do, honestly. The point of the exercise is exactly the ambiguity that stood out to you.
Also, the question was very explicitly not asking if an ambulance in the park is "okay." The question is asking is it a rule violation.
It's an excellent analogy, in my opinion, because what it's trying to be analogous to is the general ambiguity of language that makes content moderation difficult. It's hardly even an analogy because it is about precisely an identical concept: determining whether behavior is violating a rule.
That makes a ton of sense. I was always confused by that. Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone. Those comments were always greenlit. Maybe I just take stuff to literal. But some people sure have a hard-on for the death penalty...
I think what's being noted is slightly more nuanced than what you're responding to. The analogy is slightly flawed because a few additional indicators remove a lot of the ambiguity, which is possibly not the case at all with moderation, which is often about far more nebulous things. In that way, the comparison is flawed.
Asa an example, I'm seeing most people (based on people saying they match the majority at 11%, but there's some indication that may be broken) that chose to go with the common understanding of what the sign meant (as opposed to some literal definition they decided to follow) seemed to have an inherent idea of how we might better define "vehicle" to match those expectations (such as whether the conveyance provides power itself or whether it requires power from a person, or whether it houses a person, or whether it is assisting normal motion in some manner).
Also, without further analysis of the data it's hard to tell whether removing or redefining slightly a few questions might bring a core consensus far above 11%. And even if we can get this specific question to a good consensus, there's no real proof that it indicates that content moderation could similarly come to a consensus on specific concepts (I doubt it could for many important things).
In those ways, this is a clever and interesting experiment to take part in, but I'm not sure how much it really says about content moderation, as I think (as perhaps the GP thinks) it was made slightly too simplistic in an effort to be approachable, and in that case lost some of the aspects it was trying to convey.
I mostly thought it was easy to tell if the rule was being violated (the vast majority disagreed with me), but where it gets much more complicated is deciding if a rule should be allowed to be violated. I think most people don't want rules that are blindly enforced without consideration to circumstance/context. We carve out exceptions to rules everywhere in life.
It seems pretty spot on to me! A "vehicle", like "hate speech" or "words that glorify violence", is an category that humans create, and the things that fit in that category vary from person to person and situation to situation.
I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?
think the fundamental difference is that “vehicle” can be broken down into a number of concrete subcategories that cover the vast majority of vehicles that people use in practice, while “hate speech” and “speech glorifying violence” are often very nebulous and hard to define.
It's true that “vehicle” can be vague, but it's also true that in many contexts it's well-defined. The very common ”no entry for vehicular traffic” road sign applies to bikes and mopeds and cars, but not pedestrians, wheelchair users and roller skaters, for example.
Similarly, you can operationalize the “no vehicles allowed in the park” rule by enumerating the different types of vehicles people might wish to drive in the park:
- A bike? No.
- A moped? No.
- An unpowered scooter? Yes.
- A powered scooter? No.
- A skateboard? Yes.
- Roller skates? Yes.
- A wheelchair? Yes.
- A powered wheelchair? Yes.
- A car? No.
etc. The point isn't whether you agree with all these decisions (maybe skateboards shouldn't be allowed in the park?), but rather that you can enumerate two or three dozen vehicles and cover virtually all the vehicles people might possibly use in real life. Occasionally new categories need to be added (e.g., electric bikes or drones weren't really common 30 years ago) but mostly this can settle all possible debates.
And yes, it's still possible for some weirdo to build a supercharged wheelchair that can go 80 kph, but that's the extreme exception, and if the guy keeps driving through the park at 80 kph repeatedly eventually he will get arrested and then he will claim he is in the right because he's driving what's technically a wheelchair, and then a judge will rule that a wheelchair that can go 80 kph isn't actually a wheelchair in the sense intended by the law, and the rules will be updated to say “powered wheelchairs with a maximum speed of 15 kph” and that's the end of that.
The problem with “hate speech” and “glorifying violence” is exactly that they are very hard to nail down in an objective and clear way, and the majority of cases where someone is banned for “hate speech” involves vague and subjective judgement.
For a concrete example, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter on the grounds of inciting violence by tweeting “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” There is some really creative reading going on in here. How would you substantiate the rule against inciting violence in a way that it clearly covers this statement? People aren't allowed to announce that they won't be attending some event? That seems overly broad. Sitting presidents aren't allowed to announce they won't attend their successor's inauguration? This feels like it's overly specific, covering only this one event.
So that's the fundamental difference here. “No entrance for vehicles” is a rule that can be operationalized by enumerating and defining the kind of vehicles that people might think of using to enter the park. While “hate speech” defies objective definition.
>
I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is.
Exactly. I being a non-native English speaker, just to be sure, looked up in a dictionary: the most common German translation of "vehicle" is "Fahrzeug".
Of course, as it is quite common, there do exist laws in Germany
Just to bring up a linguistic point (it is far more common in German than in English to carefully analyze words if subtle parts of the meaning are to be cleared up): actually, one could argue (contrary to the Wikipedia article) that "Fahrzeug" comes from "fahren" (to drive); thus a "Flugzeug" (airplane) is not a Fahrzeug, because it flies (Flug -> flight) instead of driving (but as mentioned: the Wikipedia article states a different opinion: Flugzeuge are Luftfahrzeuge, while, say, cars are Landfahrzeuge, i.e. both vehicles belong to sub-categories of Fahrzeuge).
---
But back to the topic: as a non-native English speaker
- all my arguments are based on the most common German translation "Fahrzeug" of "vehicle". What if some subtleties are lost in this translation?
- I doubt that the typical English native speaker tends to think as deeply about words as is not unusual in Germany (when I did analyses of English words to native English speakers they nearly always admitted that they never ever thought of such analyses)
The crux of this really is about whether the ambulance is violating the rule "no fahrzeug in the park".
Personally, I feel it's unamigious that the ambulance is violating the rule as written. Whether it should be granted an exception to the rule is a different question. Such is the difficulties of content moderation.
It's also apparent to me how a rule enforcer sufficiently distant from the scenarios would declare that the space station violates the "no vehicles in the park" rule, no matter how ridiculous that sounds.
Yeah, he needs a better example. Vehicle has some ambiguity when you hint about it in the introduction, but not much. If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere. But then I don't know how people would get into the park.
And separately, a lot of the ambiguity in content moderation comes from people trying to frame what they don't agree with as something that's against the rules. If a vocal group doesn't like ice skaters, you can be sure they'll be giving detailed explanation why skates are a literal vehicle.
> If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere.
Perhaps as a non-native speaker I miss some linguistic subtlety, but does not "mode of transportation" mean "thing to (help) bring person from A to B"? Thus whether skating is a mode of transportation (or not) should be rather clear.
In this sense it should not matter whether the transportation is recreational or not, i.e. you can also recreationally drive a car or recreationally go by train.
A vehicle is any kind of tool that makes locomotion for any animate or inanimate object easier. This includes wheeled craft, seafaring vessels, shoes, aircraft.
The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.
You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles," they are usually things like "no hateful language," which is so vague, that "no vehicles" is beginning to look pretty cut-and-dry by comparison
> You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles,"
my complaint - that "no vehicles" isn't a great analogy - is because it's not vague enough. I didn't state that outright, you just assumed something different.
Is it? It seems there's a clear majority that vehicle = operational motor vehicle. The only two that are even close to 50/50nare the non functioning memorial tank, and the bicycle. I guess that shows a disagreement between those assuming functioning is a requirement, and those reading into the intent (which is devices operating at human scale in pedestrian spaces capable of achieving a speed that would cause injury). But neither of those interpretations are surprising
I don't think you do get the point - the point is that unless you define every single word in a rule (like how legislation has a definitions page), it's very hard to do simple content moderation in a way that everyone agrees
This is silly, though? Rules and legislation is also usually layered in such a way that other rules can supercede.
Such that, if your model of how rules and regulations work is that they are all active at all times.... I have really bad news for you. For fun, consider that there is still the 18th amendment to the US constitution. There is just also now the 21st amendment to go with it. And at no point did we have to redefine words for that trick.
Do content moderation rules define "violence" or "harassment"?
> often to be about being motorized or speed.
This more precise definition would include the toy car, quadcopter, ISS, and airplane, all of which fewer than 20% of respondents believe are vehicles.
> It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed.
It doesn't actually. It asks if a particular rule has been violated, not whether the violation is or should be acceptable (and it makes that distinction very explicitly even!).
The objections you have to the exercise don't actually seem that well founded, and the analogy appears even better due to the nature of your objections.
> the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
They're often ambiguous though. Lime bikes and motorized skateboards have been a recent edge conditions in vehicle laws that have needed to be specifically addressed.
But, yes, normally laws will actually define their terms.
Since the "legislature" in this example did a really lousy job of definitions, I only counted the one car as violating the rules.
>In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed.
I think that's a further example of ambiguity.
A park that had a rule in the 1990s saying "No motorized vehicles" probably wouldn't have wanted to prohibit electric bikes or electric mobility scooters, but such a rule would do that.
> This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
I disagree, lawyers would have no work then. Laws are not as specific as you would think they are and it is to provide a diverse gamut of powers and broad discretion in their application.
For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
There is plenty evidence of people exercising free speech such as wearing cuss words on shirts and their speech being stifled by police through intimidation and arrests. Most famously Cohen v California and for example more recently Wood v Eubanks (25 F. 4th 414 - Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit 2022) with very similar facts to Cohen v California.
Here is another one "Battery is an unlawful application of force directly or indirectly upon another person or their personal belongings, causing bodily injury or offensive contact." I go onto the bus and my shoulder hits the shoulder of another passenger. I did not have consent to touch them and they are upset by the contact / found it offensive. Am I guilty of battery?
In the test "No vehicle sin the park" there is no ambiguity that an ambulance is a vehicle, but clearly 1/3 of people don't think it breaks the rule, presumably largely because it's for an emergency purpose despite the rule not having an exemption for such a scenario. Neither would a rule that says "no hate speech". What is hate speech? Would speech stating "I hate..." Nazi's or a genocidal leader or regime be hate speech? So what are the exemptions, what are the discretions? How do we define things?
What about support for LGTBQIA+? Some countries only recently have become more amenable to these groups, but plenty of jurisdictions and cultures are still very much opposed to them. Is homophobia hate speech? What is transphobic speech? Is stating there are only two genders transphobic?
The same could be said about support for Ukraine which is positive in the Western world but would be illegal in Russia. But then, what about Taiwan and it's disputed status with respect to China? What about other contested borders and lands?
The fact that even when there is no ambiguity people don't entirely agree whether a simple rule is broken is entirely the point of the exercise. And now, you expect platforms and countries to exercise those rules and laws when evidently people can't even agree on a simple rule.
> For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
By the way, there's no "hate speech" exception in U.S. first amendment jurisprudence.
This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising.
If this included a definition of a vehicle, and asked if a vehicle was in the park, I'd expect consistent answers outside of the oddball aircraft and space station questions.
I'd note my local park has such a rule, and the sign has pictures of what are and are not allowed, including a picture of a drone.
It’s a legitimate definition though. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are many fundamental things that can’t be defined, where we have to rely on social norms and common sense.
>I'd note my local park has such a rule, and the sign has pictures of what are and are not allowed, including a picture of a drone.
What happens if the sign in your park was made in 1995, when drones, electric scooters, and electric bikes didn't exist or were not commonly used?
It's not possible to list every possible vehicle in existence, and to keep such a list updated. There are all sorts of weird things like electric unicycles, that most people haven't come across.
Vehicle is a word with a dictionary definition -- why does it need to have a definition included? Would that definition not include other words, would those also need to be defined?
That's not how the law typically works. Laws provide their own definitions because dictionaries describe how the language is typically used, not in a precise manner.
Perfect illustration of how tricky it can be to draw a firm line.
Another survey in this same genre is "the rape spectrum" with >5k respondents ranking scenarios: https://aella.substack.com/p/the-rape-spectrum-survey-result...
Tough topics to discuss (I see why the OP went with vehicles in the park). I'm glad I'm not in the content moderation business!
Yeah. Sometimes I see private Facebook groups by otherwise smart people, where one rule is something like "racism of any kind is forbidden". As if the addition of "of any kind" made the concept of racism any less vague.
I think that it might make expectations about moderators' interpretations less vague.
That still seems as if it adds some useful information. It's informing people ahead of time that moderators will probably not interpret "racism" in the narrowest possible sense, or likely even in a medium grey-area sense, but rather in a broad sense.
Fascinating exercise. During my first attempt I found that I had to look up the actual definition of vehicle.
I initially thought that a vehicle means someone is being transported by the vehicle, using an engine.
According to wikipedia vehicle also includes things being moved by muscle, and it is not limited to transporting persons, also wares.
I also changed my mind on whether a police or EMT falls under the rule. It obviously does. There has to be a second rule overriding this rule for those cases.
Also I changed my mind on the paraglider and the ISS. The ISS is a vehicle but it's over the park not in the park. The paraglider is a vehicle under my new understanding of the definition, and it does not matter whether the initial thrust came from when the paraglider was outside the park.
It also explains why the rules in the park near me prohibit _driving_ a bike in the park, not having one.
The legal definition of a vehicle can become relevant in some surprising ways under drunk driving laws. Most people assume that drunk driving laws are limited to driving an automobile, but in most states it simply refers to vehicles. Consequently, every now and again you get a story of someone being convicted of drunk driving when they have been bicycling while drunk. You can also be convicted of drunk driving for riding a horse while drunk (and people have been).
Does the legal definition include a sled going down a hill? If sleds, then skis aren't much of a stretch. And if skis, then shoes aren't much of a stretch.
When I was reading the dictionary definition, I got the sense that gravity isn't eligible as the motive force, and instead it would need to be someone exerting themselves (like pulling a wagon) or using stored energy (like an automobile). But sliding down a hill by gravity is indeed using stored energy, so I'd think that counts!
If the park is in my neck of the woods, I can just use this definition:
"vehicle" means a device in, on or by which a person or thing is or may be transported or drawn on a highway, but does not include a device designed to be moved by human power, a device used exclusively on stationary rails or tracks, mobile equipment, a motor assisted cycle or a regulated motorized personal mobility device
In a legal context "highway" has a broader meaning than in everyday use. From the link above: highway "includes every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles"
Translation: his parents are lawyers, so he has a low opinion of the rule of law and wants to "problematize" it. In favor of arguing for, essentially, despotism.
But his own experiment shows that most people do agree on what even a deliberately poorly worded rule means in most cases. So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.
The "game" (I use the word loosely) gets quite silly. The space station passing overhead is not "problematic" for a rule about vehicles in the park, except for someone deliberately trying to be obtuse. Like with the rest of this other nonsense, if it ever did become problematic, someone could change the rule to clear it up. The end.
> So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.
I did not interpret the creator's point to be that rules are unworkable, so much as that rules alone are insufficient. ie, that even the simplest of rules need to be augmented by human judgment.
But rules are still an important ingredient, as they and judgment complement one another.
All the discussions over interpretation are missing the point of the exercise, which is to show how hard it is to find agreement over something as emotionally neutral as "is the vehicle in the park".
Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".
I am kind of floored at how badly all the top comments have missed the point, considering how clearly the point was made by the author.
It has basically nothing to do with your interpretation, or how "good" you are at understanding the literal or intended meaning of the sign. The point is about how hard it is for all of us to agree on these matters.
Except the top comments aren’t doing that. They’re all saying it’s a flawed contrived example and despite that the actual results show most people agree. And not only that, the questions get ranked by decreasing agreement which shows that it’s pretty easy to make a cut off if put up to vote.
Are bitcoins allowed in the park or beanie babies since people consider them investment vehicles? Are pill capsules allowed in the park as they are vehicles for medicine? Are brains allowed in the park because they are vehicles for consciousness?
All the example shows is that rules need definitions or they need juries. And why is subjectivity even bad? It’s impossible to do anything without some degree of it. It’s also impossible not to have rules, like there are hundreds of unstated ones going on all the time and no one including the author is objecting to them. They aren’t objecting to the rule against DNS attacks or a thousand other examples.
We agree that it is flawed and it is obviously contrived, because the difficult decisions happen at scale and in edge cases. This is content moderation on easy mode; difficult stuff happens at scale and in the greyest of areas and have to be applied consistently.
A hot dog cart serves food in the park.
A 1997 pickup truck is rusting away on the bottom of the park's lake.
An elevator moves equipment up and down floors within the park's maintenance building.
Deep under the park's lake, a nuclear submarine hides from satellites.
An ice cream truck sits just on the border between the park entrance and a private road to a residence.
Try to define "furniture". You may say "Something to sit on". But what about a table. Ok, something to keep things on. But then is a soap dish furniture?
Furniture is a concept. It has fuzzy boundaries of meaning. And the meaning is only ever clear in context. And context is not just what is said alongside the concept. It is also the exchange itself in a particular situation.
When 14 years olds play ball in a "garden" area of a park, it's clearly disruptive. It can hurt someone, destroy the foliage etc. But when you play ball with a couple of 4 year olds in a garden, no one will suggest you stop. It is understood that a 4 year old in a play area with teenagers is at risk of being harmed, and so better to keep them in the garden area.
Rules, and the standardization of some of them into a system of law is problematic only if taken literally. As long as the what is written is understood to be a scaffold for actual meaning derivation from context there is no problem. This is the reason why judges, juries and courts exist - to interpret the law. And in the absence of formalization or systematization, common law applies. And at a very simplified level, common law is mostly common sense. Common as in shared among many. Common sense as in the sense and meaning shared among most of us implicitly.
I’m honestly not sure what the point of the exercise is. I went through and answered honestly, and looking at the end results it seems that most people agreed with me (the only significant minority disagreements were about the bike and the tank). Overall, it looks like almost all of the cases have a clear opinion?
I expected it to get into difficult edge cases, like somebody riding a motorcycle or landing a plane, but it never went there. A plane flying overhead doesn’t constitute “in the park”, and it looks like almost everybody agrees on that point.
Count the number of times you have used the words “most”, “almost”, “only disagreements…” etc. in your two paragraphs, despite the fact that all of them were relatively simple scenarios like you said. That is the point of the exercise. Yes people mostly agreed on most things, but they did not absolutely agree on everything. And those 20-30% of people arguing about 20-30% of edge cases is where all the disagreements and flame wars and toxicity comes from.
I mean, this is an online poll. There are always going to be people who argue, "technically, shoes should be considered a vehicle!". But when it comes down to it, those same people aren't going to make content moderating decisions based on those philosophical arguments. These examples fall sorta flat for me because they don't present an actual difficulty with moderation, just an imaginary one to get people arguing over semantics. Such arguments should be ignored.
The thing that really proved this game's point for me is the comments here from people giving slightly different versions of "well it's obvious what 'vehicle' means".
It’s weird that I barely see any comments like that. most people seem to be simply saying the game is silly because it’s so contrived and gives no definition of vehicle.
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. I teach legal research and I do some open discussions in the beginning and (no judgment of course) someone ALWAYS brings up "if they wrote the laws clearer..."
You seriously don't think some clarity could have helped? Like, if the law explicitly said strollers are okay and that bicycles are [not] okay, you think the quiz wouldn't have more consistent answers?
Or maybe the rule was only supposed to be for things with motors/engines and after clarifying instantly 2/3 of the questions are an easy objective "allowed".
You can't fix subjectivity, but you can reduce it, and this quiz is based on super low hanging fruit.
Oh, in this case, sure -- but I think it's a great teaching tool in getting people to understand the difficulty in other cases, and perhaps more importantly, understanding that these things are not solvable and that the essence of the very purpose of law is to have a method to get through these "not fully solvable" things.
I'm not sure what your point is. The laws can't be written clearer? Even if they were, you'd still get stuff that's ambiguous? As a lawyer you don't write the law so you have to go with what's written? You like interpreting vaguely written rules?
It's just how language works. Language is inherently ambiguous in the strictest sense. It's why at times you need to use more and more words to convey a clear message to someone, but in some sense, it's a never ending rabbit hole. Most of the time though, you don't need to be super precise in order to get a general message across to someone. Just something good enough.
Not that it's impossible to improve things, but people (frequently techies) believe the problem to be solvable and relatedly think it's easier than it actually is.
Just because "some people" believe something doesn't mean you have to make a webapp "debunking" them, and just because law is often complicated with many edge cases doesn't mean it can't be simpler or partly automated.
Everyone here implicitly knows that natural languages have ambiguity this is why formal languages were invented and it's painful that governing bodies hasn't caught up in many places. Imagine a world where you could diff laws from federal to state, state to state, stateA.city to stateB.city or StateA.cityA to StateA.cityB.
or a log where you could see exactly when a law was changed and why.
Jim backs his RV into the park. He does so without his vehicle entering the park.
Pam comes to the park and begins to live in Jim's RV.
Bob, an alien, lands his spaceship in the park and initiates first contact.
Tim, a pipercub pilot, lands his plane in the park after suffering an engine failure.
Sam rides the subway home underneath the park.
Jordan, a maintenance worker, repairs a broken light in the park from his cherrypicker.
Robert, Jordan's boss, alleges he broke the rule. Another light needs to be replaced, so Robert fixes it, but ensures the cherrypicker's wheels are outside the park.
Tom, a tow truck driver, tows Tamika's car.
Bill emails a complete 3d cad model of a car, which happens to use a fiber line running under the park.
At the time of my completing the quiz, 21% said riding a skateboard in the park violated the rule. But only 13% said carrying a skateboard violated the rule.
I'm puzzled by that. Does a vehicle stop being a vehicle when it's not vehicularizing? It'd get it if it were, "Jane carries a food tray" versus "Joe rides a food tray down the hill." But here the skateboard's purpose is to be ridden.
So the point is that content moderators will inevitably encounter ambiguous situations where they must use context to make a judgment call? And that no matter what call they make, there will be some people who believe it is the wrong one? Are those contentious points? Seems fairly obvious to me that would be the case in content moderation as well as many areas, notably law, which he mentioned.
I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, although I find the method kind of confusing.
There's a community I recently watched spring up on Reddit with the entire goal being to have a space to discuss Utah without every second comment being "Fuck Mormons". It grew pretty quick within the first day, but then the creator and community had a couple discussions on the best way to describe and enforce that rule. No discussion of Mormonism at all? No positive or negative sentiment towards the religion, but you can mention it in passing? It's certainly not an easy problem.
I don't see this as a good way to get the point across. I perceived it like this:
1. This is a game, here are the rules, remember, it's not about intent, as in "should this vehicle be allowed?", it's strictly about the rules, i.e. "is it a vehicle" && "is it in the park?".
2. Look at how difficult content moderation is, people said the ambulance should not be allowed in the park!
While I agree that content moderation is difficult, prefacing it with a rigged game that primes people to make bad judgements is not a good argument.
(Personally, I would like every rule to come with the justifications/reasoning behind it, so I could make the decision to break it more easily, e.g. if wilderness areas had the rules "No mechanized or motorized equipment shall be used" annotated with "It's about the noise" then an electric wheelchair would be fine, but not a loud drone etc.)
There is two levels of moderation in my mind. The first is to logical/ mathematically determine if the rule is broken, with goal of amoraly just answer if the rule is broken (binary). The second step is to determine the degree of rigidity/flexibility.
So by my logic the rule is broken when the ambulance drives into the park, but the leeway of the moderator to allow this should be apparent.
The way this thought experiment is framed, it seemed that you where supposed to only determine if the rule was broken. I think a more realistic way of framing the problem for a moderator would be something like: As security guard in a park, given this rule, would you allow ...
If the game was framed in this way I'm guessing the agreement would go way up.
There was one question about some sort of thing that was pulled that started with the letter T. I had no idea what that was. But then later it goes into detail defining what a Matchbox car is. I thought that was odd. Was the assumption that everyone would know what the T- thing is, but not a Matchbox car, part of the test?
Also, many people said the International Space Station was a vehicle in the park. I find that suspicious and question if people were choosing random or opposite or spurious answers just to pull the levers. I would like to hear from people who do believe the ISS is a vehicle in the park. What is your justification?
"travois". It's basically a sledge dragged along the ground and pulled by (usually) a horse.
I think "travois" is something you either know or you know you're going to have to look it up, so there's no risk of confusion. "Matchbox car" seems like something someone might not know, but just think "oh, a car, I know what a car is" without realizing it's a toy.
That said, I also felt like the description didn't explain it well enough. There are electric toy cars that kids actually ride in and drive around. The thing about a matchbox car is that it's the size of a matchbox.
>I hope that this game has made you reconsider your views on content moderation.
why would this game even make me think of content moderation? When you brought it up yourself I felt suckered, realizing I'd been sucked into a poorly thought out yet somewhat politicized "bias test" masquerading as a "survey".
I thought the same - the surprising thing to me is that most people disagree apparently; my match was 11% with the majority.
In my mind the rule would obviously have related list of reasonable exceptions filed away somewhere; the simplicity of the rule is to improve the effectiveness of preventing the common case violation of regular people driving their cars through the park, causing damage and impacting the people using the park for its intended purpose.
In my opinion almost all of the examples provided were either obviously not applicable or were perfectly reasonable exceptions (and I don't think exceptions violate a rule).
Biggest takeaway here for me was that a rule needs definitions for everything, including things which don’t even seem to be part of the rule. To complete this, I was forced to define the vertical extent of a piece of real estate (the boundary between the park and this country‘s airspace), to define a vehicle, versus something you wear or a toy. By the end, I had actually established a kind of caselaw, which defined that a vehicle is a thing that people or cargo can be on top of or inside for the purposes of transport. I defined that something you put on is not a vehicle and defined that there was some upper bound of the park above, which he would not be said to be “in“ it. I defined that the dragging frame was a vehicle, but an identical frame that was not designed to transport. Things would’ve been classified as not a vehicle. Arguably all of the above are just my conjecture. But I could not decide most of those questions without, at least internally, making all of those judgment calls. Each judgment call introduces even more edges, which could be tested by further questions.
I did not consider for a moment whether the emergency situations should have exceptions made. I feel this is at the wrong place to do so. It’s a separate question to me to ask if it’s OK to break rules during emergencies. I really appreciated the creator’s point, which is to contradict the widely held belief among some people that regardless of opinion, there can be one and only one factual determination. It all depends on a dependency chain of definitions, even before you get into the questions like when it is ok to break the rules.
I don’t find this particularly funny or enlightening. Making rules has always been hard, and I don’t see the author propose a solution to the problem that some people post weird shit on public feeds that we don’t want our young kids to witness. Kids are always online now - even if you think you have parental controls figured out, someone at school will have an uncensored phone and they‘ll all watch all the weird stuff during breaks.
Fascinating thought experiment! For a version two, I would love to see:
• more ambiguous examples (instead of “there are 27 examples, you only need to answer 7”, I would instead just offer 7 examples and on 7th say “stop now, or keep answering?”, then do the same “stop or keep going” prompt after 27 for the extra examples)
• three answer options: “yes, it’s a violation”, “no, it’s not a violation”, and “it is a violation but it should be exempt / permitted / not prosecuted”
• perhaps this third answer could also have a text box to enter your own epicycle / rule addition. The next time that person answers “yes but exempt”, they can select their previous epicycle as the explanation this time as well, or add a new one. Coalescing each user’s epicycles into a coherent set of “common sense exceptions” might be tedious, though
The third answer option, and the reveal that what you thought were obvious exceptions are not statistically agreed to be obvious exceptions, helps a ton with making the point about content moderation more, well, pointed. Adding epicycle text boxes takes it in a bit of a different direction, highlighting the complicated nebulosity hiding beneath simple rules.
As a metaphor for content moderation, there’s a clear bias to the examples, which I don’t object to per se, but there’s also a fairly large blind spot in the way the bias is presented.
Depending on interpretation, all or nearly all of the examples fall into these categories:
- Subjective categorization of restricted content, good intent
- Subjective interpretation of scope, neutral intent
- Clear intent to flout rule if subjective interpretations apply
What isn’t present in any of the examples is a case where the rule is clear but breaking the rule is intended and masked. That’s where a lot of content moderation struggles, and (because?) it’s where a lot of malicious and abusive users concentrate, and intentionally create ambiguities where there wouldn’t be any without such malicious intent.
And knowing that doesn’t make content moderation any clearer, probably the opposite, but it’s worth recognizing that that’s the point. A few clever jerks can convince well meaning people to reinforce or excuse their abuse, and can convince well meaning moderators that obvious dog whistles are hard to interpret, and then they turn rules over on themselves without any recourse.
The whole problem hinges on everyone who wants to use the park having to share the park as is. But that doesn't have to be the case with content moderation -- everyone could choose what rules and rule intent they want to subscribe to, if the content delivery was built that way. Hacker news has a very simple version of that: "show dead".
* means of carrying or transporting something (planes, trains, and other vehicles) such as a) motor vehicle or b) a piece of mechanized equipment - Websters Online Dictionary
* 1) any means in or by which someone travels or something is carried or conveyed; a means of conveyance or transport: a motor vehicle; space vehicles. 2) conveyance moving on wheels, runners, tracks, or the like, as a cart, sled, automobile, or tractor. - dictionary.com
* a machine, usually with wheels and an engine, used for transporting people or goods, especially on land - Cambridge Dictionary
Any of these definitions could have been applied successfully to the series of questions on the website without ambiguity (edit: without ambiguity, but each would have led to different sets of conclusions). Which is to say, the entire point of the excercise reduces down to finding out which definition of the word someone is working from. This is only a problem if we're dealing with something that can't be defined, or something that we refuse to define.
As it’s enforced today, that would be relatively easy to define, but I don’t think anyone wants to actually say out loud what that definition would be.
This is a bit of a straw man, because (1) a real sign would say something "no motorized vehicles allowed in park". (2) implied with the sign is the jurisdiction of whoever put it there - presumably the city goverment which doesn't control things in the airspace high over the ground, and which grants exemptions to emergency services.
I find the results confusing. I said a wheelchair is not a vehicle in the park. On the results page I see wheelchair has a score of 16.3. So this means 16.3% of people said the wheelchair is allowed in the park and 83.7% of people think the wheelchair is not allowed in the park?
If so, I now understand why moderator decisions seem insane. It's because they are.
> In a way I regret having said what I said about obscenity—that's going to be on my tombstone. When I remember all of the other solid words I've written, I regret a little bit that if I'll be remembered at all I'll be remembered for that particular phrase.
Is every single answer that there is a vehicle in the park? I skipped after 7 but I said all were vehicles in a park. I looked up the definition of vehicle before answering and all seemed to apply. Surfboard I wasn’t certain but I think it’s still definitionally a vehicle? I looked up machine at this point as this one was tricky.
From wiki
A vehicle (from Latin vehiculum)[1] is a machine that transports people or cargo. Vehicles include wagons, bicycles, motor vehicles (motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, mobility scooters for disabled people), railed vehicles (trains, trams), watercraft (ships, boats, underwater vehicles), amphibious vehicles (screw-propelled vehicles, hovercraft), aircraft (airplanes, helicopters, aerostats) and spacecraft.[2]
Uninteresting lawyer chiseling. This is all about the making the author feel "smart" by selective (mis)interpretation of ambiguous conditions, absent information, and rules not present.
1: "In" a geographic area may or may not be defined as including or excluding a particular altitude. For example, in the US, owners only own up to 500 ft AGL in Class G airspace.
2: Some jurisdictions decide a person in a boat over someone's land isn't trespassing, while standing on the bottom of the land is.
3: What is the definition of a "vehicle"? Is use or capability of occupants definitive of vehicular status? Does it require a motor? Must it be a type requiring government registration?
The point of the exercise is to require you to make decisions under uncertain conditions with limited (or next to no) information.
You don't know what jurisdiction. You don't know what airspace rules apply. "Vehicle" has its common-usage definition. (Which is different for different people, judgung by the comments here.)
BTW, the vast, vast majority of real decisions are made under uncertainty. Welcome to the real world.
This is just one case the general rule of ambiguity.
At one of my jobs, a product manager came up with the idea of categorizing explicitly delineating everybody's selection criteria into a "normalized" form to allow for aggregating statistics.
I tried to point out up front what a fool's errand in this was. There is way too much ambiguity in the language.
I was overruled and the company then spent probably 7 to 15 million dollars chasing this ridiculous El Dorado dream.
Eventually, after 3 years of wandering in the wilderness of normalized ontologies, they gave up and decided all NLP is bad.
This decision came out about 2 months before the release of chatGPT.
I find it a bit disingenuous to overlook any rules outside the thought experiment and then want to apply it to a real world discussion where the overlooked rules do apply. Like the Police question. It has nothing to do with the context of the questionary (internet moderation) as it is a real world law, not a moderation rule. In reality, the statistics at the end show who decided to do a white room thought experiment and who did not - nothing else. I see no big problems in moderation at all unless it is on a government made platform or some other state owned utility thing.
If you see a sign that says this in a park you wouldn’t go tell a person in a wheelchair to get out of the park (I hope). Common sense is a thing and it’s also a thing in comment moderation. This isn’t rocket surgery.
For most of the more down-to-earth questions, I made the distinction between something that aids a human in moving by augmenting their analog output, and something that either doesn't require much human involvement to move or supplants it entirely.
Skateboards, rollerskates, wheelchairs, bikes, wagons, parachutes etc.. require constant human involvement to keep acting as a vehicle. Horses, cars, space stations don't really require the same involvement, or aren't necessarily exclusively human transporters, and toy boats are only facsimiles of vehicles.
I don't know that this had the intended effect for me. I answered the questions as I would like the 'rule' enforced. The important thing isn't about believing the rule to be entirely valid and merely enforcing it, it's about which way you want it applied and why. Then you have to try to make everything else also fit into the oddly shaped boundaries that are forming. It's also way better if you can be transparent about it, and in some cases redraw the lines and reformulate how to decide which side new cases land.
In the case the article has in mind, you can't silently decide what is ok and what isn't, as they'll be public decisions that create precedents (what formulate as "being transparent")
If you say wheelchairs are OK because disabled people need them, someone will ride a golf cart arguing they're disabled and need a cart. And you'll have to publicly explain if you think it's not ok and update the rules accordingly, and that will continue for every i stance of you not agreeing with someone's interpretation.
Put another eay, that constant and endless redrawing of the rules to explain what you had in mind is the point of the exercice, except you can't throw away the old rules nilky willy, you're only allowed to add more weird stuff on it
It's small-minded actions like this that would ruin any attempts to moderate meaningfully. It can be effective by its own definition, but not serve the community's best interests. This 'rule' and blind applications is what makes moderation easier and worse. The exercise should instead be demonstrating how moderation is hard to do well because it's not always cut-and-dried.
> please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
In other words, if a question is about some kind of vehicle that you think should be allowed to go, overriding this rule, the answer is "yes, the rule is violated".
2. There is a twist in this game and it's best to not tell which it is before you try the game. (The twist is acknowledged in the result page, 4th paragraph from the bottom, not counting the P.S. line at the end).
This whole thing is dumb. There's never a description of "What is a vehicle?" And there's never a description of, "What is the park's jurisdiction?".
If the author wants to relate this whole thing to content moderation, all they're illustrating is they had crappy guidelines. Give better guidelines and then let's talk. But if you give a crappy set of rules expect a crappy outcome (the outcome where nobody agrees on anything).
> Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
I mean, who's surprised that it's not effective to do content moderation by imposing ambiguous rules with a complete lack of training, examples of correct and incorrect enforcement, documentation, context about the rules, why they're needed, why they were created, what problem they were solving...
Going through this is useful I guess, but it seems very low level. But maybe our understanding of content moderation is also very low level.
I think this analogy kinda falls apart because in reality the rule “no vehicles” is for a reason.
If “people could get hurt” is the reason for no vehicles, an RC car, a stroller, a quadcopter, and maybe even a hand pulled wagon is perfectly fine because the risk is very low.
If “the noise will be an issue” is the reason, bikes are fine but a quadcopter is not.
If “protecting the environment” is the problem, horses and rowboats may be allowed but RC cars and dirt bikes perhaps not.
Having a rule with no context for the rule is pointless.
Where I live, such signs are more specific. They prohibit either use of any motorized vehicle (which by law doesn’t include electrified bicycles that can go up to 25kph), or the use of bicycles, or both, or only prohibit cars, or only motorcycles, or only trucks above a certain weight.
I expected this to be tough, but it was even tougher than that! I treated it purely as an exercise in classifying what is a vehicle and what it means to be in the park.
Skateboards really tripped me up because I don't think of roller skates as a vehicle but I do think of bikes as a vehicle. Skateboards feel like they sit right between those two.
The wagon was another tough one because the kids riding in it certainly seems very vehicle-like to me. And the stroller felt even more like a vehicle to me (ultimately I didn't choose to classify either of those as vehicles).
I said the horse wasn't a vehicle, but I said the rowboat was.
I didn't classify the RC car as a vehicle, but the classification of a quadcopter was tough because of that. I wanted to consider it a vehicle, but I couldn't think of it as far enough off of an RC car to be one.
I tried to figure out some logic for my classifications but I really couldn't it was all down to feel and making sure that I didn't clearly contradict a previous decision. My answers may have been different had they been presented in another order or even just if my mood was a bit different!
It sure was interesting. One gave me a bit of a pause. The rowboat... I immediately thought "a rowboat is not a vehicle (it's human powered), but how did he get the rowboat there in the first place?"
So in the end I only said yes to 4,the tank, the car and emergency vehicles. Everything else is a no in my book. I was quite surprised 90% people thought otherwise. No doubt their vehicle definition is different.
I took the survey, then my wife did. I was being strict, so I said the parachute was a vehicle in the park. The site said I agreed with 8% of people. My wife was being reasonable, and said it wasn’t. The site also said she agreed with 8% of people.
My guess is that they’re taking the percent of all people who answered at least seven questions, but I could be wrong, and the results are in any case very misleading.
If nothing appears after the initial instruction, try a different browser. It doesn't seem to work (but also not show any error) on chromium-based webview android 11. At first I assumed the site was hugged and the questions were being loaded non-statically.
Also, I don't get how this is supposed to help anyone understand content moderation. Take any court case and you'll have similar questions: it's more like playing judge than like playing moderator. Moderation is way harder because you can offend people on both sides at once, and they'll leave your community. In this park scenario, the people being passed judgement on can't move to another park with two clicks of the mouse and take a bunch of friends with them, and the park's sole appeal is not the existence of other people in it (network effect) the way that it is for online communities. Another difference is that people rarely get angry with the judge as much as with the law and politician that made it, which again puts you in a rather different position than in actual moderation.
Great game, cleverly demonstrates a fundamental problem with creating rules/laws. I've wondered if focusing on the goal/intent when creating rules would be more effective? For example, instead of just a rule that says "No vehicles in the park", you could say, the community wants the park:
- to be safe
- to be peaceful/relaxing
- to accommodate physical activities/games
For these reasons, we don't allow vehicles that will unnecessarily compromise safety and/or make a lot of noise.
Of course the goal/intent I've written suffers from the same problem as the rules did, the definitions are ambiguous, but I think there's a distinction between capturing the spirit vs the letter of the law. It's a guide for why the rules exist and when they should or shouldn't be applied. It's not perfect, but, I think it's an improvement of just listing rules. If capturing/publishing the reasons for rules alongside the rules was normalized I wonder how different things could be?
I wanna share my experience and get some feedback into how you approached this. I want to make clear, that I approached this by consciously ignoring how real life works, where adhering to the rule and the instructions made it necessary:
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
This boiled down to answering technically "What's considered a vehicle?" and "What would be considered in the park?".
To answer this I googled when I was not reasonably sure.
I did not go to much length to answer the later question, but basically, if there were a rule that declared x meters above the ground is no longer considered to be part of whatever the area on the ground is defined as, this would what I would be interested in for this purpose. Of course, there is a lot of countries in the world, so there's probably more than one answer to this.
We have a little bit of an issue around the "disregard your jurisdiction" part in the intro (but I guess that's also part of the dilemma): All these things are defined by some jurisdiction (not necessarily in the judicial sense). We need to apply from somewhere. I don't see a way how to solve this without implicit bias. Both options satisfy the rule as stated without further constraints.
If you disagree with any of this on principle I would be super interested to hear you talk me through issues with my thinking or just explain where you went differently and why.
> All these things are defined by some jurisdiction
this is what i would call culture, or social norm.
And the thing is, this social norm might be different betwen different people and thus, either cause conflicts in interpretation, or actual real life conflicts.
Interpreting a law is usually done through the guidelines of a separate legislation outlining how it is to be done. E.g., Australia has an Acts Interpretation Act which outlines how to interpret laws by various means, including the context in which the words appear and the purpose of the act. I am unsure of other jurisdictions.
We are explicitly told that there is only one relevant rule. So, the only relevant determinations in each case should be to the definitions of "vehicle" and "in the park". No interpretation of the intent can influence the decision. I thought the aim was to determine the scope of the definitions, then be consistent with the applications of those definitions.
Personally, I defined "vehicle" as anything that can transport people or goods, and "in the park" as a reasonable area above and below the ground. But, this ended up with unsatisfactory answers like the tank being not violating the rule because it could no longer transport, and skates being in violation.
The word vehicle is up to interpretation, so it helps to not use umbrella terms like vehicle. Anything used to move goods or person is technically a vehicle. However in the a conventional understanding it is the embodiment of what would move goods or person, functional or not, to carry out a task not recreational unless also used with the intent not recreational. If both it becomes a recreational vehicle.
Recreation / Not Practical = Other
Not Recreational / Practical = Vehicle
Recreational / Practical = Recreational Vehicle
You don't have to agree with me on this. I know the definition says otherwise, I'm just speaking on the perception of what people think in society a vehicle is. As it would sound really funny to refer to toys as vehicles.
Also to expand on this. Drones they are recreational but also practical, you might use your drone for recreational things but nothing practical so it is just a drone. But the second you start flying packages it becomes practical. This makes it a recreational vehicle. If it is exclusively for delivery like Amazon Drone, it is just a vehicle.
I like this experiment! I hope to see some further analysis on the results. I came to a similar conclusion years back about languages: it's impossible to translate a word perfectly because the border cases differ. Is it a cake or a bread? Banana bread is called bread in the US, but as a Dane I consider it "kage" (the usual translation of "cake").
if the car behind or in front of you crashes into you, a human on a bicycle, the damage is much greater than if it crashes into another car. If you assume the other driver is drunk, and stomps on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal, in some ridiculous souped up sports car or truck, the human goes squish.
Over the years I've come across a few online communities that have noticeably higher conversation quality than the rest of the internet. The one thing all of those places had in common is a very strict moderation policy.
Not every forum/community/website should tolerate literally all people. It's never helpful to engage with trolls and if people aren't willing to argue in good faith than they need to go.
I've seen tons of communities slowly lose their identity because they were too accepting of counterproductive conversations and bad faith arguments.
The idea of this form of tolerance comes from the goal be open minded and listen to opposite arguments, as well as to prevent a community from turning into an echo-chamber (or a cult), but I think it's better to lean towards heavy moderation. Banning someone who would be a good fit for the community is unfortunate, but ultimately not a huge loss. Not banning even one troll can drag down a whole community.
I came to a different conclusion and said no police or ambulance should enter the park. Obviously there should be an exception for true emergencies, but stretchers exist for a reason. Police can walk or ride a bike.
The fact that respondents are so sure of the obviousness of their answers highlights common problems in moderation— rules are ambiguous and everyone has different standards.
In what way is that conclusion different? I argue that a strict moderation policy and enforcement is needed to keep a community healthy, even if that leads to the exclusion of a few posts/users that would have been good for the community.
Is that not exactly what you are saying?
Sidenote: Does the presence of an ambulance not qualify as a "true emergency" for you? In my experience an ambulance only shows up if someone needs acute medical attention. Is that not the case where you live?
What this showcases isn't an issue with moderation, it's a lack of shared culture in digital spaces.
When we interact in the real world we manage to behave not because we have some sort of logical crystal palace where every word is rigorously defined, but because we have an implicit, shared sensibility for what's appropriate. When you go and sit down in a café you don't measure your noise level and there's no sign saying "only talk at 80db!", you have an intuitive and non-verbal idea of what offends the people around you.
If people disagree about the questions in this experiment the correct conclusion isn't to do away with moderation or argue about word definitions, it's to argue for shared culture in online spaces. HN is a good example. Most people who post here I think have a decent grasp of how not to act, and take little offense with moderation, despite the fact that there aren't many rules other than the occasional reminder to be civil.
I really thought the seemingly blatant stereotypical names were going to be a factor in the assessment.
Though I guess now that I think about it, I don’t know that I could point to a name that I think would be non-stereotypical in the 21st century. Maybe the names of the average upper middle class elementary school class - a lot of those seem to me to be pretty minimally correlated with ethnicity these days.
In a heavily white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of the not too distant past, there were clearly “default” names and “other” names, and I do think that’s less and less the case. Or at the very least, it’s no longer acceptable to think about the “default” names as being normal and every other type of name as signifying something outside the mainstream of society.
Still, there’s some deeply weird socioeconomic stuff that goes on with naming kids. There have got to be some good studies about those trends.
This “thought experiment” is painting a narrative using a false dichotomy. “I don’t know” is always a valid answer. The nice thing about rule based systems is that they can be augmented with additional rules. You don’t know wether or not a skateboard is a vehicle? That’s ok. We can add a new rule that defines that.
I see a lot of "just add more specifics to the rule" in here, but that's fighting a losing battle. There will always be another edge case, and the rule will end up being so long and complicated that no one will properly follow it anyway.
I think the solution is to put the goal of the rule right next to the rule. Maybe vehicles are banned to improve air quality, to improve pedestrian safety, to reduce noise, or some combination. Or maybe there really is no good reason, and the writer of the rule just enjoys power.
Reminds me of writing security policies. There will always be exceptions, but if you include the goals of each rule, your users are empowered to recognize when an exception is a good idea. Otherwise, you get either blind compliance or secret non-compliance.
A lot of comments here about how the intro instructed us to make a very literal interpretation.
I'm not so sure. The exact wording is "You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction."
Rephrasing an earlier comment here, but - it's still a park right? On earth? What jurisdiction on earth blocks matchbox cars and space stations? Or even ambulances and police cars, which were the main ambiguous ones? Does some country not allow ambulances in its parks? Are we supposed to include all of modern human culture as a "local jurisdiction"?
The instructions of the game were pretty unclear, that seems to be what's sparking a lot of the debate.
No the instructions are clear. Figuring out where the park is just isn't part of the exercise. In fact, by the letter of the rules, it's impossible to find out. Pick any definition of "local jurisdiction" you want and you still don't know where the park is. It is not necessarily in that jurisdiction (or out of it either). It's not necessarily even on earth or in this universe either.
Additional suggestions that i think would make the game better/harder because the answer distribution is currently pretty skewed and many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule (though all respect to rule sticklers, general contrarians, and everythings-a-vehicle hipsters):
construction equipment for park improvements (backhoe, etc)
gas powered moped
electric moped
gas powered rc car
4-wheeler/atv/dune buggy
golf cart
segway/monowheel
antique cars for some kind of demo/event
shriner guys in those mini cars in a local parade (at least i think most americans know what i'm talking about)
anti-drunk driving display (they have these sometimes at colleges, and maybe high schools, but it's basically a wrecked car and there are police there to do pr)
Note: i think many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule, maybe keep some of them but not so many?
I suspect I'm not the only one who tried this, but ChatGPT does predictably well at this task. I gave it a basic prompt of 'Let's play a game. The rule says, "No vehicles in the park". This is a game about language and rules. I will describe different scenarios to you. In response, you respond "Yes" if this scenario violates the rule or "No" if it does not. You have to make a choice and can only say Yes or No.' and then just fed it the scenarios. It ended up agreeing with the majority and my own intuition quite well.
The largest differences were that it didn't considered a rowboard a vehicle and that it did consider the parachute scenario a vehicle.
Bad news for human content moderators I suppose...
It would have been better if the page defined "vehicle" since people's definitions may vary. The one I used was basically "Something used to carry people or goods". That meant that a toy car wasn't a vehicle, only a representation of one, but even a toy car could conceivably be made to carry something else at which point it would become a vehicle. I also struggled a bit with the disabled tank, since it's clearly designed for the transport of people, but while it's non-functional it couldn't fill that role. A car that's parked is also incapable of transporting people, but I think most people would argue the rule was still being violated by its presence.
It would help a lot to know the reason for the rule. Perhaps the park is filled with lots of rare, delicate plants and only narrow dirt pathways. Or perhaps the pathways are somewhat wider and allowing in a wheelchair or a small wagon wouldn't be a problem.
Without knowing the reason, it is hard to make a wise decision. At least for a problem like content moderation, people will have some idea about the goals or reasons for the rule, although certainly different people may have different opinions about how important the various goals and reasons are. But trying to enforce an arbitrary rule without a good understanding of why, on which to base judgement calls, sounds foolishly futile.
spelling error in "propultion" ("propulsion") in the question "Keisha plays with a Matchbox car in the park. A Matchbox car is a toy car with wheels that turn; it has no means of propultion other than Keisha pushing it." BTW.
I've seen much discussion of what a vehicle is, and some of what is "in" the park.
I've not yet seen (though not yet reading all 1114 extant comments) discussion of the goal and/or purpose of the rule.
Given this discussion is on Hacker News and my growing obsession with what makes this site tick (and occasionally sends it off the rails), contrast with HN's "real standard": "to engage one's intellectual curiosity" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>).
And, in fact, reading those search results just now turned up a ... interesting, now deleted ... response by dang on this thread which explains the "intended spirit" nature of HN moderation. I'm not going to quote the full item (respecting the deletion), but this bit seems to echo my sense:
[H]aving the set of first principles (the site guidelines) be organized around "intended spirit" rather than formal precision is the best bulwark I know.
In the cae of laws, the purpose or intent is often explicitly stated. In US tradition, the "whereas" clauses typically preceding the main body of legislation.
And for this game, the posted rule would benefit greatly by a clarification as to why it was enacted and what the rule is intended to accomplish. This would also clarify, even without specifically enumerating classes of vehicles or conveyances, and/or proximity to the park which specific cases might be permitted or excluded.
Given the initial instruction to not take into consideration any obvious common sense, I expected questions to scale up to "everything is a vehicle of some information, so the parc should be put into absolute unmoving zone to make the rule strictly operate", which is of course beyond human possibilities.
The point that the author try to draw about moderation and underspecifications are interesting, but to my mind the framing is not giving a relevant ground to think about it. The author say the goal was to do a better job at this than some previous approachs, which is a effort I salute, though to my mind it doesn't land there yet.
I humbly believe the real takeaway is that we need LESS rules and LESS fragile egos.
If we become like we used to be perhaps a cple decades ago, where an abstract tweet wouldn't make us collapse on our heads, things would be much easier.
That was fun. I decided early on that a vehicle is any tool that allows something to move. So an ant on a paper airplane or a kite is a vehicle. The surfboard allows someone to move and they carried it into the park, so that's not allowed. Since I wasn't allowed to apply any of my jurisdiction's laws, I also had to ticket the International Space Station for going into my park's airspace. Moon, I'm watching you, you're next.
Thinking about it further, no shoes either.
They said this was all about content moderation and to me the answer is simple. I would never visit the "no vehicles in the park" park.
I kinda answered in terms of "what interpretation of the sign gives parkgoers the best overall experience". Don't legal situations generally consider the spirit of the law, not just the letter of the law?
The HN guidelines come to mind here, they're a mix of more literal ("don't use uppercase for emphasis") and spirit/intent ("anything that good hackers would find interesting"). Seems to work here - but curious how many pedantic struggles dang & co. encounter.
That kind of proves the point. The starting paragraph asked you explicitly to ignore local laws or personal beliefs and take actions based on only the most literal definition of the rule, and yet almost half of people chose to ignore this and use their own rules. Like how they do for content moderation.
Well in that case the whole ruse of the park is pointless, and the game should just be "click the words that are vehicles". And matchbox cars and space stations are included.
> You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem. ... can reduce the problem, but [cannot] eliminate it. And at scale, with adversarial testing, every edge case will get hit.
Yup. Rules are not enough.
Same conundrum applies to taxation, safety regulations, pollution, security, etc.
It's not just a matter of better enforcement. Every system of rules will be gamed.
Alas, I still don't have a clue about solutions. I'm just exhausted by the naive hot takes.
I found that my responses hinged on the use of specific pronouns - e.g. “in” or “on” so a space station flying over a park wasn’t “in” the park per se - and on whether it was clear to me whether whether the park was being used a thoroughfare.
So, I found myself answering “not a vehicle” in a vast majority of the cases because it wasn’t clear to me if the tool in question - car or skateboard or whatever - was being used to go through the park to the other side.
The vehicle has to be consistent with all others to decide on it but certainly with all previous judged vehicles on your shift. Who is bringing the vehicle might also be objectively relevant. Time is also relevant.
One day one might accept car tires to play with, the next the kids bring 2 tires with an axle, the 3rd day they tie a rope between 2 axles, day 4 tires are banned. If the events are in stead of a day a year apart it might be different.
So much talk about the rule but not much about enforcement. To me most of the scenarios are breaking the rule, but what happens afterwards depends: emergency vehicles, wheelchairs, toys get a pass. Bicycles either get a pass or a warning. Cars get a fine. Repeat offenders get a license suspension etc.
The gray areas are settled based on local culture and who is enforcing the rule. And it’s the same with moderation of course.
My own conclusion is that the rule is not clear enough. Define "vehicle" and "in the park". Sure it's probably hard to think of all the use cases when you first write the rule. Simply iterate and add exceptions and clearer definitions as needed (seems like it's exactly how laws are made, and nobody is saying "we should not have any laws because it's hard to think of all the use cases")
> some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply
All rules are easy to apply when you're the moderator. Just say "I'm the moderator" and then do whatever you want. That's how US law works. They can say "this is how the rule works", and then a few years later say "hahaha! yeah, that's not how the rule works anymore, now it works this other way".
No to all questions since there’s probably a way in which doing any of those things still obeys the rule. The rule is about achieving the intent of the rule, not rote obedience.
The park might contain a parking lot, or an area where skateboarding is permitted, etc. Absent context, or a specific park, who could say if any of the things listed violate the rules.
As for what constitutes a vehicle, this is why you give examples.
It sounds like you did, because you’ve given a car and skateboard example, which do appear in the exercise.
But it sounds like you didn’t because you’ve given such an authoritative answer when the whole point of the exercise is that “it’s complicated”. There is no One True Answer, it’s open to interpretation, that’s the complexity it demonstrates.
I mean, I know where I am, but good god damn lord so many of you are missing the point by restating it without taking anything from the text provided at the end.
Like, missing the point with a planet's berth. Might go a ways in explaining the "mods are entitled jerks" attitude that keeps popping up around discussions of reddit, ignoring that they're the only reason reddit exists in a semi-usable state, ever.
One thing this doesn't mention bit I think is just as important is tone. Some communities are fine with casual assumptions, others require sources if challenged. Sometimes these things can be encoded in rules, sometimes it's more moderator discretion. So in addition to rules interpretation communities can be distinguished by vibes as well. This is just as valid a reason to moderate as rules
On nebulosity, see https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262134095/ . No need to read it, just to be aware that there’s a thick book full of people trying to get a handle on what a concept like “park” or “vehicle” or “in” actually is for humans, and failing completely.
Based on this I think the likelihood of me enjoying the park is inversely related to how hard the park moderators have to squint to apply the park rules. I'm totally cool with people having a park where a stroller counts as a vehicle but it's not a park I would want to spend my time. (The only one I agreed with was the one where a random person drove their kia into the park)
A better example would be a private property (you're the sole source of law, not interpreting someone else's rule) where people come to network (people are here because other people are here) and there's a competitor literally next door (there is no cost for them to change platform).
These three crucial differences make the game incomparable to actual online moderation
For me this article is not about content moderation, but about software requirements.
It turns out, no matter how hard I try to specify a piece of software, developers implementing them manage to sneak in their own interpretation into it and i find that, yes, this particular case wasn't specified or was a little ambiguous or contradicts the other part or something else.
I found the term 'wagon' to be unclear. In the UK, this would be something akin to an articulated lorry, although I am familiar with the American term 'station wagon' so I took it to mean a type of motor car at the very least.
Presumably that is not the case, having now seen the results. Is it a sort of unpowered trolley?
I was waiting for something more "insightful", it sets the expectations too high and then instead I got hit by the content moderation crap stick, a vehicle is a vehicle and if an ambulance is driven into the park is violating the rule, wether you like it or not, the rule doesn't define morality. What a waste of time.
As classified and intended by the sign and societal expectation, a vehicle would be any self-propelled method of transport which violates the space or near space of the park. So a toy car or boat doesn't count, but an actual car or boat would. Just as a bicycle doesn't count but a motorcycle does. And a bit of logic has to be applied for what constitutes "within or near the space of the park" in practice. A plane flying thirty one thousand feet overhead is not even near the park, but a helicopter dropping down so low that the rotors are level with or below the top of the tree canopy is violating the space near the park. And exceptions to rules have to be made under certain circumstances. The ambulance and police car do violate the rules, but have to be given special extensions of jurisdiction to perform the duties wider society assigns and expects of them.
But breaking things down into the very specific definition of "self propelled method of transport" is exactly what doesn't happen for a lot of moderation and enforcement. An offense brought to moderation is often several of those very specific definitions that don't get broken apart into their constituent parts for examination. We stopped using mercury to starch felt hats because the mercury was the problem. If instead we didn't break it down into components to identify the one causing the issue, would we have banned all felt hats or likely just felt altogether? Modern moderation policy dictates bias towards the latter.
The idea of nebulosity as described is precisely why reforms constantly have to be made to enforcement, why automated enforcement is harmful, and why blanket policies on enforcement are a bad idea. Public nudity is generally agreed to be a crime and distasteful, but should somebody be arrested because their clothes were stolen at a changing station? Should a bumper sticker saying "Shoot your local meth dealer" get the driver pulled over because of either threats of violence or public indecency laws that are considered relics of the 19th century and are no longer widely enforced? Moderation in reality is a very simple issue of applying societal biases as rules that becomes horribly unwieldy when scaled beyond a few thousand people. That's because the best moderation is done on a case-by-case basis, as circumstances and context are more important than the infringing action because it's simply one component in a string of them. Obviously you can't do that when you have tens of thousands of users or more and the number of possible offenses grows every picosecond.
This reminds me of the local political candidate who argued that the 100m distance rules around campaigning extended to a sphere around polling stations, so he claimed he was allowed to fly a banner over the stations as long as they maintained enough altitude.
Trying to find a link to a news story about this. I swear it's true.
Which is why there should be no moderators besides each person having an equal vote. "But then people game the system." is always the answer, which is always the root cause of the problem: on the internet, everything is completely fair until someone, inevitably, games the system.
Austria has this sort of problem when it comes to forests and cyclists. You might want to read a longer article in German about this https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000134804355/als-oesterrei... but the gist of it is:
The law until 1975 didn't allow anyone (that's everyone in Austria) to enter forests (which in comparison belong to only a few people, besides the state).
Now that problem with this law (Forstgesetz 1975) is in § 33 (3) where it says "befahren" (drive) which is a very general word when the parliamentary discussion about the law in 1975 clearly meant motor vehicles and even lists them in the discussion but not in the law. A few years later mountainbiking became a thing and the owners of forests insist that the law includes mountain bikers. Fast forward to 2023 and the law still needs fixing...
I notice that people who say "obviously emergency vehicles should be allowed, because of intent", despite the explicit instructions at the beginning of the test, often talk about "the sign" in their comments, despite no sign ever being mentioned in the instructions.
One is reminded of the difference between proof-relevant and classical mathematics. The letter of the law is a mere proposition, whereas the spirit of the law is a program of a certain type, whose “computational content” describes the actions one takes to produce the state of compliance.
The lesson here is one worth learning, but the vehicle (forgive the pun) is very poor. The lesson is: we can't agree on what to moderate and what not to moderate. There are very good thought experiments here, including citing actual prose. Should we ban parts of the Bible (the sexually explicit ones, or the ones that seem to approve of slavery?), should we ban books like Lolita or the Scarlet Letter? Should we allow Neo-Nazis to protest? What about Stalinists?
These are questions worth asking and answers worth hearing, but the problem with the question here is that the rule "no vehicles in the park" already comes with a lot of baggage. For example, it's obvious that the rule is meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park (a rule that we've seen many times in our own parks), so naturally police cars and ambulances will (or should) be exempt, especially if trying to save a life. Otherwise the corollary would be that saving a life is less important than the rule "no vehicles in the park." Which most would very obviously disagree with.
I like the idea of the website, but there's probably a better way to convey the complexities of rule-making and rule-following in the context of both our own moral (or religious, or ethical, etc.) frameworks and the social environment at large.
> These are questions worth asking and answers worth hearing, but the problem with the question here is that the rule "no vehicles in the park" already comes with a lot of baggage. For example, it's obvious that the rule is meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park (a rule that we've seen many times in our own parks), so naturally police cars and ambulances will (or should) be exempt, especially if trying to save a life. Otherwise the corollary would be that saving a life is less important than the rule "no vehicles in the park." Which most would very obviously disagree with.
That's the point, though! Everyone arrives at these moderation discussions with baggage, and it's not the same baggage.
Like, it is very much not obvious to me that the rule is "meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park". Plenty of parks prohibit bikes and skateboards. If we care about "saving a life" then I actually don't think we should make an exception for cop cars. Reasonable people can disagree! Even the most obvious-seeming judgments are, in fact, not obvious.
> Even the most obvious-seeming judgments are, in fact, not obvious.
I kind of disagree with this. The question leaves the definition of "vehicle," "in," and "park" purposefully ambiguous, so everyone kind of tries to fit the most "common sense" solution. In fact, I'd contend that the rule "life of a person outweighs park rule" is not even remotely controversial (apart from some maybe unreasonably staunch environmentalists). This is why our legal code is pretty exhaustive (and moderation systems should be, too).
With that said, there is plenty of grey area even with extremely exhaustive rules: see abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, etc. I think that this is what the website tried to do, but sort-of failed because it purposefully got us wading through a semantic quagmire.
I stopped at the first question. Without a photograph, I can't really tell what a "wagon" is supposed to be. How big is it? Does it have an engine? Is this a toy or a diesel truck? etc. There's cultural context that's not present at all.
Am I the only person who looked up the definition of "vehicle" and counted everything that wasn't a toy seemingly not meant to "transport something" as a vehicle?
It seemed like the spirit of the game was a strict interpretation, to the letter, of the rule.
I’m not sure the sign can have one unanimous understanding - which is why we have court rulings to back it up. If you disagree with a sign, take it up with “contemporary society”.
But given a situation where no proper trial is available, the sign could mean “anything”.
Cool game, but let me comment on the method of detecting bias based on names... I think it'll only work for audiences that recognise these names in a way that triggers those biases. So it'll not be very useful for outside US.
Clearly, this is all about driving cars or trucks in the park. The roads there are intended for pedestrians, cyclists, etc. It seems that 93% agree with me. Well done, everyone. ;-)
I think that was a really good way to get the point across. Which I suppose I already agreed to, but if I ever wanted to argue the point of how hard content moderation is, I might share this website.
"Travois" seemed the most interesting one. Based purely on the first page of Google images, it struck me as somewhere between a horse and a carriage, but ever more on the vehicle side.
it has no wheels so it is just dragged, maybe behind a horse but people can drag them too. horses walk and carriages roll, so it's not really between them. it's the asymptotic limit as wheels shrink to zero.
Three questions in I thought “hey, this reminds me of that recent 99% Invisible episode about restrictions on mechanized equipment”. Then I got to the explanation at the end and sure enough…
Just because there’s no analytical closed form solution that you can easily invent does not mean it’s a bad idea to have rules. The entire justice system works exactly like that.
According to most Reddit moderators: no vehicles in the park (unless the vehicle is in front of a sunset or we have to save our democracy by allowing vehicles with megaphones to drive around the park spouting the exact political ideology of the moderators)
The rule “no vehicles in the park” isn’t complicated. It’s complicated when it’s “no vehicles in the park except the moderators and their friends.”
Stopped playing after the first question because I don't care and i don't know why anyone would. After all this is just a website asking questions without context. It seems as interesting to me as the political debate in Star Wars Episode I that was famously mocked by the Simpsons.
i did 7 questions and agreed with 29% of the majority. can see why i'm writing on some "reddit alternative" platforms as much as i'm writing on reddit.
When one answers these questions, one must consider the reason behind the rule, the spirit of why vehicles are not allowed in the park: because this disturbs the park for many others in the park. It makes the park less enjoyable. People won't want to come to the park if it's full of cars.
Content moderation is about the same thing. It's about trying to minimize the negatives for everyone else while restricting the least. Part of Western cultural values seems to be that we want people to be free to have opinions that don't match the majority or those in control.
This is why the actions Elon Musk is taking in "moderating" Twitter are so problematic- they aren't about minimizing negatives for most users, they're about minimizing negatives For Elon Musk. This short sighted behavior erodes the platform in the long term.
The only thing this convinced me of is that content moderation is even more brainless and straight forward than I thought. There wasn't a single question that didn't have a straightforward commonsense answer.
In the olden days of internet forums we would consider this type of thing rules lawyering [1]. The rules were put in place to protect the community from trouble makers and trolls.
The main forum I frequented has a dispute resolution area where people could appeal infractions. It was full of people arguing about this type of stuff over something as trivial as a week long ban from some topic forum. Occasionally there would be an over zealous mod too.
Interestingly while the moderation of increasingly large and consolidated online communities becomes more automated and inflexible I’ve noticed that attitudes to rules around our public spaces have eroded into pure selfishness.
It seems there is nowhere people won’t drive and abandon their cars. Cycle tracks, footpaths (sidewalks) grass verges, parks, playing fields etc. it seems that this is simply accepted.
I’ve seen police and private security lazily patrol around parks where vehicles are not allowed in their cars. There’s no appetite for a physical on foot presence. You rarely see police on the street. The exception was during Biden’s recent visit to Dublin, there was literally a Garda on every street corner for a week.
Our local sports club patrons abandon their cars all over the grass area at the entrance to the local park when there is a half full car park right across the road.
Outside our local supermarket people will leave their cars on the footpath outside the store rather than park in a space mere metres away.
All of this is confounded by a police force (Irish Gardai) that don’t seem to give a damn.
I argued with a guy on Thursday who drove down a segregated cycle lane and up onto the footpath so he could leave his car right outside the house he was visiting. He saw nothing wrong with it. Only when I pointed out the kids trying to get around his car did he finally show some shame for his behaviour. I was furious.
So, maybe we need use the Jury system then, say 9 of them, with diversified backgrounds(e.g. 3 liberals, 3 conservatives, 3 independents, also consider age and gender,etc), and they vote online for edge cases, majority wins.
it will not be optimal, but better than a group of censors who share the same ideology and bias, or even worse, one or too persons make the calls randomly based on their own likes and dislikes.
Or design an AI agent to do that and save manual labor, but do let a jury to check its results regularly to make sure it works as expected, as much as possible.
The park may only have one rule, but the quiz has several , including disregarding exceptions to the rule. Yet there are people arguing here that rule shouldn’t count because they disagree with it. Even on a meta level, this is an interesting exploration of how people interpret rules.
This is always the way with these hypotheticals. People only disagree because they don't want to stick to the hypothetical. But the flip side of that, if you do stick to the hypothetical you also need to be clear that it is therefore of limited use in the real world. Is an ambulance in the park breaking the rule? Cleraly. Does that have any relevance to what we would expect to happen in the real world? Nope.
I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended.
To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
(To be clear, I think content moderation rules are often difficult to figure out when to apply. I just think the vehicles-in-park rule is much, much, much clearer than many content moderation rules.)
> Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Now you're assuming the intent.
The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them. If you're the park ranger and the local police come into the park in their car chasing after some criminals, and the local police are your buddies, you say they haven't violated the rule because the intent isn't to apply to emergency vehicles. If the exact same thing happens but you're having a dispute with the local police, now they're violating the rule and you can come up with something like the park isn't in their jurisdiction.
It's the same rule. It's the same action. The only difference is if you like them or not. And that's the problem.
>Now you're assuming the intent.
That's true but without assuming intent you end up blindly following rules.
Something struck me when first moved to UK from Turkey: Every rule in UK seemed to have an intent and that's why I think Turkey is full of rules which no one follows but in UK the rules are less numerous but followed. In Turkey, Turks like to think that the rules are not followed because the fines are too small or that the government is incompetent and can't enforce the fines. I disagree, I think Turkey is a chaotic society because rules are not built around intent. Did you know that up until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures?
For the first few months until I got my white collar job, I did some part time jobs in London as a waiter etc. and worked at some high end venues and hotels. In these places there are some equipments(like climate control of the wine cellar) which are operated through control panels which are accessible to everyone and they didn't put signs that say "don't touch", instead the signs said "you have no reason to touch this". They were able to keep curious hands away from buttons that shouldn't be pushed by those who don't know what they are doing by simply emphasising the intent.
Intent is extremely important, in fact everything is about intent. Every human action is with an intent. Great UX is built by designing around intent.
140 replies →
> Now you're assuming the intent.
No, it's not assuming, it's interpreting based on prior experience in communication.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff.
Then the sign would mention that, simple as that.
> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.
I agree with you here, it happens all the time, is a problem, and perhaps the test is useful to those, who haven't figured this truth so far. Probably not that many in the HN crowd…
I'll add that there's a problem with the test: "does it violate the rule" is not very meaningful. It could be understood in two ways:
- does it technically, strictly speaking, "violate" the rule, meaning, it does something the sign tells you not to do,
- or is the example acting against the intent of the author of the sign.
If the test asked "should violator be punished?" I think it would be more meaningful, otherwise it's just synthetic and the controversy is just about semantics, it doesn't incentive a discussion about our worldview and the rules we put in place, it just provokes to argue pedantically about how we phrase a message.
Moreover it possibly misleads people to think they disagree on something they really don't.
5 replies →
If a vehicle entering the park would directly endanger lives--rather than just being a nuisance--the sign would (should) give the extra context to make a stronger discouragement.
Otherwise, it is fair game to assume the "intent" of any such sign is to make guidelines to enhance the public's mutual enjoyment/safety at the park, and that such guidelines may be discarded when lives are endangered (police/ambulance).
As an alternate example where the rule itself is related to safety, "no campfires" would not be expected to be followed if one became lost and needed to make smoke signals to be rescued.
9 replies →
You pretty much have to assume intent, though? To mind, language doesn't exist without intent. You are correct that you may be wrong on the underlying message that is being communicated, but that is basically boiling communication back to the measuring problem. You measure what is easy to measure, you say what is easy to say. (As a fun counter to your example, so it would be ok if I bring a jack hammer and start pounding away? Or a shovel and dig to my hearts content?)
The silliness in this is that it boils everything down to a single rule and expects that you can define the words of the rule in a way that makes it obvious that some other meaning may be inferred. That isn't how language works. In no small part because language isn't static.
Put in a way that programmers know, decently. Regular expressions can describe context free shapes of symbols. These are usually concise and people feel like they can have a hold on them. Context free grammars, though, are typically not concise and lead to all sorts of interesting theory and problems to keep them going. And, much to the frustration of near everyone, colloquial language does not have a context free grammar, even. To try and take it out of the context is to lose.
4 replies →
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
Have you ever looked at the warning signs on water heaters? They make it instantly clear what the dangers are and how bad they can be. A "No vehicles in the park" sign in that situation would be the equivalent of just putting "Caution: Hot" on a water heater.
Similarly, parks have signs with people literally drowning and being killed to make it abundantly clear how dangerous they can be.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
I live in a city with Trams. Whenever they replace tram rails they remove the surrounding concrete and asphalt. It would be dangerous to drive there. In those cases they explicitly hang a “road closed” sign with an extra sign “including service vehicles”.
In the real world signs (especially common ones) try to be reasonable descriptive. Nobody is helped if you argue about the meaning if something goes wrong.
> that's the problem
No, that's not the problem. That's human nature, and human nature is most definitely not the problem. Humans make the world we live in and we individually get to influence it, but we don't get a veto on how others influence it.
To me, the quiz answers depended on common sense, and I was reminded by it that my common sense is not others' common sense, and so what? That's life. We deal, because there's no other choice when we live in society.
1 reply →
Well, every rule and law in existence, that I can think of, has an assumed intent. That's probably a necessary condition for rules, whether it's a sign in the park or a government regulation or anything else.
If people do not have, to some degree at least, a shared intent (e.g. let's have a conversation here about topic X, let's have a park to have fun or relax in, etc.) there is probably no set of rules that can specify sufficiently what can and must not be done. If you did manage to craft such a sufficiently detailed set of rules, it would be too large for people to read and understand.
5 replies →
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
That would be a terrible phrasing then. It should have been phrased something like "Landslide hazard, no weight more than 1ton allowed anywhere in the park." or something in that vein.
1 reply →
> Now you're assuming the intent.
Maybe you’re not aware, but rules are all about intent. In a conflict over rules, the judge will be all about the intent.
Rules work very well towards revealing the intent of all parties involved.
It’s always about intent.
Where I live, vehicles like police cars have the letters "xmt" on the left side of their license plate. That's because they are exempt from rules like "no vehicles in the park". Per the questionnaire, if the SWAT team drove their tank into the park that would be a vehicle in the park, but they get a pass.
1 reply →
This is a great anecdote for the need of intent. But, you also need context. Without either of those it’s very, very hard to agree on rules. And agreeing on either context or intent, let alone both, in a small community is hard. Doing so across the internet is damn near impossible and that was the point of the article.
Minor point perhaps, but there's no question about whether the police are violating the rule when they drive their car into the park: they are.
The question is whether it was justifiable and that's not what the original game asks you to evaluate, but it is the much harder question because it is almost always subjective--as you point out. In justifiability you can start asking about intent, weigh the various costs of the action, etc.
And that’s why education, and an educated society, are so important.
An educated person can make a much better assessment of intent.
For instance, if danger exists to a police car due to loose soil or not.
The more important point here for me is not “how should we best design and interact with the rules” (that’s a pretty authoritarian question) but rather “what fundamental human conditions, like education, tend towards more productive interaction with the world, including any rules that exist”
> If you're the park ranger and the local police come into the park in their car chasing after some criminals... If the exact same thing happens but you're having a dispute with the local police
It doesn't matter, the rules on police and emergency vehicles usually supersede some local rule about a park.
The park is not some absolute ruler of the land, sure it can put rules for general/everyday use but a lot of things are rules at higher levels
11 replies →
Without assumptions - such as what 'in the park' actually means - most of the cases are simply undecidable.
This should not be taken to mean that every rule must be fully, rigorously and unambiguously specified, as this would bring an end to human discourse.
Intent is often an appropriate basis for disambiguating rules like this.
> Now you're assuming the intent.
The funny thing is, the game itself assumes intent. And even you assume intent.
What is a vehicle? "a thing used to express, embody, or fulfill something" is one of the definitions. So, no books allowed.
But then, the rule doesn't say vehicles aren't allowed to enter the park.
It simple describes the state. That there are "No vehicles in the park."
> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.
At the very least, the other point is that it's challenging to come up with a rule that can't be misinterpreted even when being pedantic.
"No vehicles in the park."
No, there are no books current in the park. Just a bunch of cars.
This goes right to the discussion in the first couple chapters of _Promise Theory_, laying out the difference between a promise and an obligation. An obligation requires global knowledge, whereas a promise is local in scope, necessarily voluntary.
It might be a problem, but it is also an inescapable part of the human condition because, at the end of the day, rules are imaginary and all that really exist are human actions. It is pretty hopeless to complain about rules from this point of view.
Assumption of intent is critical to pretty much all social functioning. In this particular case, I think its outrageously reasonable to assume that if some unusual circumstance were to prevail in the park relevant to the definition of vehicle, the sign would explicitly indicate it. And that, without further clarification, the obvious answer is the one intended.
From computer programming we know that strict rules for complex systems become unmaintainable messes, with countless edge cases that result in things either just not functioning or - worse - allowing people to bypass the rules entirely to, e.g., run malware.
So the complaint about rules that involve human discretion strikes me as extremely hollow. We know what trying to write no-discretion rules looks like. We know it almost always still ends up allowing plenty of abuses of the system. To prevent that we need more eyes and more human judgement on things, not less.
> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.
They really need to work on their signage wording.
In a lot of countries intent is in fact everything. It's common for developed countries to be more governed by written law and have that interpreted as such in court, but in many developing countries it's all about what you are trying to do.
Selective enforcement of rules transfers power from the legislative to the people in charge.
> Now you're assuming the intent.
Communities are built on intent and learning the culture of the group. Anyone who does not understand this should get into law, not internet moderation.
[dead]
>but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules, because they are. The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.
This of course is a paradox, as a rule is something that you are forbidden from doing, and being allowed to break the rule means you're allowed to do something you're forbidden from doing, which when interpreted literally is an oxymoron.
The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules , and some rules are more important than others.
You just made me look up the rules in germany. The wording is somewhat particular. "An emergency vehicle following a higher cause can invoke special rights ("Sonderrechte") indicated by blue flashing lights. These special rights authorize the driver of the vehicle to divert from the regular traffic laws as long as done safely." Interestingly, this is separate from the "Right of the way", which can be ordered on top using a siren. This is why they need to run the siren for 2ish seconds before running a red light for example.
So yeah, an ambulance speeding to save a life is breaking the traffic laws, but they are allowed to.
Interestingly, if the ban of vehicles in the park had an additional reason - like a safety concern of unstable collapsing ground - an emergency vehicle in the park would be barred from invoking their special rights to be there, because then the driver would endanger bystanders without good reason.
6 replies →
> I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules
I think the ambiguity here is not what the rule means, but what "breaking the rules" means.
IMHO it should have been phrased as "would you refuse entry to" i.e. whether you would enforce action based on the rule.
If you would not bar entry to emergency vehicles, that would be the same as what others mean by "not breaking the rules" i.e. it is implicitly allowed.
10 replies →
See, even there for me it's rather a "firefighters/police have an exemption to the rules". For you it's "firefighters/police are breaking the rule but it's fine".
7 replies →
I answered in the same way. I chose to interpret the rule as "no functioning registered terrestrial road vehicles", in which case emergency vehicles are violating the rule.
5 replies →
In my country ambulances are allowed to run red lights, but not speeding. Actually they have their own rules that allow speeding in certain roads if the are in an emergency over their own limit: they are limited to 90 kmh in the motorway, but can go up to 120kmh, like any other car, in an emergency. Over that, they could potentially get a ticket. But AFAIK they can never go over the limits a normal car has.
When I read "obviously" in your parent comment, I though: well, not so obvious. We don't know why the vehicles are banned from this park (extreme cases: there are vehicle mines remains from a war that explodes under big weights. Park is built so ir can't stand so much weight and big vehicles would get trapped), so maybe police and ambulances must proceed on foot for the last hundred meters.
I answered the same way as you. Because there are rules and there are laws. The only reason park rules have any weight is in a larger context of laws. So, if the only park rule is "no vehicles in the park", then clearly the rule is violated by an emergency vehicle, but it will be that larger context that determines whether anyone cares if the rule was violated.
> The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.
I think this is just a way of saying that they are not breaking the rule, simply because the rule doesn't apply to them.
1 reply →
> The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules
I prefer the following quote as an explanation: "There are no rules, only consequences." There are no consequences for an ambulance entering the park because everyone agrees it is right that it should do so.
Exactly. There is a clear majority in the answers. Sure, there are edge cases, but they are edge cases.
But I also want to say this is a really cool website. I love how he used this experience to set the table for what is otherwise essentially a blog post. Very cool.
But to hone in a bit more:
> It was about content moderation. Specifically, some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply.
His experiment not only doesn't prove this because of the observation you made (there is a clear majority opinion), but also because the "simple rules" people want ARE simple in contrast to the current standard of assuming you need to be a moral authority. The supposed simple rules aren't simple because they avoid controversy. They are simple because they don't avoid controversy. They are minimal. Basically just take the stuff virtually everyone agrees on, or is illegal/possibly illegal. Yes, there are gray areas there. There are always gray areas. But the gray areas surrounding "we need to shape productive discourse" is a lot more controversial than the gray areas surrounding "is this legal?" Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.
And before someone says "well if you have offensive content then advertisers will leave," I want to point out that is not a content moderation problem. That is an advertiser attraction problem. If the goal is advertiser attraction then we are playing a completely different game and you should remove everything that is remotely controversial. Or consider that your business model is inherently bad for speech.
> Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.
Are you suggesting that section 230 is meant to discourage Internet intermediaries from moderation?
The original intent of this law was to stop requiring intermediaries to choose between adopting a passive conduit role and having legal responsibility for content. The legislators hoped that providing a general protection from liability for user-generated content would encourage more moderation by intermediaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
That might not have been the most pro-speech policy option overall but it was notionally very pluralist (with different platforms potentially having very different standards, purposes, goals, rules, communities, etc.) and it did manage to temper the previous somewhat paradoxical incentives, as well as providing a lot of legal certainty to facilitate the creation of new platforms of various sizes and models.
Pretty much everyone on the Internet is frustrated by moderation and sees pathologies and biases of moderation, intermediaries putting their thumb on scales, and so on. On the other hand, what we haven't seen is the enormous volume of litigation against intermediaries that would occur without §230. I expect people would literally be suing Y Combinator over HN moderation decisions. I can think of HN moderation decisions that I really disagree with, but it's impossible for me to imagine that having had those turn into lawsuits would somehow have been better for anyone.
4 replies →
Given that this is about moderation, I've ran a short experiment asking the first 7 questions to GPT 4 to test a theory: https://chat.openai.com/share/87c7df76-c693-4446-b8ce-817ac5...
It fully agrees with the majority interpretation in all cases despite the rule being minimal and requires taking the inferred intent into account. LLMs for machine moderation are probably rolling out very soon, I doubt Reddit and the like will even allow for human moderation in a few years (if prompt injection can be solved robustly enough).
The problem with having humans as rule breaking judges is that we all have our ever changing biases and motives. Most everyone has an experience with a power tripping mod deleting their post or comment because they had a bad day and needed to take out their anger on something. An LLM can parse these variable situations with ease and can also be tested for those biases. Since it'll never deviate from its training data it always acts as impartial as possible within the rules' limits.
3 replies →
Good point. The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion. I wonder how much consensus there would be if the intro asked you to go by the intent of the rule as you understand it, rather than what it literally says.
The first time I went through the quiz, I followed the instructions and had to think about definitions a lot. Then I read your comment and went through the quiz again and just used common sense (dangerous phrase, but I believe it worked in all 27 cases). There was only one violation: someone drove a Honda Civic through the park. What was that person thinking!
On HN we've always tried to avoid hair-splitting arguments by appealing to general values rather than trying to nail down the precise list of disallowed behaviors [1, 2]. Trying to be precise seems like a ticket to bureaucratic, soul-destroying hell [3]. I'd rather just say that there aren't precise rules, just an intended spirit and a few pointers, and yeah that means there's a lot of interpretation involved. There's going to be a lot of interpretation involved no matter what you do, so why pretend otherwise? Just make it clear up front. Then you can say "someone's got to interpret the rules, and that happens to be my job, and I'm interpreting them this way". People will get mad, but people are going to get mad no matter what you do, and at least you won't have to argue about whether a bicycle is a vehicle.
That doesn't mean there aren't edge cases and disputes about which calls are fair. There are tons of those. But if you don't try to be precise then at least you don't get into semantic hell. Except when you do. Boy this work's hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11301437
> The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion.
...and yet in this very HN discussion we have large numbers of people disagreeing about the intent of the small, clearly written intro, with each side convinced that their interpretation is the obviously correct one. I feel this does as much to support the author's thesis as the game itself.
2 replies →
> People will get mad, but people are going to get mad no matter what you do, and at least you won't have to argue about whether a bicycle is a vehicle.
The quiz epilogue said something along the same lines. Basically the point was to prove with these questions that corner cases always exist, and the system can never be perfect, and therefore we’re screwed and might want to give up. “pinning down a definition is usually impossible” … “You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem.” … “Maybe you will decide to live with the nebulosity, but have more sympathy for the refs. Maybe you will decide that you would prefer to live with the consequences of less moderation. Maybe you will think really hard about decentralization (which is not a panacea). Maybe you will give up on social media altogether.”
I do have sympathy for the refs, Dan, and I think you do an amazing job at a Sisyphean task. I’m also okay with nebulosity too.
However - I want to push back a little on the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t try to be precise, at least not as the most significant summary bit. We should try to be precise when we can, and provide examples when we can’t. I don’t buy the author’s argument/implication that the existence of a corner case somewhere means we shouldn’t be attempting to define the “epicycles” of the rules, especially when it’s really easy to say something like the park boundary is 200m above the ground, or insert ‘motorized’ in front of vehicles, which immediately eliminates like 50% of the supposedly hard to answer questions. Include the other rules, and add details to the quiz questions and almost all of them can become unambiguous. The point of all this is to provide clarity whenever possible and minimize the corner cases and reduce the number of people getting mad, right? It matters whether it’s just one or two people flaming each other versus everyone. It matter whether there’s only one or two crazy accidents in parks versus thousands or millions.
There’s a real difference between public safety and online forum opinions, of course. Yes, with a Grand-Canyon-sized gray area in between. But whether an airplane can fly through a park probably deserves a lot more bureaucratic attention than nailing down how people talk about Pi and religion on HN? Maybe I’m conflating law and forum moderation, maybe you were only talking about forum moderation, but I’m thinking about law as social moderation and how the quiz should reflect on social moderation in general. Our laws currently are in the process of building a larger and larger decision tree of both vague and specific language about what activities and behaviors are socially and legally acceptable, trying eternally to be more precise, and for the most part it “works” by some definition to keep the system manageable. We do try to get precise with speed limits and what kinds of death deserve what punishment and what constitutes insider information and whether badly compressed mp3s constitute copies. Even when it’s hard to pin down, we keep on trying, in order to reduce mistakes.
It’s kinda fun this little quiz of ambiguous questions caused so much discussion. Maybe it happened primarily because of the ambiguity, so each one is a little bike shed. Clearly the author said answer literally and most people just didn’t. But I somewhat feel like (maybe to the top comment’s point) that the contrived ambiguity backfired a bit on me. The problem with the quiz is withholding context and details in order to argue that it’s hard to draw lines. Context and details matter and they always exist in the real world. There isn’t only one rule, and a lot of the questions that seem ambiguous have actual right and wrong answers depending on details (e.g., altitude of the airplane & country of the park, or whether any country on earth asserts air & space rights hundreds of miles above their parks.)
1 reply →
That's a fairly culturally specific interpretation of common sense. Where I live it would for sure also include e-bikes and scooters, quite possibly regular bikes too (this is assuming "park" here means something on the ground and not e.g. a roof park where there might be weight limits).
The HN approach makes things simpler for moderators in much the same way that being a monarchy makes lawmaking simpler for the king, but writing down rules isn't about making the enforcer's life easier, it's about making the subject's lives easier. They're more numerous, so their needs should have at least some weight.
Independent of that argument, precise written rules and a process for updating them are valuable for several reasons:
1. Whilst people might still get mad, they get mad at the written rules and not at the interpreter of them. This takes a lot of the heat out of the situation because a document can be improved easily relative to improving a person, so discussions about bad outcomes become de-personalized and more constructive.
2. The act of writing down rules forces mental clarity. Contradictions and unhelpful biases that may not be obvious when free-floating in one's head can become apparent immediately when trying to write it all down.
3. Because the rules are clear, violations are less likely to happen to begin with. People who aren't on-board with the values of the community stay away.
The generic HN prohibition against "flamewars" is a good example of a rule that could use a rigorous clarification. It doesn't work to assume the intent or definitions are obvious, because flamewar is a purely online concept that doesn't have any clear analogy to the physical world. Actually it's the opposite: in physical debates there's a general understanding that anyone who turns up and takes part will engage in emotional self-control. If they lose it and start getting angry or raising their voice, they're the ones expected to leave, regardless of what argument the other side was making at the time. HN's approach inverts this standard social convention and blames the person who remains calm for the behavior of angry respondents!
The thread you linked to (from 2015!) is a good example of this. The original post is something about pi and the Bible. It's phrased calmly, isn't obviously in bad faith and is at least somewhat interesting yet is flagkilled, then you threaten to ban the user for conducting "religious flamewars". That user quite reasonably asks what it is that makes his post a rule violation and gives several possibilities e.g. is all discussion of religion banned? But you reply that it would be "soul destroying" to answer his question that specifically! He wasn't asking for a mechanical algorithm but getting more specific than "religious flamewar" and "spirit of the place" doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.
4 replies →
What I find really amusing is that the top comment (yours) is about how obvious the interpretation of the rules is, but there are dozens of subcomments disagreeing with your interpretation and each insisting how obvious their own interpretation is... exactly like with content moderation ;)
In my view, there's always an obvious initial purpose and interpretation (the Honda Civic), and you always have those that will pedantically insist on the most literal Draconian interpretation (the ISS), then you have those who stretch the rules to fit their agenda (bikes), but, most importantly, you have some class of common edge cases which spark significant disagreement (emergency services), even if we all agree on 90% of the point (which is that yes, emergency services should be able to drive through the park during an emergency, regardless of whether the rule is broken).
Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Obviously emergency vehicles are going to do what they need to do, but even if they are allowed to break the rule they are still breaking the rule.
I also think a park sign that says no vehicles also applies to bicycles and skateboards.
> even if they are allowed to break the rule they are still breaking the rule.
This is exactly right, I think, and in fact those who are focusing on the "intent" of the rule or on whether a violation of the rule is justified seem to have missed the clear wording of the instructions:
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
So the only questions that ever enter into it are (a) is this object a vehicle?, and (b) is the object in the park?
> a park sign that says no vehicles also applies to bicycles and skateboards.
Interesting, my dividing line was that a bike is a vehicle but a wagon, rowboat, or skateboard are not. The majority seems to think both a bicycle and a memorial tank (??!) are not vehicles under the rule.
18 replies →
I think it really depends on where you are located. I can't imagine personal wheeled vehicles like bikes and skateboards being prohibited from a park in the Netherlands unless explicitly stated so. On the other hand in suburban Florida biking places is so far out of the norm that it might make sense.
No "they are allowed to break the rule" is legally speaking nonsense.
1 reply →
Even if the park includes a skate park and a bike trail? I guess it depends on what size/type of park you are familiar with.
What??? Please explain. I can't fathom how a no vehicles sign would apply to bicycles or skateboards
25 replies →
Despite not getting a ton of debate here at the top, bicycle seems like the most contentious answer.
> police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
The question was not about whether the rule ought to be followed, but whether it was violated. Content moderation can work under these circumstances, too.
The setup in the beginning even tries to take the ought out of the deliberations: "Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated. You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules [...]" an even goes on to mention other sources of norms. It explicitly then says: "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
You are mimicking local jurisdiction rules. You don’t even know why they disallow vehicles. Let’s say because of subsidence or weight load. Then even emergency services should not go in as it would give more risk to them. Instead they need to walk in or use a helicopter suspended in mid air.
More surreal maybe it is above that cave in Lost and even an ISS or plane should not go over that location.
> So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
The game gives a super simple 2-paragraph-instruction that I feel could not be any clearer, but that you chose to ignore in favor of your own interpretation of what is being asked (because you deem the intent "crystal-clear").
Super fascinating.
It is unclear given that you and I don't agree. The question wasnt "does the police have to follow the sign", you made that up.
The nuance on that one felt odd. I said that it did violate the rule (even the spirit of the rule, being a large motor vehicle), because it was a binary question. I also felt the rule violation was justified and that they shouldn’t be called out on it.
9 replies →
Also, what sign? GP made that up too.
No one made anything up. It's obviously the intent of the question.
You can pretend that's not the case all you want.
1 reply →
I agree with this take. Most questions were very obvious when thought about from the angle of "what is the intent of the rule", which is likely to be "let people enjoy the park by not allowing large, noisy, smelly conveyances".
Bikes, kites, monuments, Radio Flyers, etc. do not violate the intent. A tank is clearly a vehicle but doesn't violate the intent because it does not interfere with people enjoying the park. And rules do not apply to on-duty emergency vehicles.
Clearly not everybody thinks about the intent, and many people focus on discussing the nitpicking corner cases of the rules, or thinking about the definition of a vehicle or "being in the park" (see also "what is a sandwich"). That's okay, and that proves the author's point that moderation is not a mathematical problem with a single formally provable solution.
Bikes do annoy people with small children because some people try to ride bikes fast where not appropriate, and this is dangerous when small children change direction unpredictably.
10 replies →
This is only true until an old grumpy lady is sitting on a bench in the park and don't want to hear any more skateboard noise. From that point on there is someone who considers skateboarding a violation of this rule.
I think we are all proving the author's point here.
For my decisions, the assumed intent of the rule was slightly different than yours: no potentially fast-moving objects that might cause severe accidents.
So: no cars, no bikes, no skateboards. RC toy cars with low mass are okay. Rowing boats are not okay because they might harm swimming people. The surfboard on the beach is okay because it is not moving fast within the park. Etc.
1 reply →
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
By "doing their jobs", you presumably mean "responding to an emergency call", right? Because, e.g., cops in normal transit from A to B are "doing their jobs" but letting them drive through a "no vehicles allowed" park in that instance is probably bad. Or if they're on a high-speed chase - definitely "doing their jobs" but not something you'd want to happen through a park.
> an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow
You've amply demonstrated this by creating a huge muddy mess around "emergency services doing their jobs".
[flagged]
Your attempt at making it black and white fails. When you say "obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign."
Does this mean that if police are code 2 en route to a crime 10 miles away they can use the park to save time? What if they are code 3?
Part of doing the job of firefighter includes conducting drills. Can they choose the park as their drill environment?
Further, even if they are responding to a crime in the park, are police allowed to drive on the sidewalk because someone has broken the littering ordinance?
Even ignoring these grey areas and focusing on your own statement, there is a philosophical dilemma. Are the first responders who "don't have to follow" an inherent part of the rule, or is the rule absolute and they are merely permitted to break it? in either case, by legal or by social convention?
just an FYI (going out on a limb) but nobody knows what this even means "Does this mean that if police are code 2 en route to a crime 10 miles away they can use the park to save time? What if they are code 3?"
if you could either explain the lingo or dial it down, that would be great for the rest of us to understand your argument
3 replies →
> So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.
Because you assume one following them does it out of good will and good intentions.
Now imagine the moderator that needs to adhere to such rules doesn't use them as guideline but as something to work around to remove the things they personally don't like. And they don't need to explain to the public why they thin it falls upon, they can just silently remove it, or put a comment "removed because rule xyz" and comments to that disabled.
Now imagine rules like /r/games, "No content primarily for humor or entertainment" or "No off-topic or low-effort content or comments". CLEARLY meant to stop memeing and spamming random game screenshots, but oh so easy to attach to nearly anything.
Same with title formatting rules. Should you copy-paste clickbaity title of the article or editorialize it to mean what the article says about? DOESN'T MATTER, if mods don't like the topic they will find an excuse. So the post gets removed but someone links to a different article with normal title that links to that as source ? Nope, LOW EFFORT, removed, should've linked to the original one (that's actual situation I saw on that subreddit, mods really don't like VNs there, and it wasn't about porn one either)
This is a great take. I thought the author was only trying to demonstrate problems that occur when moderators act in good faith. Since the only forum I use is HN, I forget that plenty of moderators do not act in good faith.
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
Thus IMO emergency vehicles violate the rule, although they should be allowed. Same thing IMO with the tank. Sure it's inoperable but it's a vehicle, in the park.
Agree. Emergency vehicles don't automatically get a "free pass", there are separate rules that apply an exemption. So the question and rule, as written, says that the emergency vehicles do violate the rule IMO. In the real world, there would just be other rules that would apply an exemption.
(IANAL, but have been driving emergency vehicles for 15 years).
I would say the tank is no longer a vehicle. More like a statue than a vehicle.
5 replies →
Not really an opinion if you follow the instructions, unless somehow you argue an ambulance is not a vehicle.
An interesting way to go about this would be through revelation
The rule is "no adult content"
1 A scholar is discussing their recently published contribution
2 as a professional sexologist
3 whose area of study is pornography
4 Ancient pornography
5 And how it relates to modern styles
6 of fiction literature and paintings
7 by quoting seedy passages of ancient erotic literate
8 written in ancient Sumerian
Etc... With every sentence fragment of increasing context you can get people changing their minds
Surely I can't be the only one who imagined Homer Simpson going "that's good... that's bad" while reading that comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7osb78oZ9Z4
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I agree with this obviously, but I feel quite strongly that you must answer "Yes, this violates the rule" to the emergency vehicles questions, because the rules of the game at the beginning clearly stated that you should answer about the violation itself, not about whether it should be allowed.
I think the author should have made the statement "A sandwich is an item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with meat, cheese, or other filling between them".
And then asked questions like:
- Is a grilled cheese a sandwich?
- Is two pieces of bread with a third piece of bread in the middle a sandwich?
- Is a hotdog a sandwich?
- Is a taco a sandwich?
- Is a breadbowl a sandwich?
- Is a poptart a sandwich?
- Is a calzone a sandwich?
- Is a burrito a sandwich?
- Is a pizza folded in half a sandwich?
Having asked these questions to many folks over the years, I promise the answers are much more split.
> Is a pizza folded in half a sandwich?
If you don’t cut it, no.
If you cut it at the fold, yes.
Now what if the pizza crust is toasted enough that, while it was not your intent, it breaks evenly at the seam during the act of folding it in half, and then you proceed to collapse the two halves before taking a bite. Did you have a sandwich for lunch?
5 replies →
I don't understand. If you walk into an establishment and ask for a sandwich, and they bring you any of the items you listed, you and me and everyone would be upset and confused. So no they are not sandwiches.
1 reply →
Time to wheel out this old classic then: https://cuberule.com/
More split than what? Only 11% agreed with my correct answers. Seems pretty split to me and I can only see the results for one person.
8 replies →
> Is two pieces of bread with a third piece of bread in the middle a sandwich?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_sandwich
Are ravioli sandwiches?
2 replies →
Fascinating that the first comment entirely disregard the very simple game rules (“it’s not about your jurisdiction“ and “it’s not about wether the rule should be disregarded in that case“).
Is it just because that way you can feel smart having “solved“ the game? Or do you think there’s a moral imperative to say an ambulance isn’t breaking a rule even in an abstract word game? Do you understand abstraction, and that this isn’t really about a park?
It seems more like you didn't read the instructions
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
I did read the instructions and I also assumed that I should use my judgment to determine whether the intent of the sign was violated. If the author had wanted otherwise, they should have said something like "Forget everything you about how laws are written and interpreted in the real world and simply take the most literal interpretation you can, with no regard for how ridiculous the outcome might be."
10 replies →
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Cue ambulance crashing through a wooden bridge over a river because it was never intended to carry the weight, or getting stuck in a tunnel, driving over pedestrians that can't get out of the way because there is no space left, ... . Blindly ignoring a rule because you can is not always a good idea. You might be able to ignore the rule, but you can't ignore the reason why it was put in place.
What was your percentage of agreeing with the majority? Greater than 50%?
I think your response to this exercise actually proves the author's point. I see people disagreeing with your take in the comments or making (to their perspective) reasonable arguments in favor of their choices.
Whether you found it personally "crystal-clear" to answer the way you did says more about your personal confidence and way of understanding rules than about the task itself being unambiguous.
>> Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Obviously? Really? Not only do I find it non-obvious, the rules of the game specifically say to ignore outside context which would IMO include ignoring municipal laws or rules that might say emergency vehicles can go anywhere they are needed. That is huge part of the issue they are pointing out - an ambulance violates the rule, but context makes it OK.
lol, do you honestly in good faith actually believe the intention of that sign has anything to do with prohibiting vehicles in emergency situations?
1 reply →
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
Most likely true. But to me the answer for the question itself is not about whether the rule can be overridden by any other rules. It’s purely about the rule itself.
The intro supports this:
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
There is a difference between a rule being violated, and whether the violation of the rule is allowed. Like they say in that intro text.
Therefore, all of the examples with police motor vehicles and ambulance motor vehicles are to be answered as being in violation of the rule.
I think the website is very disingenuous because it purposely asks the wrong question. The question is not "is the rule technically violated", the question is "should they be fined for violating the rule". If you asked the latter question, then 99% of people would agree on all questions.
2 replies →
The only one that I don't understand is the horse.
A horse is not a vehicle. A horse is a horse, of course.
1 reply →
> "To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear."
I'd be interested to see more grey-area things like a group of fast amateur bicycle racers, e-bikes, classic pedal-mopeds, electric stand-up scooters, electric sitting moped/scooters, Vespas, ice-cream tricycles, pedal delivery vehicles, I think there would be a lot more differing opinions about those.
Pedal-moped: https://www.used.forsale/sh-img/Honda_Hobbit_pedal%2Bmoped.j...
UPS pedal trike: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/11/mobil...
Ice cream trike: https://www.hogroastredditch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/...
Recumbent trike: https://i1.wp.com/www.recumbenttrikestore.com/wp-content/upl...
Given the spiel at the beginning about how this place is different from where I live and that in this place, there are no rules which trump the park's rules, I can't agree that it's obvious that police, ambulances, and fire trucks obviously don't have to follow the rules. To me, it seems that the framing all but says that they do.
Police, ambulances and fire trucks are if anything some of the clearest violations. They are unambiguously vehicles. They are unambiguously entering the park.
It was really surprising to me how many so explicitly ignored the instructions for them.
There are two ways to approach the problem. Either to be dogmatic about the wording or to be practical. I ended up with only one "is a vehicle" because I was enforcing it the way I would enforce a rule like that in real life, a practical rule. If you were being dogmatic about the wording you would undermine the likely intent of the sign by kicking people out of their wheelchairs and having to shoot down the ISS. Rigid adherence to bad (or even just badly worded) rules is its own form of tyranny, one that is even more insidious because it has a veneer of legitimacy. Much evil has been perpetrated throughout history by people who were "just following orders".
Rules are for the police.
Intent is for the judges / lawyers.
In Europe our driver education contains a legal definition of a vehicle (and motor vehicle). You'll find almost all parks with drivable roads will have a clear definition at the entrance what's allowed and what isn't. If in Europe there was a sign that says "no vehicles", that disallows skateboards and bicycles too. Signs will always make it clear if they mean "motor vehicles".
In this case, there was no sign, only a rule. The sign was made up by the gp along with a bunch of other contextual details.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
The test explicitly asked for answers as to whether the rule is followed, not whether its ok to ignore the rule in a given situation. Very obviously a police car or an ambulance is a vehicle in the park.
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
Wasn't the point of the experiment not that you could come up with answers that seemed sensible to you, but that different people came up with different answers that seemed sensible to them? I too felt the line was fairly clear in this case, but I was very surprised that others thought differently.
It isn't mentioned in the discussion on the results page, but one facet of effective moderation this shines a light on is as follows: each of us may find the moderation task easy, but few (or none) of us would be a moderator who would be universally trusted.
Yes, but then the experiment kinda proves the opposite of the point it was trying to prove. As it were, people largely agree with each other as to what's reasonable and what is not.
2 replies →
No, police and ambulances are vehicles. They're not allowed in the park. It's a violation. Maybe they can get away with the violation but if you're following the rules it's a violation.
This is why the real rules say "Emergency vehicles allowed", and then usually "No skateboarding, roller blading, scooters".
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I disagree due to the instructions on the page before starting the quiz: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
The game is specifically asking us not to make a judgement call on whether a violation of the rule should be permitted. So, police are violating the rule (even if we think it's allowable)
And police is like one super clear example of violation, everybody can agree car is a vehicle, and it's clearly written that you answer whether it's a violation not whether it should be, ignoring your local laws.
And yet it is top comment, with many confirmations in the replies. I had to scroll really really long to find somebody quoting short instruction which the parent is ignoring.
So long story short, amazing job with that game. It's seems really hard to present the case for how difficult moderation is any clearer. Fascinating stuff.
Also, I'm too lazy but it would be nice to see LLMs answers.
edit: curiosity won, not all questions, GPT4: https://gist.github.com/comboy/71caac8afdc1b92d103c4ec7c42e4...
1 reply →
From the game's rules:
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. [...] please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
You:
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign
Even having read your reply it is not obvious to me what you answered. Did you answer yes, the police etc. are violating the rule only adding a note for us tha, or did you answer no, thinking that this doesn't count as a violation?
To me the overall discussion, but especially the disagreement about emergency services and bicycles proves the point of the original article.
To everyone the answers are crystal clear. That doesn’t mean there isn’t disagreement across a population.
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
For other people too, but for them maybe the right answer is different.
Intent is clear until it is not.
Cars obviously aren't allowed. Bicycles are not, either. But can I walk through the park pulling my bicycle ? (I want to cut through the park to avoid a long detour). Some will say that the intent is to avoid have people _driving_ vehicles through the park because it is dangerous, others will say that if that was the intent the rule would be "No driving of vehicles in the park".
What about toy cars ? The extreme cases are easy, an hot wheels car is obviously fine. Something like this [1] I would say not, too fast and dangerous. What about the middle ground ? Are tricycles fine ? Toy car with pedals ? A car-like stroller [2] ?
It is less clear and you will have different complains from different persons. Some people will be pissed off that they can use their vehicle while other can use their. Some people are petty and will try to have any kind vehicle banned "because the rule says so", just to make the life of others miserable.
And this is only about what constitutes a vehicle, we are not even talking about what means "in the park".
You can give moderators (law enforcement, in the park example) freedom to act according the intent ("when I see it I know if it is allowed or not"), but the more freedom they have, the more potential for trouble there is.
Of course people will be disgruntled also if the rule is too specific and inflexible, because that may mean not being able to do something that it "obviously" was meant to be allowed. You need to find a good balance, and the ability to update the rules for the thorny cases.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOMXCW7uK4U [2] https://www.walmart.com/ip/3-In-1-Push-Car/40926763
There was no reason to assume either the police car or the ambulance was doing their job. There was no mention of a medical emergency, just an EMT driving an ambulance. Police officers may or may not have jurisdiction in the area and there was no evidence the emergency was even a police matter. The EMT driving through the gate to watch the music festival, and the police officer driving through the park during mid-2020 (when the entire world had declared COVID an emergency) would both qualify.
And that doesn't even address the bigger issue that even if they were justified in breaking the rule, they were breaking the rule.
Yes indeed. “In a justifiable emergency, X breaks the rules — does this break the rules?” Is a very clear “yes”. It doesn’t ask whether X should be punished for breaking them.
> There was no reason to assume either the police car or the ambulance was doing their job.
The prompts were: "In an emergency, Neil, an EMT, drives his ambulance into the park" and "In an emergency, Laurie, a police officer, drives her police car into the park."
1 reply →
Ehm. I answered that the cop and ambulance were in violation of the rule, but it’s sometimes okay to break the rules. That doesn’t mean they didn’t break the rules — it means they were justified in breaking the rules.
in other words, there's two pieces here, 1) the rule, 2) the consequences of breaking the rule.
It is agreed that the rule (1) is broken by emergency vehicles. It is unknown that (2) is in effect (it is not described in the scenario), but people would assume that there's no consequences for emergency vehicles breaking the rule.
1 reply →
If people don't agree on it, then the clarity you feel is an illusion. The point of rules is common understanding of what is acceptable. Notably, you pulled a bunch of special cases and refinements from thin air. The way I read the setup, it was "crystal clear" that the rule was violated by emergency services, even if we could agree afterwards not to enforce it there.
And, yes, of course, moderation questions are much harder. At least with the vehicle thing people aren't usually aren't deliberately constructing tricky cases.
I feel the same way as the above comment. If you were an actual administrator in charge of fining people for violating the rule, almost none of these examples should give you pause. You wouldn't be trying to give a ticket to planes flying overhead, for example. With these examples, there really isn't much disagreement on whether action should be taken, so any discussion of whether a rule is technically violated is moot.
18 replies →
I fully agreed with the GP for the same reasons: in my book everything except the Civic was OK, because that matches the intent of the sign.
In both law and real life, there is a common understanding (to use your term) that rules may be violated for the greater good. Does driving an ambulance into the park violate the letter of the rule? Yes, but it's still OK because we give emergency vehicles wide leeway to break rules so they can save lives. Judaism even encodes this in a general principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh
11 replies →
I'm with the parent comment, as I think the context is important here.
If you think the emergency service vehicles violate the rule, how about a park maintenance vehicle or a park ranger vehicle? Would you say "no vehicles in the park" rule applies to them too, so they would be violating it?
3 replies →
> If people don't agree on it, then the clarity you feel is an illusion.
Well, no, people can just be wrong.
2 replies →
[flagged]
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
isn't that the exact thing this points attention to? When you have power, everything is clear. But _your_ clear isn't necessarily same as anyone else's clear
thus percentages aren't 100%, as shown
The intent isn't super clear. Personally, I don't think that emergency vehicles are obviously exempt, we don't know why the rule is there. I don't that bicycles are obviously exempt either, they are clear vehicles that go faster than normal human speeds and the line between motorcycle and bicycle is rather unclear. (Ask five of your friends and associates whether ebikes should be allow on a bike path, then ask about ebikes that hit 45mph, then ice mopeds, then those e unicycle things, then the faster versions...) Likewise with boats, it seems that there are many cases where no watercraft at all should be allowed, and other cases where a motorboat is fine even if they don't want cars and whatnot in the park. And while flying aover a park is arguably not in it, a helicopter hovering a few feet over a field obviously is in the park and far more disruptive than the other vehicles.
And if i want to say no skateboarding, roller blading, scootering, pogoing, or any alternative in the park?
I agreed with 11% of people, but that is 1 in 10 who agree your take isn't correct. (granted i think a small wagon is ridiculous to enforce under like 90% of circumstances)
I'm a cyclist. Without additional context, I said that a bicycle (and skateboards (that aren't being carried)) are not allowed in the park.
What did you answer about bicycles and roller skates? It wasn't one of the questions, but I bet razor scooters would split the vote close to 50/50.
And what if the fire marshal is visiting the park to evaluate the maximum occupancy of the office — can they drive their official vehicle into the park for that?
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
The instructions specifically tell you to disregard any unstated assumptions about exceptions for special vehicles.
So in this way you have just illustrated the authors point.
It was crystal clear to you. Now imagine someone with diametrically opposed views - they also have an interpretation that is crystal clear.
For me, it is obvious that police and ambulances in emergencies violate the rule.
They may have some higher-level rule that says "in emergencies we don't get punished for violating this category of rule", but the rule is still there, and requires the drivers to demonstrate that there was in fact an emergency.
A hierarchy of rules is why normal people don't get to act like cops, or perform amateur heart transplants.
Bikes are a more interesting edge case for me; I think they are, as I expect the reason for the rule to be some kind of environment degradation, possibly easily damaged lawns or similar. But they might be fine. Depends on the reason for the rule.
The website closes with a graph objectively showing how people disagree with each other on these questions. People thinking that interpretation is obvious and that there is no reasonable disagreement is exactly the problem.
I thought it was clear and obvious and then at the end I learned I agree with the majority only 12% of the time.
Same, I agreed with the majority only 11% of the time.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
They have to acknowledge that the rule exists, and then deliberately break it, because their task takes priority over the rule.
If the question is "does this break the rule?" then the answer is "yes, but". If the question is "will it stay out of the park?" then the answer is "no". The real world doesn't work exactly like if (cond) statements in code.
I interpreted the ambulance and police as breaking the rule, even though it wouldn't be persecuted. Of course the important thing isn't the rule, but people's reaction over time. A vehicle might cause unwanted noise or damage park grounds. Even without the rule, people might get upset if people use vehicles to degrade park quality. On the other end, if the park is many miles across and it has large paved trails, people might perceive the rule as unjust. So it's ultimately this negotiation and power between participants (including the park owners) that determines acceptability. An arbitrary rule which is easy to break but without real harm, in enforcing it, creates more harm than it prevents. So, I don't care about the rule but how it's enforced. Another concept useful to these situations is Taleb's intransigent minority: those who care will win over those who don't. With content moderation, we will always have a battle between those who perceive harm and those who don't. Problematic rules must be fought just as problematic content must be fought. A systems ability to adapt rules over time will ultimately determine its useful life. Change or be replaced.
So which side of the vehicle/nonvehicle line did you choose for these? Wagon, wheel chair, skateboard, surf board, parachute, roller skates, ice skates, shoes, socks.
It's not that hard. You have to understand a "park" is usually primarily some pseudo-preserve of nature, with varying degrees of permitted human recreational uses. That is what a "park" actually means.
Users of parks generally know there will be varying usage rules for the park based on the park. But generally speaking, things that will destroy the "natural perserved" aspects, things that will disrupt other people using the park, aren't allowed.
And, like moderation, if you don't understand the context of what a park is in society, you should either go there with someone that does, ask the authorities in charge of the park, or DON'T GO.
So the answer to the question is "what activities are supported by the park, do you know other people that use those implements there without controversy".
You socially interact to know. If it is a grey area, ask either someone that may know, or the authorities.
This isn't Zeno's paradoxes. You aren't asking if the vehicle is every technically being used at the park because the atoms are repelled by the electromagnetic force and things never actually touch each other.
It isn't something that needs to be solved philosophically. There are people with authoritative knowledge, and you ask them the questions, and they give a "yes or no". And you either obey their judgement, or you break the rules.
If the AI (because this HAS to be about AI, why else is this dribble here) can't understand the context, it won't effectively moderate.
3 replies →
It's crystal clear until it's not. In the UK a bicycle is, rightly so, considered a vehicle. I know this, but I'd guess many British people do not. I also understand why bicycles are considered vehicles and, when on my bike, tend to follow the spirit of rules and designs that appear to prohibit vehicles.
I would not ride in the park, but would walk my bike in the park. I'd be breaking the rules but adhering to the spirit of them.
You are absolutely the example of their point. Your dogmatic approach is not universal. This should be clear as I'm sure you didn't get a 100% match.
This is funny because others probably answered differently but feel the same way. So the site is actually achieving what it was created for. Discussion.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Not so obvious. I identified them as having violated the rules. If an exemption was intended for emergency vehicles it should have been included in the sign. Many signs regarding rules for vehicles include "except for emergency vehicles". Without such an exemption I would apply the rules to them.
An interesting counterpoint to this
> Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Is that every year multiple people in the U.S. are killed by police driving their cars onto beaches and running over unsuspecting sun bathers. So there’s a strong argument that the signs intent is to ban even responding emergency vehicles.
My takeaway was similar — the problem is one of how we define "vehicle". Is it anything that moves, anything that carries a person, is it a toy model of a vehicle, etc., etc., etc..
Without that definition, almost anything resembling an edge case becomes an argument.
Similarly, without specifying the intent, it becomes impossible to decide the argument, because easily two people can have legitimately different views; e.g., the rule is to prevent anything putting more pressure on the ground than a footfall (so basically anything w/wheels is a problem, including emergency vehicles, but a sled might be is OK), to anything fast-moving and massive (so toys, airplanes, & spacecraft are OK), to some arbitrary rule from a psycho-dictator owner...
I.e., if you want people to make sense of the rules, they need to start with a simple clear definition (this does OK in that dept.), specify the extent (what to include and exclude) specify the intent, and maybe provide examples of how to decide edge cases so that others can reason about them.
It's clear that the rule is broken by emergency vehicles. Whether they need to follow the rule is a different question and not the one asked.
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
An emergency or service vehicle in practice could have an overriding exemption rule (or not and just ignore some rules without retaliation), but they still violate "No vehicles in the park".
Seriously. I read the rule and I hear "keep the park a park".
Only the car is forbidden and everything else goes.
Same here. I looked at the intent of the rule given the context. Rules are enforced by humans not robots and are meaningless without context.
When you do try to enforce rules literally, you end up with kids being expelled because they brought an action figure to school, or teenagers being executed because they fell into a flower bed.
4 replies →
It's also an awfully simplistic vision of moderation/rules, whereas the answer in real life should be "it depends". Should an emergency vehicle be allowed through the park? Yes. As another comment says, is there a known risk about things collapsing in the park? Guess what, that kind of stuff is either displayed prominently at the entrance, or told in advance to the few people that might legitimately have to go through the park.
Simple solutions do not apply to such an extremely complex as human behaviour. In the same way, moderation can not rely on simple, inflexible rules. Yes, sometimes you're gonna ban someone who's just skirting them. Yes, a few dumbasses are going to complain. Ignore them, ban then too, whatever.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Obviously? I disagree there and marked those as violating the rule. If we are to take the rule literally and logically, then those examples clearly violate the rule. Nowhere in that game did it say that police, ambulances and fire trucks get a free pass. There isn't anything obvious about that. You're bringing your own context and knowledge/interpretation of the world into this. The game also clearly stated that we should ignore our own local laws (and religion) when answering the questions.
What was your answer on the wheelchair? Same as for bicycle, or different? If different, what about a wheelchair but the person in it doesn’t need a wheelchair, they just enjoy the sporting aspect of arm-powered vehicles?
The other way I would “problematize” (to borrow the author’s wording) your crystal-clear understanding is to ask about the matchbox car, then the remote control car, then one of those kid-size toy cars that the kid drives around (then a small one-person electric car, then a full-size electric car).
I suppose another angle would be, are bicycles okay? What about battery-powered bicycles? Does it change if we add a small petrol motor to recharge the battery?
>obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
It's still breaking the rule though. Legally I suspect it varies between jurisdictions whether the sign doesn't apply to them, it does apply but conflicts with another rule, or whether it's argued as an extenuating circumstance.
Then there's the edge cases like bikes and horses.
Are they vehicles? It's completely reasonable that they could be deemed to be.
We've got the same kind of argument going on with e scooters at the moment.
Ultimately I answered a lot of these based on what I would expect to see in a park, and what I think is reasonable. But they aren't objective measures.
There is being rational, using principles to interpret a statement.
And then there is being rational to the extent that you are in complete denial about that the fact that your rational faculty is located within a spongy organ in the cranial cavity of an ambulatory meat bag.
There doesn't need to be an objective measure for you to take a position on the intent and meaning of a linguistic construct such as a rule. It is just a thing that bipedal meatbags do.
If one meatbag has a different view than another meatbag then they are in a political conflict. There are ways of resolving the conflict which range from friendly chat, through formal debate, right the way to genocide. Generally speaking, well adjusted members of civilised society can resolve things through the former. Sometimes we go fucking bananas and end up at the latter.
Not sure why so many find it so difficult to grasp, or feel the need to apologize that they are mortal, they can't derive the answer from a set of universally agreed-upon axioms and carve it in to a stone tablet like some old-testament god ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
Nope, not for me :-) But funny part is that it's so obvious for me, I'm surprised anyone else thinks otherwise.
To me, a bike is clearly a vehicle. To double-check, I've searched for "list of vehicles" on Google, all the lists I have seen include bikes in them (and I didn't expect anyone to disagree with this).
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
That's not particularly surprising. But you may be asking the wrong question.
If you want to know whether the rules are clear then I think that the right question to ask is not "Are the answers crystal-clear to you?" but "Will different people produce the same answers?".
If we had a sharp drop in the graph at one point then it would suggest that most everyone has the same cutoff; instead we see a very smooth curve as if different people read this VERY SIMPLE AND CLEAR rule and still didn't agree on when it applied.
But what is the exact definition of "vehicle"?
In the Highway Traffic Act of Ontario "vehicle" is defined as: “vehicle” includes a motor vehicle, trailer, traction engine, farm tractor, road-building machine, bicycle and any vehicle drawn, propelled or driven by any kind of power, including muscular power, but does not include a motorized snow vehicle or a street car; (“véhicule”)
https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90h08/v116#BK1
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear.
One of the points of the exercise is that there is broad spread (though far from a uniform distribution) of responses, so the fact that the correct answers are clear to you only goes so far.
It might be interesting to see how additional statements about intent would affect the distribution (though to the extent that the statements of intent take the form of lists of determinations in each special case, the interesting outcome would be the distribution continuing to be broad.)
> To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear
You are actually perfect example, everying is crystal clear to me too, and my interpretation violently contradicts your interpretation
But the ambulance DOES break the rule. Clearly and unambiguously.
But breaking rules like this in cases of emergency is the correct thing to do.
This is where the moderation difficulty comes in.
I felt the exact same way. I found there was exactly one example of a vehicle being in the park, and everything else was fine. That didn't seem to be their intent
You clearly didn't understand. It's mostly not able how easy or not you found it to apply the rule, it was about how whatever you decided was actually quite different from other people. In fact, you finding it very clear makes the point apply even more.
I felt it was easy too, but I felt that almost every item listed was a vehicle and in the park. If it helps here was my reasoning. To start with I checked the dictionary for a definition and it appears that a vehicle is "A device or structure for transporting persons or things; a conveyance". Then it was a matter of categorizing. The only one I had to deliberate was the horse, because while it transports persons or things it isn't a device or structure. I ended up saying almost everything was a vehicle and in the park.
Are you saying that an ambulance is not a vehicle?
> I just think the vehicles-in-park rule is much, much, much clearer than many content moderation rules.
And as clear as it is, it can still be enforced selectively.
That's the point.
One thing we can be sure of is that if there is a rule, there is someone trying to test its absolute limits (and our tolerance for BS, I suppose).
Content moderation is hard. Analogies are also hard.
> … obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
They are indeed violating the rule. Whether that rule is enforced against emergency vehicles is considered by the enforcing agent. I believe most people in that position would allow the emergency vehicles to do their jobs without citing them for violating the rule.
But they’re still violating it.
I think it achieved its purpose. I only got 11% right, because in my mind, the majority of those things were not vehicles.
"obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign"
They basically said to ignore local jurisdiction laws. Depending on where the sign is placed, this might not be so obvious.
If you take the sign rule to the letter, an ambulance is a vehicle and thus cannot enter the park as well.
Police can enter the park, but without a vehicle.
I'll argue that the police can enter the park with their vehicles, but they'll be violating the rule when they do so.
But if we're ignoring local rules and the only question is whether or not they would be violating the rules, then yes they would be, and whether they can anyway is out of scope.
1 reply →
In that scenario the duty to help citizens in need simply supersedes the rule that vehicles are not allowed in the park. So pedantically the EMT and police officer are breaking the rule, but breaking the rule of idly standing by in an emergency is worse.
The reason to allow emergency vehicles to go through the park must then outweigh the benefit of the ‘no vehicles allowed rule’. Something trivial like a pedestrian illegally crossing the street should not warrant the police going on a car chase through said park.
3 replies →
> the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
"Obvious" for you that is. I had a different interpretation of the obvious rule, so came up with a different set of answers.
QED, no?
That's why you add a "why" in any rule or law.
If you add this, you clarify the intent and can meaningfully declare exceptions like "no rules in the park because people come here to relax. Of course if a vehicle is necessary to e.g. stop a wildfire or stop a criminal from shooting people, a vehicle is more than welcome"
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
That’s not so clear IMO. It depends on the severity and urgency of the accident, and whether there is a really prohibitive issue that entirely prevents heavy vehicles from entering, like quicksand or muddy ground that will get an EMT stuck.
I think it's more intended to be a proof of how people have a difficult time applying clear-cut rules without relying on their prior biases. That (conceptually) is a really good exercise and one that we could all benefit from. The implementation, explanation and result transparency otoh, are garbage.
> but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer
There is no sign. Nowhere in the question does it mention a sign.
What the question does say, however, is this: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
Which is pretty much the opposite of what you conclude.
Interesting.
It's obvious that the spirit of a rule that says "no vehicles in the park" actually means "do not cause inconvenience or ruin the serenity of the park." A person in a wheelchair, nor an astronaut passing overhead do those things. A guy driving a Toyota around does.
Did you look at the answers other people gave at the end of the quiz? Did 100% of those people agree with you?
> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I agree, but in the sense that it’s okay for them to violate the rule. However, they are still violating the rule, and thus the correct answer in the game is “yes, this violates the rule”.
>(and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
In some countries they can ignore such signs only when under an emergency and rights have been given by a central or a local station. A police car can't just turn on flashy lights and drive into a park.
I will say an ambulance or police car in the park does break the rule.
It is fine to break the rule sometimes though.
You didn't follow the instructions. He specifically says forget all existing rules you may know. There are no vehicles allowed in the park. That includes ambulances, fire trucks, orbiting space stations that pass through the border of the park, etc.
I may have answered differently from you (I would say the police violated the rule) but I think we actually agree on the point that the rules do not apply to emergency workers. In essence, the data collected isn’t reflective of peoples actual attitudes.
I considered the emergency vehicles to be violations of the rule, but that they were defensible exceptions. To borrow a legal concept, that they are emergency vehicles was an affirmative defense, meaning I had to first admit they violated the rule.
Yes I'd say it's "unclear to follow" to adversarial (or just nitpicking) people
(Also) because we have a context of a park and of general rules. (Also if you think the ISS is a vehicle on the park you're welcome to try to enforce that)
Same here.
Also the questions have dubious intent.
Does something violate the rule? Some times they do and sometimes we need to understand if that's acceptable or fix what made this rule to be broken.
But I think many people interpret the question as "should it be allowed"
While I agree, I marked the emergency vehicles as being in violation of the rule. My interpretation being that such a rule would not be enforced even though it was technically violated.
I mean, all it takes to disprove you here is, what percentage did you get? What percent of people agreed it was that simple in the same way you did.
A low percent
What a bizarre conclusion. I don’t agree at all, which by itself kibd of invalidates your conclusion.
“It’s clear to me, therefore it’s clear to everyone.”
the child in the electric toy car is probably the real dividing line on the question of what is a "vehicle"... the ISS orbiting is the line on what is "in the park"... and the police car in an emergency is where you're supposed to bend the definition of the word "allowed".
I think the answer to the survey is "I want to talk to my lawyer".
you give emergency vehicles an exception to the rule, that was specifically mentions as not being the intent. the rule is no vehicles in the park, an ambulance is a vehicle so it broke the rule. if then punishment is applied and what is something else, in the basis it's a vehicle in the park.
I came away with the exact same takeaway. If you really want to convince people that content moderation is a hard problem, just ask them to listen to this Radiolab episode about Facebook's struggle: https://radiolab.org/podcast/post-no-evil
It's much more convincing.
Yea this seems like an argument in favor of extensive (and confusing) legaleese / lawyerese
Is this some dumb philosophical thing? It's just contextualized language, with fairly well established context.
You have a "park". You have a rule about "no vehicles in park".
If you have been to enough parks, you know that they generally will entail some sort of separation of nature from the more general technological society around it, and certainly from one of the major aspects of that technological society, big ass heavy noisy smelly destructive annoying vehicles.
You will also know that parks are managed and funded by some authority, who may have necessity to enter and maintain them with "vehicles" that they know and are trained to operate and use properly in the park, likewise with emergency services and their vehicles.
So let's look at content moderation in this standpoint. Almost always, content moderation is within a context of a forum, where there is a subject matter and a set of germane topics. The subject matter often has implicit constraints, a lot like a park.
The other interesting thing about a park is that you arrive at one, and you can generally tell what is acceptable behavior in a park without the rules by observing what other people are doing, and "conforming" to that behavior. And if you don't know, you ask people around you and they will tell you yes/no/dunno and whether they are knowledgeable.
I can see a forum or subreddit kind of the same.
If a person was going to the park asking these questions, the actual answer after about four or five questions is "you probably shouldn't go to a park, or do whatever it is you want to do there, because you don't understand parks very well"
Similarly for something that is content moderated, after about four or five questions that clearly show you don't understand the subject matter of the forum or how to interact with other people involved in the subject matter, the answer is "you shouldn't post or say anything in that forum".
The ACTUAL corner cases in this are "well, can I take an electric bike into the park?" "Can my personal dog-robot follow me into the park?" "can I ride my electric blade scooter in the park?" "Okay, how BIG of an e-bike can I bring in?" "Is the no-vehicle policy about loud dirty ICE engines, or is it mostly about size?" because electric vehicles will ACTUALLY stress that stuff out.
But if the answers were crystal-clear why didn't everyone answer them like you did?
I think the purpose was to focus on the rule not on the intent of the rule.
Following rules without thinking of their intent is just malicious compliance.
1 reply →
If emergency vehicles were exempt, the sign would say so, it does not.
You just chose to ignore the game.
I think it does a fair job if you realize that the entire thing is semantics.
Every prompt is asking either one or both of these questions: "Is this a vehicle?" "Is it in the park?"
So you have to ask yourself what is a vehicle? Most people would not classify shoes as a vehicle. So why would attaching wheels to shoes make them vehicles? The definition of vehicle is rather vague, basically "something used to move people or goods, especially on land". Which skates kind of are. They use a machine, the wheel, to multiply work done.
Even though a matchbox car has all the appearances of something normally accepted as a vehicle, does the fact that it is incapable of transporting anything significant change that fact?
Then you get to "in the park". What is "in" the park as opposed to "out"? Yes, the grounds as defined by the property lines are definitely "in" the park. Someone driving a Civic through the grounds is definitely "in the park". Basically, do you count the airspace of the park and if so, where does it end? If something hovering 4 feet above the ground is in the park, then why isn't an airplane at 33,000 feet "in" in the park? Is it because we can't reasonably interact with it? If that's the case, do the boundaries of the park change depending on the height and reach of those in it? If no one is in the park, and you jump a Civic completely over the grounds, were you ever "in" the park?
Moderation is an attempt to define things like this. Sometimes more abstractly, sometimes way more directly. For instance, if you have a forum about sandwiches, you're going to have to have a rule about hot dogs. Whether or not they count.
You see it here all the time when someone asks "Why was this posted here?"
So if you have a rule that says "No slurs". That seems simple enough. But now you have to define what a slur is. If I call someone a "fucking idiot", is that slur or just an insult? What if I just said, "Americans, right?" Calling out someone's nationality shouldn't technically be a slur, but it's kind of the implication that turns it into one. Because I'm saying something about people from America, saying they all share a negative quality by virtue of where they are geographically from.
Do we just make a list of slurs? Do we try and account for tone? Where is the line between heated debate and a flamewar? Or even an engaged discussion and a heated debate. Even here, you can get rate limited for just interacting too much. Conversations killed because people were conversing too much.
But that's how they defined a vehicle, that's where they drew the lines of the park.
I agree 100% with the spirit of your point and I think imagining a forced bet scenario can help to clarify things. There are three main concepts we want to interpret within the context of the phrasing of the rule: (1) the intended referrent of 'vehicle'; (2) the intended meaning of 'in' the park; (3) the actual intention of the rule regarding emergency vehicles.
This is the scenario: imagine you're forced to wager a nontrivial sum of money on the following bet. You have to write down how you interpreted (1), (2), and (3). Then we randomly pick a real park that has this exact rule phrased in this exact way (I'm hopeful there'll be at least one out there), find the person who wrote the rule, give them your written interpretation, and ask if they agree. You lose if they don't. Notice we're not asking them to also write down a longer interpretation and comparing word-for-word. Just whether they think you got the gist of it.
I would write down that 'vehicle' was intended to refer to motorized passenger vehicles, 'in' was intended to mean that the vehicles shouldn't be in/on water or land within park boundaries, and that the rule wasn't intended to restrict passage to emergency vehicles responding to emergency situations. I expect most people would write something similar if they had real money on the line.
The trouble with the horrible website is it's trying to prove that nebulosity makes content moderation difficult by forcing people to disagree, but this disagreement almost entirely pertains to a point that has nothing to do with nebulosity: the park rule would only ever be written within a wider legal framework and doesn't make sense in isolation.
If I take my answers to (1) and (2), I'm forced to conclude that the emergency vehicles were violating the rule within the ridiculously artificial scenario presented. However, I'm also confident that this rule would only have been written verbatim within a wider legal framework that provided exceptions for emergency vehicles.
Consider self-defence in the context of murder or manslaughter. In the UK at least, the first thing the court does is establish whether the defendant would fit the criteria for murder / manslaughter ignoring the self-defence aspect, because otherwise it's a moot point. Once this is done, they would then establish whether the defence of self-defence also applies, which would then negate the conviction. If you wanted to prove that law is complex because it's hard to define words, would you really make a website that says "Ignore everything else you know and suppose that murder is only defined as killing a person" and then think you're being really smart when people disagree on the scenario involving clear self-defence? Hopefully not, because they're really only disagreeing with being forced to invoke your artificially-restricted definition.
That said, the website demonstrates the real reason why online moderation is hard: because it disproportionately attracts the sorts of people who answered 'yes' to the ISS question in this quiz. So you often end up with lots of users sharing a reasonable consensus on what the rules mean being moderated by a tiny group of... we'll say 'non-representative' moderators. It's a common problem with any banal form of authority, and isn't specific to website moderation at all.
I think you would lose a lot of money. Bikes and skateboards alone are going to have tons of violations. Also, I feel like if i had to bet money, boats aren't going to be included unless specified in most but crucially not all circumstances.
1 reply →
The number at the end is unclear - it says I agreed with the majority 11%, but then it shows a bunch of charts. Yet the three I said were vehicles (the car, the police vehicle, and the ambulance) are the only 3 above 50% support, so it seems I agreed with the majority 100%. I even opened a second session in another browser and hit yes to everything to see if the numbers in the chart was the amount that agree with me, and no, the numbers didn't invert so it seems the chart is measuring yes answers.
Same, the only three I marked as violating the rule were the car, the police and the ambulance. And it told me I agreed with 11% but showed a bar chart showing that basically everyone agreed with me. It was confusing.
Also breaking a rule is fine for an emergency vehicle.
I also took away the opposite of what the author tried to convey.
But I also got a bad impression of their argumentative integrity because they tried to use a strawman to illustrate their point - only it backfired anyway.
An ill defined rule that lacks examples and definition is not a good way to prove people interpret a good faith attempt at rules differently.
And the longer explanation at the end simply dismisses the notion of giving any examples or even trying to give a clear rule by hand waving and basically saying a motivated person can find ambiguity in anything.
So because a rule or law can’t be defined to perfection without the slightest ambiguity then we should just have anarchy? I’m sorry for the bluntness but that’s asinine.
I also got 11%, but I only selected 3 answers that did _not_ violate the rule: The matchbox toy car, the ISS, (and something else).
2 replies →
Hah, I got 11% and I selected the car, the police, the ambulance and the tank. Does everyone just get 11% no matter what?
Edit: reading further, yes, everyone gets 11%.
1 reply →
I think it's giving you a percentage of people who answered exactly the same as you on all questions.
Edit: Okay I have no idea what it's meant to be (other than "11")
Am I crazy/dumb or is the chart super confusing? I really had to stare at it to figure out how to read it, and I'm still just guessing the vertical scale is percent of the whole that think each item is a car.
But also I got 11% here.
5 replies →
Maybe it is meta commentary on how broken automatic content filters are when applied to forum posts.
I too got 11% but stuck assiduously to powered vehicles on the ground of or launched from the park.
I did not include the tank.
I also got the exact same percentage saying 'yes' to everything.
I also got the exact same percentage saying 'no ' to everything.
27 * .11 ~= 3, fwiw
The problem is that I also got 11% just saying yes to everything. It would seem surprising to me to have the same percentage of maximalists as there is for people who are in the majority on every question
20 replies →
What, exactly, is the graph showing? % of people who said "Yes this is a vehicle in the park" or % of people who agree with you ? It's very difficult to tell as I said yes only to the car and the memorial...
Your first interpretation is correct. No one thinks a kite is a vehicle. Everyone thinks a private car is a vehicle. Everything else is in between.
If your answers were consistent with a consistent population, there would be a threshold above which all your bars turn red. Any churn in that consistency (my last six bars are a mixture of red and green) shows a deviation of some kind, but I don’t know how this accounts for when there is no overall consistency and everyone disagrees.
1 reply →
We are all the 11%
Did anyone not get 11?
You can get not-11% by choosing to skip before the end. IF you skip after 7 questions, it's "You agreed with the majority: 29%" — same whether I say yes to all or no to all.
So I don't think it's related to yours answers. It's just the weighted average of what people said for the set of questions you answered, or something like that. Not actually your score at all.
I got 11 when I did all the questions
18 when I stopped after just the first 7 questions
i got 29 percent but i stopped after 7 questions
The charts show your answer, and how popular is your answer, the bigger the more popular.
The "majority 11%" means that 1/9 of your answers were above 50% (as you can see it on the charts).
What it appears to be actually calculating is that 1/9 of items had majority consensus that they were against the rule. It doesn't appear to take your actual selection into consideration, only the amount of questions answered
1 reply →
I also got 11% and think that number may be a result of some kind of flawed calculation. The final chart distribution of each "vehicle" paints a much clearer picture.
Yeah, I don't get what the score means. Also saw 11%. Clearly the number means something other than what people think it means, which is maybe the real test.
I am also in the 11%, I don't think this it is accurate or I'm misunderstanding what the number actually represents.
I think that the 11% majority are the people that had the exact same answers as you for all questions.
I also got 11%. I suspect foul play..
1 reply →
I think that number is just bugged
It seems unlikely that we both agreed with 11%, yet that's what it says.
11% club checking in
We're all 11% on this blessed day.
I only selected one "yes" answer (the car), but still got 11%, so not sure what this may mean.
11% as well (all questions answered).
I answered yes to all of them and it said I was in the 11% majority as well.
Also 11%
The only one red in my chart is the car and I too got 11%.
Hey me too. Another 11 here.
To me, if I see a rule trying to ban "vehicles" without defining "vehicles", I take my concept of "vehicles" by deduction: I think about all the ways that things that I know of as being "vehicle-esque" could be problematic in various different ways such that you'd want to ban them — being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example); property damage (skateboards, dirt bikes) — and then I guess that the "spirit of the law" is to put whatever requirements in place would be required to reduce the instances of those problems.
The banning of certain explicit classes of vehicles is only a byproduct, not the end-goal, of such a rule; and so it doesn't actually matter what is or isn't a vehicle — the word "vehicle" in such a rule is acting as a conceptual stand-in for whatever things cause uniquely vehicle-in-the-park-ish problems; and anything that doesn't cause such problems, isn't "a vehicle."
I find that this lens on rule enforcement is a useful guide, because whatever the text of the law ends up saying, the enforcement of the law will hew to the spirit that the text of the rule is being interpreted to have, by those charged with its enforcement. (I.e., the non-working tank is almost certainly a "vehicle" by any definition a bylaw would pose, but if they deliver it to the park on a non-damaging sled, let it sit there for a while, then haul it away on the same sled, then it's not causing any of the problems that "vehicles" cause, and so it's very unlikely that any bylaw-enforcement officer would actually ticket the owner of the tank for having it in the park.)
The problem is that it won’t always be enforced that way.
For example: in the city of Melbourne, there are sometimes signs instructing cyclists to dismount (e.g. at railway level crossings), or that you aren’t permitted to cycle in such-and-such a place (e.g. railway platform). Their illustrations always depict an upright bicycle. I ride a recumbent tricycle, which the Road Safety Road Rules considers to be a bicycle. The reasons for dismounting simply don’t apply: my wheels won’t get caught in rails and I won’t fall over, and in fact dismounting will make matters worse. And the reasons for not cycling in most of the so-marked places are seriously diminished and heavily counterbalanced: I can easily and safely travel at pedestrian speed, and I will be far more of an obstruction on your thoroughfare if you require that I stand up and awkwardly push my vehicle along, steering only with difficulty (normally mostly by nudging one of the front wheels with one foot as I walk), taking up a lot more space and not going straight or at the same speed as others. Common sense says I should ignore such signs and assess each situation individually. But I tried applying common sense like this on a railway platform once and was severely threatened with a fine. Meanwhile, mobility scooters are really pretty similar to me in contextual characteristics (my vehicle interacts in such situations much more like one of them than like an upright bicycle), but they’re fine.
(Aside: in the state of Victoria, the road rules classify my vehicle as a bicycle; but in New Zealand, the road rules classify it and bicycles as cycles, and only mention bicycles in one section, about wearing helmets. No attention is drawn to the use of a different word, but it’s clear that tricyclists are genuinely not legally required to wear helmets—which does actually make some sense, as the majority of scenarios where a helmet is beneficial to a bicyclist either don’t apply, or apply vastly less often, to recumbent tricyclists.)
Sounds like the railway staff are indeed enforcing the spirit of the law by allowing mobility scooters on the platform. If I had to guess why your tricycle was not allowed it's because the staff perceive your tricycle as a potentially very fast moving obstacle on the platform which the mobility scooter obviously is not. They are probably more concerned about the safety of others than yourself when they apply that rule. In my opinion analysing the intent of rule is the right way to go about enforcement even if it means different people will arrive at different conclusions.
6 replies →
>Common sense says I should ignore such signs and assess each situation individually.
Does it? How is it different from Car A driving the speed limit and Car B driving 20 over because "I have a big SUV/racecar/motorcycle"?
Laws are normally made knowing there are situations where it will not always seem common sense, but if we follow your logic we would have hundred of thousands of rules, like a complete set for each type of car, bike, etc. I see it as common sense that of course the same rules apply to your tricycle, unless it is for a disabled person.
2 replies →
We recently had this problem in Sweden: There are parking spaces where "Caravans" or "Campers" are forbidden (because they either tend to stay there all day or sleep) - we have a VW T4, it is considered of class "car" in Germany. We still sleep in it. Are we allowed to stay on these parking spaces? We decided: No. Our interpretation was that overnight-stays are unwanted by the local population or government. But the sign wasn't clear. The pictures on these signs also showed no vans, just big campers.
1 reply →
I think you might have arrived at the Mischief rule of statutory interpretation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule).
This is seriously an amazing rule! Down the Wikipedia rabbit hole for now!
> being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example);
Well, there are many possible options, so this does not help unless you know which issue was bothering the rule-makers.
I know a park that allows horses but not bicycles.
It's interesting to think about the same sign and "vehicle" in different contexts could have different answers.
For example, the same sign in a school hallway leading to an enclosed play area for kindergartners would most certainly result in more violations.
But rules are a "contract" between two parties. The people who put up a sign are trying to fix a problem and they care about the intention behind the sign. But the visitors need to try to follow the rules, so they need to decide of the activity they were considering is allowed.
This ambiguity can cause issues. In a perfect world it doesn't exist. But in reality it usually does because you don't want to hire a lawyer to help you understand if the 30-page sign prevents you from bringing a toy boat into the park.
To put it more succinctly: the sign itself isn't the statute or bylaw! it's just a quick reminder.
Everyone is trying to interpret one line of text. But that line ks just a stand in for a much longer text that should answer all of the questions.
E.g. for emergency vehicles, there is certainly a statute somewhere that grants them exemption, if that is appropriate. We don't need to torture ourself wondering.
The sibling who mentioned his recombinant bicycle not fitting the intent of the bylaws should petition the relevant authority to update the text to clarify this detail. But that doesn't mean they're going to change the signs or graphics.
But this depends on "in what context am I being asked whether a rule is violated"? I didn't start out knowing I was doing content moderation for a website or I might've answered those differently.
[flagged]
Nitpick: The summary at the end labels your choices as "You think it is not a vehicle" or "You think it is a vehicle" based on whether or not you said the situation violates the rule, but some of the scenarios were clearly about whether or not something was in the park, rather than whether or not it was a vehicle. I can think a plane or a space station is a vehicle without thinking it violates the rule about not being in the park.
Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
That seems like good analogy to content moderation. You have to ask "is the forbidden content actually on the site?"
For example you can have a rule like "no sharing pornographic content", but then are people allowed to share links to forbidden content? Links to sites that are 100% links to forbidden content? Links to sites that have one link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? Links to sites that have one extremely prominent link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? How prominent? Etc etc etc.
That is a pretty clear distinction. A separate site has separate administration, can be blocked separately, etc. Otherwise you have additional rules: disallow direct links to forbidden content that causes it to render on the page, disallow linking to specific forbidden content, disallow links to on blacklisted domains, allow only whitelisted domain links.
1 reply →
This is why Reddit is banned in Indonesia; because there's a bit of porn. Now laypeople just use Twitter instead...
9 replies →
Given that the whole exercise was about meticulous line drawing I think this bit of nitpicking is entirely appropriate. Clearly “is a vehicle” and “is in the park” were the two major axes that each question needed to be plotted on.
Interestingly, some people added others that weren't explicit in the rule. For example, the person riding a skateboard was considered a violation by roughly twice as many people as the person carrying one, despite both being identical on the "is a vehicle" and "in the park" axes. I suppose unless someone's definition of vehicle depends on it being in use.
18 replies →
It is funny that you say so because for me the primary axis was about whether the rule was violated or not.
This is why some people (including myself) chose that an ambulance driven into a park wouldn't be a violation of the rule.
3 replies →
Similarly, the question asks "does it violate the rule" not "should the vehicle be allowed in the park". Of course driving an ambulance into the park violates the rule - but it's ok the break the rule for emergencies!
Which of course illustrates that in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply. Especially in content moderation.
The instructions explain that, so it shouldn't interfere with the decision making, but the thing that the instructions don't talk about is whether the park extends indefinitely into the sky. One need not even consider the legal aspect of this (airspace rights: historical versus modern) but merely consider what it means to be in the park! Personally, I think that if the vehicle is making contact with the ground then it's "in" the park, but if it's not making contact with the ground then it's "above" the park.
5 replies →
> in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply
I think it might be worse than that, there are sometimes rules which aren't actually rules which can still (sometimes!) override rules which are.
2 replies →
> Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
No actually I do think it does and is captured beautifully in the game. Things that clearly once vehicles are arguably no longer - like the war tank.
Like Michelangelo's David, is the nudity porn? is it obscene? for who? Is this a website about art? or a porn site? education site? a site for children?
Each one of those sites have differing views of the exact same thing.
Love this exercise.
It's exactly the point of the exercise. Whether something is a vehicle and whether said thing is "in" the park are both separate dimensions of logic that each individual applies differently towards their decision making. This is exactly why content moderation has trouble to stay consistent and rarely pleases everyone, because so many nuances from non-intersecting aspects of logic/context/culture/opinions are forced to consolidate into a binary choice (violation vs. non-violation).
No, you missed the point entirely. The question was whether the scenario is a violation but the answers were not labeled accordingly.
For an exercise that is, by it's own admission, pedantic by design that's a pretty glaring fault
3 replies →
Same - I used the simple "rule" that basically everything that's in the park and used to carry people or goods is a "vehicle" at least by some people's standard. But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
> But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
But you were specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction, and that's why this can happen. The 15 countries it flew over are members of the ICAO, which delegated some of their sovereignty to the common good of easy air travel. It could have easily worked out some other way; fly over our country without stopping for immigration, and we blow up your plane. (You can see this in action if you fly your plane from Canada to do a low approach over the White House. You probably won't be home for dinner.) Similarly, in the US, the FAA decides who can fly over your property and how low. These are not universal constraints on existence, just actual laws that people wrote down because nobody could agree on the details. I'd venture a guess that if you asked the average property owner if airplanes could fly over their property and stare at them in their hot tubs, they'd say "no". However, the law simply doesn't agree with them, and a satellite is photographing your underwear as we speak!
12 replies →
You can fly a plane across the globe but the plane's flight path must be approved by each of the 15 countries before it is allowed in their airspace.
The countries often ask for passenger lists and manifests before they allow your plane to do so and have, in the past forced planes to land to get to passengers or suspected passengers on the plane they have an interest in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
8 replies →
Funnily enough, by your wide standard, any footwear would also be considered a vehicle.
9 replies →
Even for no-fly zones, we don't say 'in' the place. We say in the zone. We're over the place, but in the zone.
Is an airplane in your park if you put a roof over it? Is an airplane in your house?
The plane question stated the plane was `over` the park which implies it is not in the park. If the question instead said `through` the park, the answer would differ.
12 replies →
Humans carry all kinds of goods and often carry people. Even if we limit "goods" to exclude our personal effects, someone carrying takeout across a park—especially for someone else—could be considered a vehicle by that definition.
Additionally strollers, wagons, and other baby or child conveyances would also qualify.
So that includes wheelchair?
35 replies →
Backpack? Dog? Dog with a backpack? Horse? Riding a horse?
I say none are vehicles but I could see how one might.
Let's say that in your opinion: (a) it's a vehicle, (b) it's in the park, (c) but the park authority doesn't have jurisdiction over the activity.
Is the correct resolution to deny (b)?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "in the park" represents within the analogy.
Seems like a very fair nitpick to me considering the semantic nature of the game in the first place!
Posting “racial epithets” is banned on social networks but if I post a video of a politician saying a racial epithet to raise awareness. Does that violate the rule? We aren’t debating whether or not it was a racial epithet.
I didn’t get that question.
I was thinking along these lines as well but after reading the explanation at the end of the game, I’m not so sure.
The rule is no vehicles in the park. I’ve also concluded that an ambulance or police responding to a call didn’t violate the rule but saw that a lot of people seemed to think it did. And it made me think.
The rules say to not apply any other rule but the stated one. And if you follow the rule to the letter, a police car in the park is a vehicle in the park , violates the rule. It’s dumb but it does.
Common sense says it shouldn’t but the rule says it does and the instructions say to only consider the rule with no nuance.
The instructions beforehand were very clear that you should answer whether the scenario violated the rule, not whether it should be allowed.
I suppose that's the beauty, intentional or not, of this exercise... Since the point was to highlight human behavior your response is still a valid, important datapoint despite you "failing" to complete the exercise according to the instructions.
Yeah it raises potential ontological issues about the words "vehicles", "in", "rule" and probably others.
They’ve updated the labels now I think. Unless there are some other labels I am not seeing.
The labels at the end now say:
> You think it is not a vehicle in the park
> You think it is a vehicle in the park
Ha, so they have
You aren't challenging your assumption of "in"
How far does the airspace extend?
If "in the park" is meant as an analogy for "on the platform" in content moderation, then curiously enough Twitter suspended @RealDonaldTrump for off-park action (Jan 6).
Nobody provided the definition of vehicle either. The summary references lawyers using a variation of this game, but most legalese I've seen as a layperson usually starts by defining terms.
Yes, defined terms are critical. As the exercise went on, I kept refining my mental model of what a “vehicle” was in the context of the park sign.
I eventually came up with a mental model that was something like “an artificially powered or mechanically advantaged means of conveyance or transport, especially one that creates negative externalities to other park goers inconsistent with typical use and enjoyment of public park space.” But that wasn’t absolute - the non-functional tank was, in my mind, quite obviously a vehicle, and so was prohibited. Someone at a higher pay grade is going to have to make an exception there. The skydiver - ehhh, it was a stretch to call him a vehicle, but by my heuristic he broke the sign’s rule.
5 replies →
I don't think it really matters. The point I guess was that an ambulance or police car is obviously a vehicle, and obviously in the park. And yet enforcing this seemingly simple and logical rule becomes so absurd that some people would decide that a police car is not a vehicle just because it should be allowed in.
2 replies →
No, I felt a bit "betrayed" by this as well but also probably the point of the exercise? I dunno. Obviously there is rhyme to reason as to why you're offered to skip after 7 questions. I'm not sure why, but somewhere after 10 I started to feel like I wanted to go back and re-answer.
Did this change? For me it says "You think it is (not) a vehicle in the park," which doesn't match with your description of your issue with the results.
The "pulled a wagon" one is another aspect. Is the answerer assuming a vehicle pulled the wagon? I immediately wondered if the wagon was pulled by hand or animal or a vehicle.
If I bring a box of chocolate cars into the park and eat them, that's a violation too, right?
(If Schrodinger brings a backpack into the park but doesn't know what's in it, is that a violation? Did you pack your own luggage today, sir/maam?)
This lead me to question about size. Clearly a traditional animal dragged sized one is a vehicle. But those small ones pulled by hand are not.
Same goes for things like kites and quadrocopters.
Wagons are vehicles in the strictest since.
3 replies →
What this highlights is that online we have lost - or at least eroded - social norms. If I see a sign that says "no vehicles allowed", it's obvious they don't mean wagons and strollers. In almost all cases the police and the public are 99% in sync. Online, though, the moderators are forced to do a careful study of every action and become asinine literalists lest a horde of boundary-pushers ruin it for everyone.
Social norms are quite culture-specific. Online people from all countries and cultures interact, and that's where some misunderstandings come from.
It's not a big problem if everyone is civil and existing moderation mechanisms aren't overwhelmed; people quickly learn from online faux pas and the online social norm is restored.
I think it goes even beyond that. Online you can get a lot more socioeconomic, age-related mixing than IRL. On some websites there is a large contingent of actual children/college students who have never worked or don't understand certain social norms due to inexperience. Or, if you live in a bubble of highly paid professionals like many on this site (honestly, including me), you can be completely shocked seeing how the working class people you see but don't actively converse with (beyond pleasantries) think.
Also, on pseudonymous sites, you may not even be able to know this at a glance. Sometimes on reddit I have been baffled at the replies I've received, until I realized it was coming from a child, or an older conservative person living on disability.
1 reply →
> Social norms are quite culture-specific.
This is an argument against migration then.
2 replies →
Are you sure? Legal systems have been arguing about the semantics of "obvious" rules for thousands of years.
But do they not also consider what a 'reasonable' person would do in a situation?
I think two questions have to be considered, then:
How would you phrase the question/game so that 100% of people all get the same answers as you?
How would you expect others to phrase the question, so that you'd 100% agree with their answers?
To me the issue is one of pragmatics: the instruction say "ignore your local law" but they don't say "ignore reality".
Taking the ambulance example: it would indeed break a literal interpretation of "no vehicles in the park" and would also fall under the instruction "ignore your local laws". The issue, however, is that 99% of all parks in the world would allow ambulances, and those that don't would have a specific clarification as to why (archeological site, dangerous, etc). At that point, if it didn't allow ambulances then it would almost certainly not be a park either.
If I wanted to get agreement I would specifically write "forget what you know about the human experience and pretend you're a cold robot with no feelings and no idea about social contracts".
I think what it highlights is that the meaning of words depends on context and stripping all context from a rule and situation makes that ambiguous. Reading more into it than that seems silly.
Thank you! Language, specifically legalese, tries to make precise something that can't ever be. It's why "language prescriptivists" annoy me because it's not even a preference difference it's simply impossible, you can't define any word completely. Worse even if you could your definition is only good for a point in time.
Even simple things like chairs, you can't write down a definition that includes everything that humans consider chairs and excludes everything humans don't consider chairs.
The majority of comments and people participating in a forum generally both have common sense and are good actors. It's the borderline cases that are difficult, and of course there are boundary pushers of all sorts persuasions. Some are right, some are bad actors.
two people are tried for the exact same crime, the lawyers used the same responses, questions, etc. all the discovery and testimonials are equal. The only thing different is the judge, jury, defendant, prosecutor, and defendants lawyer.
could one of these people be acquitted but the other not? Say if one committed the crime so did the other, ie everything being equal except personality and demeanor of key players.
not everything is black and white.
I think the police and ambulance examples are interesting. To me, they're clear and blatant violations of the rule. To be sure, I certainly think it's ok that they broke the rule, but they still broke the rule. Yet some (45% of respondents) clearly think the rule wouldn't apply to them in the first place?
The instructions for the exercise tell you straight up to ignore any and all exceptions, yet 30% of people chose to apply their own judgment in the police and ambulance case because it felt right to them. Very telling.
If you believe that the spirit of rules is more important than the text, then those people were obeying the spirit of the rule to not include exceptions, not the text.
4 replies →
I'm far more worried about the people who think a man should die because the sign must be obeyed at all costs.
It's telling that 70% would apply immoral guidance. "Just following orders."
1 reply →
One thing that makes this exercise fairly useless is that any real world law or rule would have exemptions for such circumstances, and a definition of “in the park” and what a vehicle is… not just one sentence with no clarification. Beyond that, also a history of previous legal interpretation to which one could refer.
I actually disagree. I assume every law is subject to "at the discretion of the DA/judge" (or whoever is in charge). Do you think everyone needs to account for every emergency circumstance possible in every law? In real life, there's the law and then there are mitigating circumstances.
(A few years ago I could have said "we don't get ticketed by an AI that only follows the rules it was given." Well, we do now in many places and that's a problem.)
2 replies →
This exercise is not about a court of law but any random online forum, for example the kind we are on right now. If you look up the HN participation guidelines you will find they are exactly as vague as the rule in the exercise and open to endless interpretation.
6 replies →
My reasoning was that in emergencies, typically, certain rules don't apply to certain groups of people if their actions are related to the emergency. Therefore, a police officer driving a police car into the park (assuming they're doing it because of the emergency) is not a violation of "no vehicles in the park" because for that officer, in that situation, there effectively is no such rule.
In the real world, we might debate whether it was actually an emergency and so on, but here we're told straight up.
I thought the instructions were pretty clear that it's a violation, even if e.g. your religion says it's okay.
1 reply →
The exception for emergency vehicles is just another rule. And even that rule can be more complex, like a police car could be not allowed to drive on railways. Or military rules that are above emergency vehicle exceptions. A police officer is not above the rules.
And in the given case we had none of them. It was just one simple rule - no vehicles inside the park.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
I don’t think there’s ever effectively “no such rule” but only “(expected) immunity from consequences of said rule” which is subtly different.
This is very jurisdictional dependent, and the exercise was pretty clear that you are not in any of those jurisdictions.
I agree with you, but also the first time I did it I started answering in a different way, before realizing I should change my interpretation.
I started answering by interpreting the choice as "is this allowed in the park", not "does this violate the rule".
I'm not sure if this page makes its point better or worse if you know what it's testing. It's interesting though how explicit you have to be if you want people to not add any additional context. But also, so much of the questions rely on context. So it feels like an unfair test, but it's hard to say exactly why.
I think a questionaire telling you to ignore all preconceived notions about a topic in a note and then ask fairly unspecific questions about that, will have a lot of people answer without ignoring their preconceived notions about that.
I'd assume the answers would be different if the questions was phrased differently, restating the assumptions and some of the consequences, e.g., that there might be exceptions, we just don't look at them yet.
It's about common sense.
Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
Uncle Jim Bob trying to drive his Buick around is what's obviously prohibited as that's the vehicle/driver most likely to cause harm...
> Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
By this logic, it’s ok for a police officer to drive through the park’s green on his way to work, with no emergency.
3 replies →
No vehicles in the park is a rule for the people that use the park. The emergency vehicles aren't 'using' the park so it doesn't apply to them.
> No vehicles in the park is a rule for the people that use the park
Says who? So I can park my car in the park and take the train so long as I don’t “use” the park? Or drive through it on my way to work?
1 reply →
I said no to every question as even in the cases where a vehicle did enter the park, it was only one and the rule says "no vehicles". Remember that the No Homers Club was allowed to have one Homer.
Now hold on, doesn't the person on skates have two vehicles?
An absolutely unarguable point. Well done.
You're overthinking this. To recap the rules of the game:
1. Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park."
2. Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Your job was to determine if rule 2 ("this rule") has been violated. By playing the game, you are fulfilling your job and thus the rule is never violated.
I also answered no to every question and got the "11%" statistic, matching the percentage that many other users here received.
I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is. In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed. This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.
I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.
I'm not sure if you do, honestly. The point of the exercise is exactly the ambiguity that stood out to you.
Also, the question was very explicitly not asking if an ambulance in the park is "okay." The question is asking is it a rule violation.
It's an excellent analogy, in my opinion, because what it's trying to be analogous to is the general ambiguity of language that makes content moderation difficult. It's hardly even an analogy because it is about precisely an identical concept: determining whether behavior is violating a rule.
That makes a ton of sense. I was always confused by that. Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone. Those comments were always greenlit. Maybe I just take stuff to literal. But some people sure have a hard-on for the death penalty...
23 replies →
I think what's being noted is slightly more nuanced than what you're responding to. The analogy is slightly flawed because a few additional indicators remove a lot of the ambiguity, which is possibly not the case at all with moderation, which is often about far more nebulous things. In that way, the comparison is flawed.
Asa an example, I'm seeing most people (based on people saying they match the majority at 11%, but there's some indication that may be broken) that chose to go with the common understanding of what the sign meant (as opposed to some literal definition they decided to follow) seemed to have an inherent idea of how we might better define "vehicle" to match those expectations (such as whether the conveyance provides power itself or whether it requires power from a person, or whether it houses a person, or whether it is assisting normal motion in some manner).
Also, without further analysis of the data it's hard to tell whether removing or redefining slightly a few questions might bring a core consensus far above 11%. And even if we can get this specific question to a good consensus, there's no real proof that it indicates that content moderation could similarly come to a consensus on specific concepts (I doubt it could for many important things).
In those ways, this is a clever and interesting experiment to take part in, but I'm not sure how much it really says about content moderation, as I think (as perhaps the GP thinks) it was made slightly too simplistic in an effort to be approachable, and in that case lost some of the aspects it was trying to convey.
I mostly thought it was easy to tell if the rule was being violated (the vast majority disagreed with me), but where it gets much more complicated is deciding if a rule should be allowed to be violated. I think most people don't want rules that are blindly enforced without consideration to circumstance/context. We carve out exceptions to rules everywhere in life.
I do get the point, I'm saying that the analogy was bad. The point could have been made better.
5 replies →
It seems pretty spot on to me! A "vehicle", like "hate speech" or "words that glorify violence", is an category that humans create, and the things that fit in that category vary from person to person and situation to situation.
I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?
think the fundamental difference is that “vehicle” can be broken down into a number of concrete subcategories that cover the vast majority of vehicles that people use in practice, while “hate speech” and “speech glorifying violence” are often very nebulous and hard to define.
It's true that “vehicle” can be vague, but it's also true that in many contexts it's well-defined. The very common ”no entry for vehicular traffic” road sign applies to bikes and mopeds and cars, but not pedestrians, wheelchair users and roller skaters, for example.
Similarly, you can operationalize the “no vehicles allowed in the park” rule by enumerating the different types of vehicles people might wish to drive in the park:
etc. The point isn't whether you agree with all these decisions (maybe skateboards shouldn't be allowed in the park?), but rather that you can enumerate two or three dozen vehicles and cover virtually all the vehicles people might possibly use in real life. Occasionally new categories need to be added (e.g., electric bikes or drones weren't really common 30 years ago) but mostly this can settle all possible debates.
And yes, it's still possible for some weirdo to build a supercharged wheelchair that can go 80 kph, but that's the extreme exception, and if the guy keeps driving through the park at 80 kph repeatedly eventually he will get arrested and then he will claim he is in the right because he's driving what's technically a wheelchair, and then a judge will rule that a wheelchair that can go 80 kph isn't actually a wheelchair in the sense intended by the law, and the rules will be updated to say “powered wheelchairs with a maximum speed of 15 kph” and that's the end of that.
The problem with “hate speech” and “glorifying violence” is exactly that they are very hard to nail down in an objective and clear way, and the majority of cases where someone is banned for “hate speech” involves vague and subjective judgement.
For a concrete example, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter on the grounds of inciting violence by tweeting “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” There is some really creative reading going on in here. How would you substantiate the rule against inciting violence in a way that it clearly covers this statement? People aren't allowed to announce that they won't be attending some event? That seems overly broad. Sitting presidents aren't allowed to announce they won't attend their successor's inauguration? This feels like it's overly specific, covering only this one event.
So that's the fundamental difference here. “No entrance for vehicles” is a rule that can be operationalized by enumerating and defining the kind of vehicles that people might think of using to enter the park. While “hate speech” defies objective definition.
5 replies →
> I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is.
Exactly. I being a non-native English speaker, just to be sure, looked up in a dictionary: the most common German translation of "vehicle" is "Fahrzeug".
Of course, as it is quite common, there do exist laws in Germany
> https://gesetze.io/definitionen/fahrzeug-f9r8
what is a "Fahrzeug" and what is not, and also a German Wikipedia article that goes quite deeply into this topic:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrzeug
Just to bring up a linguistic point (it is far more common in German than in English to carefully analyze words if subtle parts of the meaning are to be cleared up): actually, one could argue (contrary to the Wikipedia article) that "Fahrzeug" comes from "fahren" (to drive); thus a "Flugzeug" (airplane) is not a Fahrzeug, because it flies (Flug -> flight) instead of driving (but as mentioned: the Wikipedia article states a different opinion: Flugzeuge are Luftfahrzeuge, while, say, cars are Landfahrzeuge, i.e. both vehicles belong to sub-categories of Fahrzeuge).
---
But back to the topic: as a non-native English speaker
- all my arguments are based on the most common German translation "Fahrzeug" of "vehicle". What if some subtleties are lost in this translation?
- I doubt that the typical English native speaker tends to think as deeply about words as is not unusual in Germany (when I did analyses of English words to native English speakers they nearly always admitted that they never ever thought of such analyses)
The crux of this really is about whether the ambulance is violating the rule "no fahrzeug in the park".
Personally, I feel it's unamigious that the ambulance is violating the rule as written. Whether it should be granted an exception to the rule is a different question. Such is the difficulties of content moderation.
It's also apparent to me how a rule enforcer sufficiently distant from the scenarios would declare that the space station violates the "no vehicles in the park" rule, no matter how ridiculous that sounds.
Yeah, he needs a better example. Vehicle has some ambiguity when you hint about it in the introduction, but not much. If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere. But then I don't know how people would get into the park.
And separately, a lot of the ambiguity in content moderation comes from people trying to frame what they don't agree with as something that's against the rules. If a vocal group doesn't like ice skaters, you can be sure they'll be giving detailed explanation why skates are a literal vehicle.
> If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere.
Perhaps as a non-native speaker I miss some linguistic subtlety, but does not "mode of transportation" mean "thing to (help) bring person from A to B"? Thus whether skating is a mode of transportation (or not) should be rather clear.
In this sense it should not matter whether the transportation is recreational or not, i.e. you can also recreationally drive a car or recreationally go by train.
2 replies →
Or even something along the lines of "Susan said x."
A vehicle is any kind of tool that makes locomotion for any animate or inanimate object easier. This includes wheeled craft, seafaring vessels, shoes, aircraft.
The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.
What if it makes locomotion harder? IS a snowmobiel is a vehicle in the summer? A motorbike without fuel?
1 reply →
You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles," they are usually things like "no hateful language," which is so vague, that "no vehicles" is beginning to look pretty cut-and-dry by comparison
> You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles,"
my complaint - that "no vehicles" isn't a great analogy - is because it's not vague enough. I didn't state that outright, you just assumed something different.
Is it? It seems there's a clear majority that vehicle = operational motor vehicle. The only two that are even close to 50/50nare the non functioning memorial tank, and the bicycle. I guess that shows a disagreement between those assuming functioning is a requirement, and those reading into the intent (which is devices operating at human scale in pedestrian spaces capable of achieving a speed that would cause injury). But neither of those interpretations are surprising
1 reply →
> "no hateful language," which is so vague,
You don't have to have silly rules like that, though.
2 replies →
I don't think you do get the point - the point is that unless you define every single word in a rule (like how legislation has a definitions page), it's very hard to do simple content moderation in a way that everyone agrees
This is silly, though? Rules and legislation is also usually layered in such a way that other rules can supercede.
Such that, if your model of how rules and regulations work is that they are all active at all times.... I have really bad news for you. For fun, consider that there is still the 18th amendment to the US constitution. There is just also now the 21st amendment to go with it. And at no point did we have to redefine words for that trick.
If everyone agrees you wouldn't have to do content moderation, it's not a meaningful point of consideration.
I do get the point, I'm saying that the analogy was bad.
8 replies →
Do content moderation rules define "violence" or "harassment"?
> often to be about being motorized or speed.
This more precise definition would include the toy car, quadcopter, ISS, and airplane, all of which fewer than 20% of respondents believe are vehicles.
> It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed.
It doesn't actually. It asks if a particular rule has been violated, not whether the violation is or should be acceptable (and it makes that distinction very explicitly even!).
The objections you have to the exercise don't actually seem that well founded, and the analogy appears even better due to the nature of your objections.
Did you get through the game to the end text? This is specifically addressed.
Yes. I stand by what I said.
> the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
They're often ambiguous though. Lime bikes and motorized skateboards have been a recent edge conditions in vehicle laws that have needed to be specifically addressed.
But, yes, normally laws will actually define their terms.
Since the "legislature" in this example did a really lousy job of definitions, I only counted the one car as violating the rules.
>In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed.
I think that's a further example of ambiguity.
A park that had a rule in the 1990s saying "No motorized vehicles" probably wouldn't have wanted to prohibit electric bikes or electric mobility scooters, but such a rule would do that.
So is a dissolving pill capsule, which is a vehicle for delivering medicine, allowed in the park?!
I get what the author hopes to do, but it’s really a bad go at it.
Although perhaps that’s because arguing a losing position is hard.
> I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.
You really do not.
I really do.
I used a dictionary to define vehicle. The definition does not match yours.
> This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
I disagree, lawyers would have no work then. Laws are not as specific as you would think they are and it is to provide a diverse gamut of powers and broad discretion in their application.
For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
There is plenty evidence of people exercising free speech such as wearing cuss words on shirts and their speech being stifled by police through intimidation and arrests. Most famously Cohen v California and for example more recently Wood v Eubanks (25 F. 4th 414 - Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit 2022) with very similar facts to Cohen v California.
Here is another one "Battery is an unlawful application of force directly or indirectly upon another person or their personal belongings, causing bodily injury or offensive contact." I go onto the bus and my shoulder hits the shoulder of another passenger. I did not have consent to touch them and they are upset by the contact / found it offensive. Am I guilty of battery?
In the test "No vehicle sin the park" there is no ambiguity that an ambulance is a vehicle, but clearly 1/3 of people don't think it breaks the rule, presumably largely because it's for an emergency purpose despite the rule not having an exemption for such a scenario. Neither would a rule that says "no hate speech". What is hate speech? Would speech stating "I hate..." Nazi's or a genocidal leader or regime be hate speech? So what are the exemptions, what are the discretions? How do we define things?
What about support for LGTBQIA+? Some countries only recently have become more amenable to these groups, but plenty of jurisdictions and cultures are still very much opposed to them. Is homophobia hate speech? What is transphobic speech? Is stating there are only two genders transphobic?
The same could be said about support for Ukraine which is positive in the Western world but would be illegal in Russia. But then, what about Taiwan and it's disputed status with respect to China? What about other contested borders and lands?
The fact that even when there is no ambiguity people don't entirely agree whether a simple rule is broken is entirely the point of the exercise. And now, you expect platforms and countries to exercise those rules and laws when evidently people can't even agree on a simple rule.
> For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
By the way, there's no "hate speech" exception in U.S. first amendment jurisprudence.
This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising.
If this included a definition of a vehicle, and asked if a vehicle was in the park, I'd expect consistent answers outside of the oddball aircraft and space station questions.
I'd note my local park has such a rule, and the sign has pictures of what are and are not allowed, including a picture of a drone.
> This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising.
Here's a common example from real life: "No pornography". Even SCOTUS famously couldn't define obscenity ("I know it when I see it")
Is “No pornography” a rule? It doesn’t specify any prohibited action and on its own isn’t a complete thought, let alone a rule.
“I know it when I see it” was in reference to _hardcore pornography_, not obscenity. The Miller Test deals with obscenity perfectly well.
1 reply →
It’s a legitimate definition though. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are many fundamental things that can’t be defined, where we have to rely on social norms and common sense.
>I'd note my local park has such a rule, and the sign has pictures of what are and are not allowed, including a picture of a drone.
What happens if the sign in your park was made in 1995, when drones, electric scooters, and electric bikes didn't exist or were not commonly used?
It's not possible to list every possible vehicle in existence, and to keep such a list updated. There are all sorts of weird things like electric unicycles, that most people haven't come across.
What happens is they have to update a sign every couple of decades.
1 reply →
That is exactly the point - who defines racism? sexism? Moderators are going to disagree because of how nebulous those terms are
The world isn’t black and white.
It’s typically shades of gray and requires judgement, discretion.
And consequences of breaking a rule or law require even more judgement.
The world isn’t a “smart”contract.
1 reply →
Vehicle is a word with a dictionary definition -- why does it need to have a definition included? Would that definition not include other words, would those also need to be defined?
No pill capsules in the park then? aren’t they a vehicle for delivering medicine?
1 reply →
That's not how the law typically works. Laws provide their own definitions because dictionaries describe how the language is typically used, not in a precise manner.
Perfect illustration of how tricky it can be to draw a firm line. Another survey in this same genre is "the rape spectrum" with >5k respondents ranking scenarios: https://aella.substack.com/p/the-rape-spectrum-survey-result... Tough topics to discuss (I see why the OP went with vehicles in the park). I'm glad I'm not in the content moderation business!
Yeah. Sometimes I see private Facebook groups by otherwise smart people, where one rule is something like "racism of any kind is forbidden". As if the addition of "of any kind" made the concept of racism any less vague.
I think that it might make expectations about moderators' interpretations less vague.
That still seems as if it adds some useful information. It's informing people ahead of time that moderators will probably not interpret "racism" in the narrowest possible sense, or likely even in a medium grey-area sense, but rather in a broad sense.
it means that you're also not allowed to say that Formula 1 is better than MotoGP, or that you like Usain Bolt over Valentino Rossi.
Fascinating exercise. During my first attempt I found that I had to look up the actual definition of vehicle.
I initially thought that a vehicle means someone is being transported by the vehicle, using an engine.
According to wikipedia vehicle also includes things being moved by muscle, and it is not limited to transporting persons, also wares.
I also changed my mind on whether a police or EMT falls under the rule. It obviously does. There has to be a second rule overriding this rule for those cases.
Also I changed my mind on the paraglider and the ISS. The ISS is a vehicle but it's over the park not in the park. The paraglider is a vehicle under my new understanding of the definition, and it does not matter whether the initial thrust came from when the paraglider was outside the park.
It also explains why the rules in the park near me prohibit _driving_ a bike in the park, not having one.
The legal definition of a vehicle can become relevant in some surprising ways under drunk driving laws. Most people assume that drunk driving laws are limited to driving an automobile, but in most states it simply refers to vehicles. Consequently, every now and again you get a story of someone being convicted of drunk driving when they have been bicycling while drunk. You can also be convicted of drunk driving for riding a horse while drunk (and people have been).
Does the legal definition include a sled going down a hill? If sleds, then skis aren't much of a stretch. And if skis, then shoes aren't much of a stretch.
When I was reading the dictionary definition, I got the sense that gravity isn't eligible as the motive force, and instead it would need to be someone exerting themselves (like pulling a wagon) or using stored energy (like an automobile). But sliding down a hill by gravity is indeed using stored energy, so I'd think that counts!
My reasoning was: Yes, an EMT violates the rule, but in an emergency rules don't necessarily apply anymore.
If the park is in my neck of the woods, I can just use this definition:
"vehicle" means a device in, on or by which a person or thing is or may be transported or drawn on a highway, but does not include a device designed to be moved by human power, a device used exclusively on stationary rails or tracks, mobile equipment, a motor assisted cycle or a regulated motorized personal mobility device
[BC Motor Vehicle Act, 1 Definitions]
https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/stat...
The words written on some sign on a road or park are not meant to be freely defined by whoever happens to be reading the sign.
That definition looks like it only applies to highways, whereas this exercise is much broader.
In a legal context "highway" has a broader meaning than in everyday use. From the link above: highway "includes every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles"
1 reply →
Did you look up the definition of "highway", or are you substituting your own? It's in there.
2 replies →
Translation: his parents are lawyers, so he has a low opinion of the rule of law and wants to "problematize" it. In favor of arguing for, essentially, despotism.
But his own experiment shows that most people do agree on what even a deliberately poorly worded rule means in most cases. So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.
The "game" (I use the word loosely) gets quite silly. The space station passing overhead is not "problematic" for a rule about vehicles in the park, except for someone deliberately trying to be obtuse. Like with the rest of this other nonsense, if it ever did become problematic, someone could change the rule to clear it up. The end.
> So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.
I did not interpret the creator's point to be that rules are unworkable, so much as that rules alone are insufficient. ie, that even the simplest of rules need to be augmented by human judgment.
But rules are still an important ingredient, as they and judgment complement one another.
All the discussions over interpretation are missing the point of the exercise, which is to show how hard it is to find agreement over something as emotionally neutral as "is the vehicle in the park".
Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".
I am kind of floored at how badly all the top comments have missed the point, considering how clearly the point was made by the author.
It has basically nothing to do with your interpretation, or how "good" you are at understanding the literal or intended meaning of the sign. The point is about how hard it is for all of us to agree on these matters.
Except the top comments aren’t doing that. They’re all saying it’s a flawed contrived example and despite that the actual results show most people agree. And not only that, the questions get ranked by decreasing agreement which shows that it’s pretty easy to make a cut off if put up to vote.
Are bitcoins allowed in the park or beanie babies since people consider them investment vehicles? Are pill capsules allowed in the park as they are vehicles for medicine? Are brains allowed in the park because they are vehicles for consciousness?
All the example shows is that rules need definitions or they need juries. And why is subjectivity even bad? It’s impossible to do anything without some degree of it. It’s also impossible not to have rules, like there are hundreds of unstated ones going on all the time and no one including the author is objecting to them. They aren’t objecting to the rule against DNS attacks or a thousand other examples.
We agree that it is flawed and it is obviously contrived, because the difficult decisions happen at scale and in edge cases. This is content moderation on easy mode; difficult stuff happens at scale and in the greyest of areas and have to be applied consistently.
This is fun! I propose a few more scenarios:
Rules, if taken as written, are never clear.
Try to define "furniture". You may say "Something to sit on". But what about a table. Ok, something to keep things on. But then is a soap dish furniture?
Furniture is a concept. It has fuzzy boundaries of meaning. And the meaning is only ever clear in context. And context is not just what is said alongside the concept. It is also the exchange itself in a particular situation.
When 14 years olds play ball in a "garden" area of a park, it's clearly disruptive. It can hurt someone, destroy the foliage etc. But when you play ball with a couple of 4 year olds in a garden, no one will suggest you stop. It is understood that a 4 year old in a play area with teenagers is at risk of being harmed, and so better to keep them in the garden area.
Rules, and the standardization of some of them into a system of law is problematic only if taken literally. As long as the what is written is understood to be a scaffold for actual meaning derivation from context there is no problem. This is the reason why judges, juries and courts exist - to interpret the law. And in the absence of formalization or systematization, common law applies. And at a very simplified level, common law is mostly common sense. Common as in shared among many. Common sense as in the sense and meaning shared among most of us implicitly.
I’m honestly not sure what the point of the exercise is. I went through and answered honestly, and looking at the end results it seems that most people agreed with me (the only significant minority disagreements were about the bike and the tank). Overall, it looks like almost all of the cases have a clear opinion?
I expected it to get into difficult edge cases, like somebody riding a motorcycle or landing a plane, but it never went there. A plane flying overhead doesn’t constitute “in the park”, and it looks like almost everybody agrees on that point.
Count the number of times you have used the words “most”, “almost”, “only disagreements…” etc. in your two paragraphs, despite the fact that all of them were relatively simple scenarios like you said. That is the point of the exercise. Yes people mostly agreed on most things, but they did not absolutely agree on everything. And those 20-30% of people arguing about 20-30% of edge cases is where all the disagreements and flame wars and toxicity comes from.
I mean, this is an online poll. There are always going to be people who argue, "technically, shoes should be considered a vehicle!". But when it comes down to it, those same people aren't going to make content moderating decisions based on those philosophical arguments. These examples fall sorta flat for me because they don't present an actual difficulty with moderation, just an imaginary one to get people arguing over semantics. Such arguments should be ignored.
1 reply →
The thing that really proved this game's point for me is the comments here from people giving slightly different versions of "well it's obvious what 'vehicle' means".
It’s weird that I barely see any comments like that. most people seem to be simply saying the game is silly because it’s so contrived and gives no definition of vehicle.
Lawyer here.
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. I teach legal research and I do some open discussions in the beginning and (no judgment of course) someone ALWAYS brings up "if they wrote the laws clearer..."
nope. nope nope nope. This is not how it works.
You seriously don't think some clarity could have helped? Like, if the law explicitly said strollers are okay and that bicycles are [not] okay, you think the quiz wouldn't have more consistent answers?
Or maybe the rule was only supposed to be for things with motors/engines and after clarifying instantly 2/3 of the questions are an easy objective "allowed".
You can't fix subjectivity, but you can reduce it, and this quiz is based on super low hanging fruit.
> if the law explicitly said strollers are okay and that bicycles are [not] okay
The quizz would have asked questions about the new edge-cases (created by the additional examples).
1 reply →
Oh, in this case, sure -- but I think it's a great teaching tool in getting people to understand the difficulty in other cases, and perhaps more importantly, understanding that these things are not solvable and that the essence of the very purpose of law is to have a method to get through these "not fully solvable" things.
I'm not sure what your point is. The laws can't be written clearer? Even if they were, you'd still get stuff that's ambiguous? As a lawyer you don't write the law so you have to go with what's written? You like interpreting vaguely written rules?
It's just how language works. Language is inherently ambiguous in the strictest sense. It's why at times you need to use more and more words to convey a clear message to someone, but in some sense, it's a never ending rabbit hole. Most of the time though, you don't need to be super precise in order to get a general message across to someone. Just something good enough.
It's why, as some other people noted, you sometimes can't tell anyone anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
2 replies →
Not that it's impossible to improve things, but people (frequently techies) believe the problem to be solvable and relatedly think it's easier than it actually is.
Just because "some people" believe something doesn't mean you have to make a webapp "debunking" them, and just because law is often complicated with many edge cases doesn't mean it can't be simpler or partly automated.
Everyone here implicitly knows that natural languages have ambiguity this is why formal languages were invented and it's painful that governing bodies hasn't caught up in many places. Imagine a world where you could diff laws from federal to state, state to state, stateA.city to stateB.city or StateA.cityA to StateA.cityB. or a log where you could see exactly when a law was changed and why.
Jim backs his RV into the park. He does so without his vehicle entering the park.
Pam comes to the park and begins to live in Jim's RV.
Bob, an alien, lands his spaceship in the park and initiates first contact.
Tim, a pipercub pilot, lands his plane in the park after suffering an engine failure.
Sam rides the subway home underneath the park.
Jordan, a maintenance worker, repairs a broken light in the park from his cherrypicker.
Robert, Jordan's boss, alleges he broke the rule. Another light needs to be replaced, so Robert fixes it, but ensures the cherrypicker's wheels are outside the park.
Tom, a tow truck driver, tows Tamika's car.
Bill emails a complete 3d cad model of a car, which happens to use a fiber line running under the park.
>Jim backs his RV into the park. He does so without his vehicle entering the park.
He backs his RV into the park? That means his RV enters the park, right? What does the V stand for in RV?
They’d probably meant a trailer.
At the time of my completing the quiz, 21% said riding a skateboard in the park violated the rule. But only 13% said carrying a skateboard violated the rule.
I'm puzzled by that. Does a vehicle stop being a vehicle when it's not vehicularizing? It'd get it if it were, "Jane carries a food tray" versus "Joe rides a food tray down the hill." But here the skateboard's purpose is to be ridden.
So the point is that content moderators will inevitably encounter ambiguous situations where they must use context to make a judgment call? And that no matter what call they make, there will be some people who believe it is the wrong one? Are those contentious points? Seems fairly obvious to me that would be the case in content moderation as well as many areas, notably law, which he mentioned.
I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, although I find the method kind of confusing.
There's a community I recently watched spring up on Reddit with the entire goal being to have a space to discuss Utah without every second comment being "Fuck Mormons". It grew pretty quick within the first day, but then the creator and community had a couple discussions on the best way to describe and enforce that rule. No discussion of Mormonism at all? No positive or negative sentiment towards the religion, but you can mention it in passing? It's certainly not an easy problem.
"You agreed with the majority. 18%. <Confusing insufficiently explained chart.>"
That could have been presented better. Is it trying to tell me the majority of people are "wrong"?
I don't see this as a good way to get the point across. I perceived it like this:
1. This is a game, here are the rules, remember, it's not about intent, as in "should this vehicle be allowed?", it's strictly about the rules, i.e. "is it a vehicle" && "is it in the park?".
2. Look at how difficult content moderation is, people said the ambulance should not be allowed in the park!
While I agree that content moderation is difficult, prefacing it with a rigged game that primes people to make bad judgements is not a good argument.
(Personally, I would like every rule to come with the justifications/reasoning behind it, so I could make the decision to break it more easily, e.g. if wilderness areas had the rules "No mechanized or motorized equipment shall be used" annotated with "It's about the noise" then an electric wheelchair would be fine, but not a loud drone etc.)
There is two levels of moderation in my mind. The first is to logical/ mathematically determine if the rule is broken, with goal of amoraly just answer if the rule is broken (binary). The second step is to determine the degree of rigidity/flexibility.
So by my logic the rule is broken when the ambulance drives into the park, but the leeway of the moderator to allow this should be apparent.
The way this thought experiment is framed, it seemed that you where supposed to only determine if the rule was broken. I think a more realistic way of framing the problem for a moderator would be something like: As security guard in a park, given this rule, would you allow ...
If the game was framed in this way I'm guessing the agreement would go way up.
It explains what a Matchbox car is for the approximately zero people who don't know, but it doesn't explain a travois.
This seems to be an exercise in signage while simultaneously ignoring common sense...
There was one question about some sort of thing that was pulled that started with the letter T. I had no idea what that was. But then later it goes into detail defining what a Matchbox car is. I thought that was odd. Was the assumption that everyone would know what the T- thing is, but not a Matchbox car, part of the test?
Also, many people said the International Space Station was a vehicle in the park. I find that suspicious and question if people were choosing random or opposite or spurious answers just to pull the levers. I would like to hear from people who do believe the ISS is a vehicle in the park. What is your justification?
"travois". It's basically a sledge dragged along the ground and pulled by (usually) a horse.
I think "travois" is something you either know or you know you're going to have to look it up, so there's no risk of confusion. "Matchbox car" seems like something someone might not know, but just think "oh, a car, I know what a car is" without realizing it's a toy.
That said, I also felt like the description didn't explain it well enough. There are electric toy cars that kids actually ride in and drive around. The thing about a matchbox car is that it's the size of a matchbox.
Ah, I made a guess that a travois was either one of those bicycle taxis or one of the two wheel carts that a person pulls.
>I hope that this game has made you reconsider your views on content moderation.
why would this game even make me think of content moderation? When you brought it up yourself I felt suckered, realizing I'd been sucked into a poorly thought out yet somewhat politicized "bias test" masquerading as a "survey".
It was all about, does the rule intend to apply to thus-and-such. Clearly the intent matters; the rule is made by a park ranger, not by god.
So emergency vehicles, toys etc are only an issue to a rule-lawyer. Not to normal people.
I thought the same - the surprising thing to me is that most people disagree apparently; my match was 11% with the majority.
In my mind the rule would obviously have related list of reasonable exceptions filed away somewhere; the simplicity of the rule is to improve the effectiveness of preventing the common case violation of regular people driving their cars through the park, causing damage and impacting the people using the park for its intended purpose.
In my opinion almost all of the examples provided were either obviously not applicable or were perfectly reasonable exceptions (and I don't think exceptions violate a rule).
Biggest takeaway here for me was that a rule needs definitions for everything, including things which don’t even seem to be part of the rule. To complete this, I was forced to define the vertical extent of a piece of real estate (the boundary between the park and this country‘s airspace), to define a vehicle, versus something you wear or a toy. By the end, I had actually established a kind of caselaw, which defined that a vehicle is a thing that people or cargo can be on top of or inside for the purposes of transport. I defined that something you put on is not a vehicle and defined that there was some upper bound of the park above, which he would not be said to be “in“ it. I defined that the dragging frame was a vehicle, but an identical frame that was not designed to transport. Things would’ve been classified as not a vehicle. Arguably all of the above are just my conjecture. But I could not decide most of those questions without, at least internally, making all of those judgment calls. Each judgment call introduces even more edges, which could be tested by further questions.
I did not consider for a moment whether the emergency situations should have exceptions made. I feel this is at the wrong place to do so. It’s a separate question to me to ask if it’s OK to break rules during emergencies. I really appreciated the creator’s point, which is to contradict the widely held belief among some people that regardless of opinion, there can be one and only one factual determination. It all depends on a dependency chain of definitions, even before you get into the questions like when it is ok to break the rules.
I don’t find this particularly funny or enlightening. Making rules has always been hard, and I don’t see the author propose a solution to the problem that some people post weird shit on public feeds that we don’t want our young kids to witness. Kids are always online now - even if you think you have parental controls figured out, someone at school will have an uncensored phone and they‘ll all watch all the weird stuff during breaks.
Fascinating thought experiment! For a version two, I would love to see:
• more ambiguous examples (instead of “there are 27 examples, you only need to answer 7”, I would instead just offer 7 examples and on 7th say “stop now, or keep answering?”, then do the same “stop or keep going” prompt after 27 for the extra examples)
• three answer options: “yes, it’s a violation”, “no, it’s not a violation”, and “it is a violation but it should be exempt / permitted / not prosecuted”
• perhaps this third answer could also have a text box to enter your own epicycle / rule addition. The next time that person answers “yes but exempt”, they can select their previous epicycle as the explanation this time as well, or add a new one. Coalescing each user’s epicycles into a coherent set of “common sense exceptions” might be tedious, though
The third answer option, and the reveal that what you thought were obvious exceptions are not statistically agreed to be obvious exceptions, helps a ton with making the point about content moderation more, well, pointed. Adding epicycle text boxes takes it in a bit of a different direction, highlighting the complicated nebulosity hiding beneath simple rules.
As a metaphor for content moderation, there’s a clear bias to the examples, which I don’t object to per se, but there’s also a fairly large blind spot in the way the bias is presented.
Depending on interpretation, all or nearly all of the examples fall into these categories:
- Subjective categorization of restricted content, good intent
- Subjective interpretation of scope, neutral intent
- Clear intent to flout rule if subjective interpretations apply
What isn’t present in any of the examples is a case where the rule is clear but breaking the rule is intended and masked. That’s where a lot of content moderation struggles, and (because?) it’s where a lot of malicious and abusive users concentrate, and intentionally create ambiguities where there wouldn’t be any without such malicious intent.
And knowing that doesn’t make content moderation any clearer, probably the opposite, but it’s worth recognizing that that’s the point. A few clever jerks can convince well meaning people to reinforce or excuse their abuse, and can convince well meaning moderators that obvious dog whistles are hard to interpret, and then they turn rules over on themselves without any recourse.
The whole problem hinges on everyone who wants to use the park having to share the park as is. But that doesn't have to be the case with content moderation -- everyone could choose what rules and rule intent they want to subscribe to, if the content delivery was built that way. Hacker news has a very simple version of that: "show dead".
"vehicle:"
* means of carrying or transporting something (planes, trains, and other vehicles) such as a) motor vehicle or b) a piece of mechanized equipment - Websters Online Dictionary
* 1) any means in or by which someone travels or something is carried or conveyed; a means of conveyance or transport: a motor vehicle; space vehicles. 2) conveyance moving on wheels, runners, tracks, or the like, as a cart, sled, automobile, or tractor. - dictionary.com
* a machine, usually with wheels and an engine, used for transporting people or goods, especially on land - Cambridge Dictionary
Any of these definitions could have been applied successfully to the series of questions on the website without ambiguity (edit: without ambiguity, but each would have led to different sets of conclusions). Which is to say, the entire point of the excercise reduces down to finding out which definition of the word someone is working from. This is only a problem if we're dealing with something that can't be defined, or something that we refuse to define.
Such as "No hate speech".
As it’s enforced today, that would be relatively easy to define, but I don’t think anyone wants to actually say out loud what that definition would be.
Let's take the third definition. Do the roller skates count? The wheelchair? The rowboat?
None of those have an engine, which both the first and third definitions would say is typical.
That's why the only vehicle that made me pause was the tank, since it was at one point motorized, but no longer.
6 replies →
This is a bit of a straw man, because (1) a real sign would say something "no motorized vehicles allowed in park". (2) implied with the sign is the jurisdiction of whoever put it there - presumably the city goverment which doesn't control things in the airspace high over the ground, and which grants exemptions to emergency services.
What about powered electric wheelchairs?
Also allowed by city governments to go places motorized vehicles are prohibited in general, like emergency vehicles.
I find the results confusing. I said a wheelchair is not a vehicle in the park. On the results page I see wheelchair has a score of 16.3. So this means 16.3% of people said the wheelchair is allowed in the park and 83.7% of people think the wheelchair is not allowed in the park?
If so, I now understand why moderator decisions seem insane. It's because they are.
That is an example of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
When the highest court in the land can't get a good grasp on whether a law has been broken or not you know you've hit a thorny problem.
> In a way I regret having said what I said about obscenity—that's going to be on my tombstone. When I remember all of the other solid words I've written, I regret a little bit that if I'll be remembered at all I'll be remembered for that particular phrase.
Is every single answer that there is a vehicle in the park? I skipped after 7 but I said all were vehicles in a park. I looked up the definition of vehicle before answering and all seemed to apply. Surfboard I wasn’t certain but I think it’s still definitionally a vehicle? I looked up machine at this point as this one was tricky.
From wiki A vehicle (from Latin vehiculum)[1] is a machine that transports people or cargo. Vehicles include wagons, bicycles, motor vehicles (motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, mobility scooters for disabled people), railed vehicles (trains, trams), watercraft (ships, boats, underwater vehicles), amphibious vehicles (screw-propelled vehicles, hovercraft), aircraft (airplanes, helicopters, aerostats) and spacecraft.[2]
Uninteresting lawyer chiseling. This is all about the making the author feel "smart" by selective (mis)interpretation of ambiguous conditions, absent information, and rules not present.
1: "In" a geographic area may or may not be defined as including or excluding a particular altitude. For example, in the US, owners only own up to 500 ft AGL in Class G airspace.
2: Some jurisdictions decide a person in a boat over someone's land isn't trespassing, while standing on the bottom of the land is.
3: What is the definition of a "vehicle"? Is use or capability of occupants definitive of vehicular status? Does it require a motor? Must it be a type requiring government registration?
The point of the exercise is to require you to make decisions under uncertain conditions with limited (or next to no) information.
You don't know what jurisdiction. You don't know what airspace rules apply. "Vehicle" has its common-usage definition. (Which is different for different people, judgung by the comments here.)
BTW, the vast, vast majority of real decisions are made under uncertainty. Welcome to the real world.
This is just one case the general rule of ambiguity.
At one of my jobs, a product manager came up with the idea of categorizing explicitly delineating everybody's selection criteria into a "normalized" form to allow for aggregating statistics.
I tried to point out up front what a fool's errand in this was. There is way too much ambiguity in the language.
I was overruled and the company then spent probably 7 to 15 million dollars chasing this ridiculous El Dorado dream. Eventually, after 3 years of wandering in the wilderness of normalized ontologies, they gave up and decided all NLP is bad.
This decision came out about 2 months before the release of chatGPT.
I find it a bit disingenuous to overlook any rules outside the thought experiment and then want to apply it to a real world discussion where the overlooked rules do apply. Like the Police question. It has nothing to do with the context of the questionary (internet moderation) as it is a real world law, not a moderation rule. In reality, the statistics at the end show who decided to do a white room thought experiment and who did not - nothing else. I see no big problems in moderation at all unless it is on a government made platform or some other state owned utility thing.
If you see a sign that says this in a park you wouldn’t go tell a person in a wheelchair to get out of the park (I hope). Common sense is a thing and it’s also a thing in comment moderation. This isn’t rocket surgery.
For most of the more down-to-earth questions, I made the distinction between something that aids a human in moving by augmenting their analog output, and something that either doesn't require much human involvement to move or supplants it entirely.
Skateboards, rollerskates, wheelchairs, bikes, wagons, parachutes etc.. require constant human involvement to keep acting as a vehicle. Horses, cars, space stations don't really require the same involvement, or aren't necessarily exclusively human transporters, and toy boats are only facsimiles of vehicles.
The sheer size and endless bike shedding in this comment section proves that the author is after something here.
I don't know that this had the intended effect for me. I answered the questions as I would like the 'rule' enforced. The important thing isn't about believing the rule to be entirely valid and merely enforcing it, it's about which way you want it applied and why. Then you have to try to make everything else also fit into the oddly shaped boundaries that are forming. It's also way better if you can be transparent about it, and in some cases redraw the lines and reformulate how to decide which side new cases land.
> which way you want it applied and why
In the case the article has in mind, you can't silently decide what is ok and what isn't, as they'll be public decisions that create precedents (what formulate as "being transparent")
If you say wheelchairs are OK because disabled people need them, someone will ride a golf cart arguing they're disabled and need a cart. And you'll have to publicly explain if you think it's not ok and update the rules accordingly, and that will continue for every i stance of you not agreeing with someone's interpretation.
Put another eay, that constant and endless redrawing of the rules to explain what you had in mind is the point of the exercice, except you can't throw away the old rules nilky willy, you're only allowed to add more weird stuff on it
The opening statement spectically addresses this:
> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
It's small-minded actions like this that would ruin any attempts to moderate meaningfully. It can be effective by its own definition, but not serve the community's best interests. This 'rule' and blind applications is what makes moderation easier and worse. The exercise should instead be demonstrating how moderation is hard to do well because it's not always cut-and-dried.
Two important things:
1. From the first page:
> please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
In other words, if a question is about some kind of vehicle that you think should be allowed to go, overriding this rule, the answer is "yes, the rule is violated".
2. There is a twist in this game and it's best to not tell which it is before you try the game. (The twist is acknowledged in the result page, 4th paragraph from the bottom, not counting the P.S. line at the end).
This whole thing is dumb. There's never a description of "What is a vehicle?" And there's never a description of, "What is the park's jurisdiction?".
If the author wants to relate this whole thing to content moderation, all they're illustrating is they had crappy guidelines. Give better guidelines and then let's talk. But if you give a crappy set of rules expect a crappy outcome (the outcome where nobody agrees on anything).
> Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
I mean, who's surprised that it's not effective to do content moderation by imposing ambiguous rules with a complete lack of training, examples of correct and incorrect enforcement, documentation, context about the rules, why they're needed, why they were created, what problem they were solving...
Going through this is useful I guess, but it seems very low level. But maybe our understanding of content moderation is also very low level.
I think this analogy kinda falls apart because in reality the rule “no vehicles” is for a reason.
If “people could get hurt” is the reason for no vehicles, an RC car, a stroller, a quadcopter, and maybe even a hand pulled wagon is perfectly fine because the risk is very low.
If “the noise will be an issue” is the reason, bikes are fine but a quadcopter is not.
If “protecting the environment” is the problem, horses and rowboats may be allowed but RC cars and dirt bikes perhaps not.
Having a rule with no context for the rule is pointless.
Where I live, such signs are more specific. They prohibit either use of any motorized vehicle (which by law doesn’t include electrified bicycles that can go up to 25kph), or the use of bicycles, or both, or only prohibit cars, or only motorcycles, or only trucks above a certain weight.
I expected this to be tough, but it was even tougher than that! I treated it purely as an exercise in classifying what is a vehicle and what it means to be in the park.
Skateboards really tripped me up because I don't think of roller skates as a vehicle but I do think of bikes as a vehicle. Skateboards feel like they sit right between those two.
The wagon was another tough one because the kids riding in it certainly seems very vehicle-like to me. And the stroller felt even more like a vehicle to me (ultimately I didn't choose to classify either of those as vehicles).
I said the horse wasn't a vehicle, but I said the rowboat was.
I didn't classify the RC car as a vehicle, but the classification of a quadcopter was tough because of that. I wanted to consider it a vehicle, but I couldn't think of it as far enough off of an RC car to be one.
I tried to figure out some logic for my classifications but I really couldn't it was all down to feel and making sure that I didn't clearly contradict a previous decision. My answers may have been different had they been presented in another order or even just if my mood was a bit different!
It sure was interesting. One gave me a bit of a pause. The rowboat... I immediately thought "a rowboat is not a vehicle (it's human powered), but how did he get the rowboat there in the first place?"
So in the end I only said yes to 4,the tank, the car and emergency vehicles. Everything else is a no in my book. I was quite surprised 90% people thought otherwise. No doubt their vehicle definition is different.
I took the survey, then my wife did. I was being strict, so I said the parachute was a vehicle in the park. The site said I agreed with 8% of people. My wife was being reasonable, and said it wasn’t. The site also said she agreed with 8% of people.
My guess is that they’re taking the percent of all people who answered at least seven questions, but I could be wrong, and the results are in any case very misleading.
If nothing appears after the initial instruction, try a different browser. It doesn't seem to work (but also not show any error) on chromium-based webview android 11. At first I assumed the site was hugged and the questions were being loaded non-statically.
Also, I don't get how this is supposed to help anyone understand content moderation. Take any court case and you'll have similar questions: it's more like playing judge than like playing moderator. Moderation is way harder because you can offend people on both sides at once, and they'll leave your community. In this park scenario, the people being passed judgement on can't move to another park with two clicks of the mouse and take a bunch of friends with them, and the park's sole appeal is not the existence of other people in it (network effect) the way that it is for online communities. Another difference is that people rarely get angry with the judge as much as with the law and politician that made it, which again puts you in a rather different position than in actual moderation.
Great game, cleverly demonstrates a fundamental problem with creating rules/laws. I've wondered if focusing on the goal/intent when creating rules would be more effective? For example, instead of just a rule that says "No vehicles in the park", you could say, the community wants the park: - to be safe - to be peaceful/relaxing - to accommodate physical activities/games
For these reasons, we don't allow vehicles that will unnecessarily compromise safety and/or make a lot of noise.
Of course the goal/intent I've written suffers from the same problem as the rules did, the definitions are ambiguous, but I think there's a distinction between capturing the spirit vs the letter of the law. It's a guide for why the rules exist and when they should or shouldn't be applied. It's not perfect, but, I think it's an improvement of just listing rules. If capturing/publishing the reasons for rules alongside the rules was normalized I wonder how different things could be?
Super fascinating.
I wanna share my experience and get some feedback into how you approached this. I want to make clear, that I approached this by consciously ignoring how real life works, where adhering to the rule and the instructions made it necessary:
> You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
This boiled down to answering technically "What's considered a vehicle?" and "What would be considered in the park?".
To answer this I googled when I was not reasonably sure.
I did not go to much length to answer the later question, but basically, if there were a rule that declared x meters above the ground is no longer considered to be part of whatever the area on the ground is defined as, this would what I would be interested in for this purpose. Of course, there is a lot of countries in the world, so there's probably more than one answer to this.
We have a little bit of an issue around the "disregard your jurisdiction" part in the intro (but I guess that's also part of the dilemma): All these things are defined by some jurisdiction (not necessarily in the judicial sense). We need to apply from somewhere. I don't see a way how to solve this without implicit bias. Both options satisfy the rule as stated without further constraints.
If you disagree with any of this on principle I would be super interested to hear you talk me through issues with my thinking or just explain where you went differently and why.
> All these things are defined by some jurisdiction
this is what i would call culture, or social norm.
And the thing is, this social norm might be different betwen different people and thus, either cause conflicts in interpretation, or actual real life conflicts.
Interpreting a law is usually done through the guidelines of a separate legislation outlining how it is to be done. E.g., Australia has an Acts Interpretation Act which outlines how to interpret laws by various means, including the context in which the words appear and the purpose of the act. I am unsure of other jurisdictions.
We are explicitly told that there is only one relevant rule. So, the only relevant determinations in each case should be to the definitions of "vehicle" and "in the park". No interpretation of the intent can influence the decision. I thought the aim was to determine the scope of the definitions, then be consistent with the applications of those definitions.
Personally, I defined "vehicle" as anything that can transport people or goods, and "in the park" as a reasonable area above and below the ground. But, this ended up with unsatisfactory answers like the tank being not violating the rule because it could no longer transport, and skates being in violation.
The word vehicle is up to interpretation, so it helps to not use umbrella terms like vehicle. Anything used to move goods or person is technically a vehicle. However in the a conventional understanding it is the embodiment of what would move goods or person, functional or not, to carry out a task not recreational unless also used with the intent not recreational. If both it becomes a recreational vehicle.
Recreation / Not Practical = Other
Not Recreational / Practical = Vehicle
Recreational / Practical = Recreational Vehicle
You don't have to agree with me on this. I know the definition says otherwise, I'm just speaking on the perception of what people think in society a vehicle is. As it would sound really funny to refer to toys as vehicles.
Also to expand on this. Drones they are recreational but also practical, you might use your drone for recreational things but nothing practical so it is just a drone. But the second you start flying packages it becomes practical. This makes it a recreational vehicle. If it is exclusively for delivery like Amazon Drone, it is just a vehicle.
I like this experiment! I hope to see some further analysis on the results. I came to a similar conclusion years back about languages: it's impossible to translate a word perfectly because the border cases differ. Is it a cake or a bread? Banana bread is called bread in the US, but as a Dane I consider it "kage" (the usual translation of "cake").
Here is something else. During the pandemic, I went through MacDonald's drive-in on bicycle, because you couldn't go into the restaurant.
I was refused service because I was not a vehicle, and since only the drive-in was operating, I was absolutely refused service.
They claimed it was for safety.
Though technically it is true that a bicycle is not a vehicle according to the BC Motor Vehicle Act, the Act also says:
"a person operating a cycle on a highway has the same rights and duties as a driver of a vehicle"
The drive-through road constitutes a highway, according to the definition, which includes
"every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles, ..."
and
"every private place or passageway to which the public, for the purpose of the parking or servicing of vehicles, has access or is invited"
By a kind of stretch "rights" should include being treated the same by a drive-in for vehicles. :)
I actually cited this to them, but in the end it was come back with a car or no service.
I'd like to know what they think is unsafe about this.
if the car behind or in front of you crashes into you, a human on a bicycle, the damage is much greater than if it crashes into another car. If you assume the other driver is drunk, and stomps on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal, in some ridiculous souped up sports car or truck, the human goes squish.
5 replies →
Over the years I've come across a few online communities that have noticeably higher conversation quality than the rest of the internet. The one thing all of those places had in common is a very strict moderation policy.
Not every forum/community/website should tolerate literally all people. It's never helpful to engage with trolls and if people aren't willing to argue in good faith than they need to go. I've seen tons of communities slowly lose their identity because they were too accepting of counterproductive conversations and bad faith arguments.
The idea of this form of tolerance comes from the goal be open minded and listen to opposite arguments, as well as to prevent a community from turning into an echo-chamber (or a cult), but I think it's better to lean towards heavy moderation. Banning someone who would be a good fit for the community is unfortunate, but ultimately not a huge loss. Not banning even one troll can drag down a whole community.
I came to a different conclusion and said no police or ambulance should enter the park. Obviously there should be an exception for true emergencies, but stretchers exist for a reason. Police can walk or ride a bike.
The fact that respondents are so sure of the obviousness of their answers highlights common problems in moderation— rules are ambiguous and everyone has different standards.
In what way is that conclusion different? I argue that a strict moderation policy and enforcement is needed to keep a community healthy, even if that leads to the exclusion of a few posts/users that would have been good for the community.
Is that not exactly what you are saying?
Sidenote: Does the presence of an ambulance not qualify as a "true emergency" for you? In my experience an ambulance only shows up if someone needs acute medical attention. Is that not the case where you live?
What this showcases isn't an issue with moderation, it's a lack of shared culture in digital spaces.
When we interact in the real world we manage to behave not because we have some sort of logical crystal palace where every word is rigorously defined, but because we have an implicit, shared sensibility for what's appropriate. When you go and sit down in a café you don't measure your noise level and there's no sign saying "only talk at 80db!", you have an intuitive and non-verbal idea of what offends the people around you.
If people disagree about the questions in this experiment the correct conclusion isn't to do away with moderation or argue about word definitions, it's to argue for shared culture in online spaces. HN is a good example. Most people who post here I think have a decent grasp of how not to act, and take little offense with moderation, despite the fact that there aren't many rules other than the occasional reminder to be civil.
I really thought the seemingly blatant stereotypical names were going to be a factor in the assessment.
Though I guess now that I think about it, I don’t know that I could point to a name that I think would be non-stereotypical in the 21st century. Maybe the names of the average upper middle class elementary school class - a lot of those seem to me to be pretty minimally correlated with ethnicity these days.
In a heavily white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of the not too distant past, there were clearly “default” names and “other” names, and I do think that’s less and less the case. Or at the very least, it’s no longer acceptable to think about the “default” names as being normal and every other type of name as signifying something outside the mainstream of society.
Still, there’s some deeply weird socioeconomic stuff that goes on with naming kids. There have got to be some good studies about those trends.
This “thought experiment” is painting a narrative using a false dichotomy. “I don’t know” is always a valid answer. The nice thing about rule based systems is that they can be augmented with additional rules. You don’t know wether or not a skateboard is a vehicle? That’s ok. We can add a new rule that defines that.
I see a lot of "just add more specifics to the rule" in here, but that's fighting a losing battle. There will always be another edge case, and the rule will end up being so long and complicated that no one will properly follow it anyway.
I think the solution is to put the goal of the rule right next to the rule. Maybe vehicles are banned to improve air quality, to improve pedestrian safety, to reduce noise, or some combination. Or maybe there really is no good reason, and the writer of the rule just enjoys power.
Reminds me of writing security policies. There will always be exceptions, but if you include the goals of each rule, your users are empowered to recognize when an exception is a good idea. Otherwise, you get either blind compliance or secret non-compliance.
A lot of comments here about how the intro instructed us to make a very literal interpretation.
I'm not so sure. The exact wording is "You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction."
Rephrasing an earlier comment here, but - it's still a park right? On earth? What jurisdiction on earth blocks matchbox cars and space stations? Or even ambulances and police cars, which were the main ambiguous ones? Does some country not allow ambulances in its parks? Are we supposed to include all of modern human culture as a "local jurisdiction"?
The instructions of the game were pretty unclear, that seems to be what's sparking a lot of the debate.
No the instructions are clear. Figuring out where the park is just isn't part of the exercise. In fact, by the letter of the rules, it's impossible to find out. Pick any definition of "local jurisdiction" you want and you still don't know where the park is. It is not necessarily in that jurisdiction (or out of it either). It's not necessarily even on earth or in this universe either.
It's not about finding the particular jurisdiction. It's that any jurisdiction will have almost all of this stuff in common.
If we're not even taking about earth or this universe then discussion is probably hopeless...
4 replies →
Additional suggestions that i think would make the game better/harder because the answer distribution is currently pretty skewed and many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule (though all respect to rule sticklers, general contrarians, and everythings-a-vehicle hipsters):
construction equipment for park improvements (backhoe, etc)
gas powered moped
electric moped
gas powered rc car
4-wheeler/atv/dune buggy
golf cart
segway/monowheel
antique cars for some kind of demo/event
shriner guys in those mini cars in a local parade (at least i think most americans know what i'm talking about)
anti-drunk driving display (they have these sometimes at colleges, and maybe high schools, but it's basically a wrecked car and there are police there to do pr)
Note: i think many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule, maybe keep some of them but not so many?
I suspect I'm not the only one who tried this, but ChatGPT does predictably well at this task. I gave it a basic prompt of 'Let's play a game. The rule says, "No vehicles in the park". This is a game about language and rules. I will describe different scenarios to you. In response, you respond "Yes" if this scenario violates the rule or "No" if it does not. You have to make a choice and can only say Yes or No.' and then just fed it the scenarios. It ended up agreeing with the majority and my own intuition quite well.
The largest differences were that it didn't considered a rowboard a vehicle and that it did consider the parachute scenario a vehicle.
Bad news for human content moderators I suppose...
It would have been better if the page defined "vehicle" since people's definitions may vary. The one I used was basically "Something used to carry people or goods". That meant that a toy car wasn't a vehicle, only a representation of one, but even a toy car could conceivably be made to carry something else at which point it would become a vehicle. I also struggled a bit with the disabled tank, since it's clearly designed for the transport of people, but while it's non-functional it couldn't fill that role. A car that's parked is also incapable of transporting people, but I think most people would argue the rule was still being violated by its presence.
It would help a lot to know the reason for the rule. Perhaps the park is filled with lots of rare, delicate plants and only narrow dirt pathways. Or perhaps the pathways are somewhat wider and allowing in a wheelchair or a small wagon wouldn't be a problem.
Without knowing the reason, it is hard to make a wise decision. At least for a problem like content moderation, people will have some idea about the goals or reasons for the rule, although certainly different people may have different opinions about how important the various goals and reasons are. But trying to enforce an arbitrary rule without a good understanding of why, on which to base judgement calls, sounds foolishly futile.
spelling error in "propultion" ("propulsion") in the question "Keisha plays with a Matchbox car in the park. A Matchbox car is a toy car with wheels that turn; it has no means of propultion other than Keisha pushing it." BTW.
I've seen much discussion of what a vehicle is, and some of what is "in" the park.
I've not yet seen (though not yet reading all 1114 extant comments) discussion of the goal and/or purpose of the rule.
Given this discussion is on Hacker News and my growing obsession with what makes this site tick (and occasionally sends it off the rails), contrast with HN's "real standard": "to engage one's intellectual curiosity" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>).
HN's somewhat famously brief and loose guidelines (<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>) augmented by dang's moderation comments (viewable by search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>) provide much of that.
And, in fact, reading those search results just now turned up a ... interesting, now deleted ... response by dang on this thread which explains the "intended spirit" nature of HN moderation. I'm not going to quote the full item (respecting the deletion), but this bit seems to echo my sense:
[H]aving the set of first principles (the site guidelines) be organized around "intended spirit" rather than formal precision is the best bulwark I know.
In the cae of laws, the purpose or intent is often explicitly stated. In US tradition, the "whereas" clauses typically preceding the main body of legislation.
And for this game, the posted rule would benefit greatly by a clarification as to why it was enacted and what the rule is intended to accomplish. This would also clarify, even without specifically enumerating classes of vehicles or conveyances, and/or proximity to the park which specific cases might be permitted or excluded.
Given the initial instruction to not take into consideration any obvious common sense, I expected questions to scale up to "everything is a vehicle of some information, so the parc should be put into absolute unmoving zone to make the rule strictly operate", which is of course beyond human possibilities.
The point that the author try to draw about moderation and underspecifications are interesting, but to my mind the framing is not giving a relevant ground to think about it. The author say the goal was to do a better job at this than some previous approachs, which is a effort I salute, though to my mind it doesn't land there yet.
I feel like it’s missing:
* A truck is driven over the corner of the park, but it uses a ramp so it never physically touched the ground of the park.
* One tire of a car drives 10cm on along the edge of a park, but the truck’s satnav has a different datum than your cadastral data.
> over the corner
A Wyoming federal court just ruled the truck wasn’t in the park [1], I agree!
* the platted boundary of the park extends into the road.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wyd.606...
I humbly believe the real takeaway is that we need LESS rules and LESS fragile egos.
If we become like we used to be perhaps a cple decades ago, where an abstract tweet wouldn't make us collapse on our heads, things would be much easier.
That was fun. I decided early on that a vehicle is any tool that allows something to move. So an ant on a paper airplane or a kite is a vehicle. The surfboard allows someone to move and they carried it into the park, so that's not allowed. Since I wasn't allowed to apply any of my jurisdiction's laws, I also had to ticket the International Space Station for going into my park's airspace. Moon, I'm watching you, you're next.
Thinking about it further, no shoes either.
They said this was all about content moderation and to me the answer is simple. I would never visit the "no vehicles in the park" park.
The author's site also links to their other games (https://games.novalis.org/),
and Semantle (https://semantle.com/), a semantic-similarity-based Wordle type guessing game (using word2vec similarity), is quite neat.
Was popular in 2022: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=semantle
I kinda answered in terms of "what interpretation of the sign gives parkgoers the best overall experience". Don't legal situations generally consider the spirit of the law, not just the letter of the law?
The HN guidelines come to mind here, they're a mix of more literal ("don't use uppercase for emphasis") and spirit/intent ("anything that good hackers would find interesting"). Seems to work here - but curious how many pedantic struggles dang & co. encounter.
That kind of proves the point. The starting paragraph asked you explicitly to ignore local laws or personal beliefs and take actions based on only the most literal definition of the rule, and yet almost half of people chose to ignore this and use their own rules. Like how they do for content moderation.
Well in that case the whole ruse of the park is pointless, and the game should just be "click the words that are vehicles". And matchbox cars and space stations are included.
5 replies →
From the OC:
> You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem. ... can reduce the problem, but [cannot] eliminate it. And at scale, with adversarial testing, every edge case will get hit.
Yup. Rules are not enough.
Same conundrum applies to taxation, safety regulations, pollution, security, etc.
It's not just a matter of better enforcement. Every system of rules will be gamed.
Alas, I still don't have a clue about solutions. I'm just exhausted by the naive hot takes.
Human affairs (societies) are messy.
I found that my responses hinged on the use of specific pronouns - e.g. “in” or “on” so a space station flying over a park wasn’t “in” the park per se - and on whether it was clear to me whether whether the park was being used a thoroughfare.
So, I found myself answering “not a vehicle” in a vast majority of the cases because it wasn’t clear to me if the tool in question - car or skateboard or whatever - was being used to go through the park to the other side.
Great thought exercise though.
The vehicle has to be consistent with all others to decide on it but certainly with all previous judged vehicles on your shift. Who is bringing the vehicle might also be objectively relevant. Time is also relevant.
One day one might accept car tires to play with, the next the kids bring 2 tires with an axle, the 3rd day they tie a rope between 2 axles, day 4 tires are banned. If the events are in stead of a day a year apart it might be different.
So much talk about the rule but not much about enforcement. To me most of the scenarios are breaking the rule, but what happens afterwards depends: emergency vehicles, wheelchairs, toys get a pass. Bicycles either get a pass or a warning. Cars get a fine. Repeat offenders get a license suspension etc.
The gray areas are settled based on local culture and who is enforcing the rule. And it’s the same with moderation of course.
The rule is more like a guideline anyway.
My own conclusion is that the rule is not clear enough. Define "vehicle" and "in the park". Sure it's probably hard to think of all the use cases when you first write the rule. Simply iterate and add exceptions and clearer definitions as needed (seems like it's exactly how laws are made, and nobody is saying "we should not have any laws because it's hard to think of all the use cases")
Now, when you enter the park, you must read a novel-sized rulebook first.
Well that's case even when you are not entering the park, because of all those laws you must follow at all times
> some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply
All rules are easy to apply when you're the moderator. Just say "I'm the moderator" and then do whatever you want. That's how US law works. They can say "this is how the rule works", and then a few years later say "hahaha! yeah, that's not how the rule works anymore, now it works this other way".
No to all questions since there’s probably a way in which doing any of those things still obeys the rule. The rule is about achieving the intent of the rule, not rote obedience.
The park might contain a parking lot, or an area where skateboarding is permitted, etc. Absent context, or a specific park, who could say if any of the things listed violate the rules.
As for what constitutes a vehicle, this is why you give examples.
Did you actually try it?
It sounds like you did, because you’ve given a car and skateboard example, which do appear in the exercise.
But it sounds like you didn’t because you’ve given such an authoritative answer when the whole point of the exercise is that “it’s complicated”. There is no One True Answer, it’s open to interpretation, that’s the complexity it demonstrates.
I mean, I know where I am, but good god damn lord so many of you are missing the point by restating it without taking anything from the text provided at the end.
Like, missing the point with a planet's berth. Might go a ways in explaining the "mods are entitled jerks" attitude that keeps popping up around discussions of reddit, ignoring that they're the only reason reddit exists in a semi-usable state, ever.
One thing this doesn't mention bit I think is just as important is tone. Some communities are fine with casual assumptions, others require sources if challenged. Sometimes these things can be encoded in rules, sometimes it's more moderator discretion. So in addition to rules interpretation communities can be distinguished by vibes as well. This is just as valid a reason to moderate as rules
On nebulosity, see https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262134095/ . No need to read it, just to be aware that there’s a thick book full of people trying to get a handle on what a concept like “park” or “vehicle” or “in” actually is for humans, and failing completely.
Based on this I think the likelihood of me enjoying the park is inversely related to how hard the park moderators have to squint to apply the park rules. I'm totally cool with people having a park where a stroller counts as a vehicle but it's not a park I would want to spend my time. (The only one I agreed with was the one where a random person drove their kia into the park)
A better example would be a private property (you're the sole source of law, not interpreting someone else's rule) where people come to network (people are here because other people are here) and there's a competitor literally next door (there is no cost for them to change platform).
These three crucial differences make the game incomparable to actual online moderation
For me this article is not about content moderation, but about software requirements.
It turns out, no matter how hard I try to specify a piece of software, developers implementing them manage to sneak in their own interpretation into it and i find that, yes, this particular case wasn't specified or was a little ambiguous or contradicts the other part or something else.
This is an interesting concept with terrible execution as almost everyone will agree that most of the situations do not violate the rule.
Is there a collection of games like this which are really thought experiments? I found that doing this and the Staying Alive game https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/stayingalive/Default.a... were very relaxing.
I found the term 'wagon' to be unclear. In the UK, this would be something akin to an articulated lorry, although I am familiar with the American term 'station wagon' so I took it to mean a type of motor car at the very least.
Presumably that is not the case, having now seen the results. Is it a sort of unpowered trolley?
More like a little red cart on wheels pulled on a handle.
I read it as the "little red wagon" type.
Anyone who's programmed knows intimately that any such rules/laws by humans in RL is basically undefined behaviour.
I was waiting for something more "insightful", it sets the expectations too high and then instead I got hit by the content moderation crap stick, a vehicle is a vehicle and if an ambulance is driven into the park is violating the rule, wether you like it or not, the rule doesn't define morality. What a waste of time.
As classified and intended by the sign and societal expectation, a vehicle would be any self-propelled method of transport which violates the space or near space of the park. So a toy car or boat doesn't count, but an actual car or boat would. Just as a bicycle doesn't count but a motorcycle does. And a bit of logic has to be applied for what constitutes "within or near the space of the park" in practice. A plane flying thirty one thousand feet overhead is not even near the park, but a helicopter dropping down so low that the rotors are level with or below the top of the tree canopy is violating the space near the park. And exceptions to rules have to be made under certain circumstances. The ambulance and police car do violate the rules, but have to be given special extensions of jurisdiction to perform the duties wider society assigns and expects of them.
But breaking things down into the very specific definition of "self propelled method of transport" is exactly what doesn't happen for a lot of moderation and enforcement. An offense brought to moderation is often several of those very specific definitions that don't get broken apart into their constituent parts for examination. We stopped using mercury to starch felt hats because the mercury was the problem. If instead we didn't break it down into components to identify the one causing the issue, would we have banned all felt hats or likely just felt altogether? Modern moderation policy dictates bias towards the latter.
The idea of nebulosity as described is precisely why reforms constantly have to be made to enforcement, why automated enforcement is harmful, and why blanket policies on enforcement are a bad idea. Public nudity is generally agreed to be a crime and distasteful, but should somebody be arrested because their clothes were stolen at a changing station? Should a bumper sticker saying "Shoot your local meth dealer" get the driver pulled over because of either threats of violence or public indecency laws that are considered relics of the 19th century and are no longer widely enforced? Moderation in reality is a very simple issue of applying societal biases as rules that becomes horribly unwieldy when scaled beyond a few thousand people. That's because the best moderation is done on a case-by-case basis, as circumstances and context are more important than the infringing action because it's simply one component in a string of them. Obviously you can't do that when you have tens of thousands of users or more and the number of possible offenses grows every picosecond.
This reminds me of the local political candidate who argued that the 100m distance rules around campaigning extended to a sphere around polling stations, so he claimed he was allowed to fly a banner over the stations as long as they maintained enough altitude.
Trying to find a link to a news story about this. I swear it's true.
I got stuck on the first question.
I couldn't figure out what kind of park it was. I don't think a wheelchair is appropriate in a skate park.
However, if the "skate park" allowed bicycles, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and cars, I think a wheelchair is fuckin' fine.
Thus, a wheelchair is a vehicle in some circumstances.
Which is why there should be no moderators besides each person having an equal vote. "But then people game the system." is always the answer, which is always the root cause of the problem: on the internet, everything is completely fair until someone, inevitably, games the system.
Austria has this sort of problem when it comes to forests and cyclists. You might want to read a longer article in German about this https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000134804355/als-oesterrei... but the gist of it is: The law until 1975 didn't allow anyone (that's everyone in Austria) to enter forests (which in comparison belong to only a few people, besides the state).
Now that problem with this law (Forstgesetz 1975) is in § 33 (3) where it says "befahren" (drive) which is a very general word when the parliamentary discussion about the law in 1975 clearly meant motor vehicles and even lists them in the discussion but not in the law. A few years later mountainbiking became a thing and the owners of forests insist that the law includes mountain bikers. Fast forward to 2023 and the law still needs fixing...
I notice that people who say "obviously emergency vehicles should be allowed, because of intent", despite the explicit instructions at the beginning of the test, often talk about "the sign" in their comments, despite no sign ever being mentioned in the instructions.
One is reminded of the difference between proof-relevant and classical mathematics. The letter of the law is a mere proposition, whereas the spirit of the law is a program of a certain type, whose “computational content” describes the actions one takes to produce the state of compliance.
The lesson here is one worth learning, but the vehicle (forgive the pun) is very poor. The lesson is: we can't agree on what to moderate and what not to moderate. There are very good thought experiments here, including citing actual prose. Should we ban parts of the Bible (the sexually explicit ones, or the ones that seem to approve of slavery?), should we ban books like Lolita or the Scarlet Letter? Should we allow Neo-Nazis to protest? What about Stalinists?
These are questions worth asking and answers worth hearing, but the problem with the question here is that the rule "no vehicles in the park" already comes with a lot of baggage. For example, it's obvious that the rule is meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park (a rule that we've seen many times in our own parks), so naturally police cars and ambulances will (or should) be exempt, especially if trying to save a life. Otherwise the corollary would be that saving a life is less important than the rule "no vehicles in the park." Which most would very obviously disagree with.
I like the idea of the website, but there's probably a better way to convey the complexities of rule-making and rule-following in the context of both our own moral (or religious, or ethical, etc.) frameworks and the social environment at large.
> These are questions worth asking and answers worth hearing, but the problem with the question here is that the rule "no vehicles in the park" already comes with a lot of baggage. For example, it's obvious that the rule is meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park (a rule that we've seen many times in our own parks), so naturally police cars and ambulances will (or should) be exempt, especially if trying to save a life. Otherwise the corollary would be that saving a life is less important than the rule "no vehicles in the park." Which most would very obviously disagree with.
That's the point, though! Everyone arrives at these moderation discussions with baggage, and it's not the same baggage.
Like, it is very much not obvious to me that the rule is "meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park". Plenty of parks prohibit bikes and skateboards. If we care about "saving a life" then I actually don't think we should make an exception for cop cars. Reasonable people can disagree! Even the most obvious-seeming judgments are, in fact, not obvious.
> Even the most obvious-seeming judgments are, in fact, not obvious.
I kind of disagree with this. The question leaves the definition of "vehicle," "in," and "park" purposefully ambiguous, so everyone kind of tries to fit the most "common sense" solution. In fact, I'd contend that the rule "life of a person outweighs park rule" is not even remotely controversial (apart from some maybe unreasonably staunch environmentalists). This is why our legal code is pretty exhaustive (and moderation systems should be, too).
With that said, there is plenty of grey area even with extremely exhaustive rules: see abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, etc. I think that this is what the website tried to do, but sort-of failed because it purposefully got us wading through a semantic quagmire.
2 replies →
I stopped at the first question. Without a photograph, I can't really tell what a "wagon" is supposed to be. How big is it? Does it have an engine? Is this a toy or a diesel truck? etc. There's cultural context that's not present at all.
Am I the only person who looked up the definition of "vehicle" and counted everything that wasn't a toy seemingly not meant to "transport something" as a vehicle?
It seemed like the spirit of the game was a strict interpretation, to the letter, of the rule.
I’m not sure the sign can have one unanimous understanding - which is why we have court rulings to back it up. If you disagree with a sign, take it up with “contemporary society”.
But given a situation where no proper trial is available, the sign could mean “anything”.
Cool game, but let me comment on the method of detecting bias based on names... I think it'll only work for audiences that recognise these names in a way that triggers those biases. So it'll not be very useful for outside US.
The instructions say to ignore intent. We are left with definitions, then.
We do not define park boundaries, so each scenario must indicate those boundaries.
We do not define vehicle, so all objects are vehicles, including this soupy bag of proteins you pilot around.
The Game.
Clearly, this is all about driving cars or trucks in the park. The roads there are intended for pedestrians, cyclists, etc. It seems that 93% agree with me. Well done, everyone. ;-)
I think that was a really good way to get the point across. Which I suppose I already agreed to, but if I ever wanted to argue the point of how hard content moderation is, I might share this website.
"Travois" seemed the most interesting one. Based purely on the first page of Google images, it struck me as somewhere between a horse and a carriage, but ever more on the vehicle side.
it has no wheels so it is just dragged, maybe behind a horse but people can drag them too. horses walk and carriages roll, so it's not really between them. it's the asymptotic limit as wheels shrink to zero.
Three questions in I thought “hey, this reminds me of that recent 99% Invisible episode about restrictions on mechanized equipment”. Then I got to the explanation at the end and sure enough…
I think this missed one more axis, or didn't go deep enough.
What if someone mines under the park? And uses things like carts or mining vehicles there? Are those "in" the park or not?
Just because there’s no analytical closed form solution that you can easily invent does not mean it’s a bad idea to have rules. The entire justice system works exactly like that.
Illustrates how rule keeping in the absence of grace is a dead end.
For me, where English isn't my native language, the answer to all the questions was no, because of the lack of a verb on the sign.
It was a quite interesting quiz to be honest.
I reasoned that vehicle did not cover water vehicles, since that should be a special rule for the lake.
Maybe I'm dumb but I have no idea how to read the result at the end. I agreed with the majority, yet it says 13%. What are the axis of that graph?
No, it needs labels, not dumb.
You first ask me to think about spherical vehicles in the vacuum and then set up a trap about ambulances. You're priming the experiment
Determining whether a horse is a vehicle was the hardest for me. I could see the ambiguity for some other questions, but pretty easy to decide.
Unfortunately, "You agreed with the majority: 11%" tells me fucking nothing leaves me with far more questions. 11% of what?
I got 11% too and wondered what it means.
I think it means "thanks for the hits HN, go fly a kite"
[edit] maybe I'm just cynical
I like this. Indeed the fundamental crux of all human discourse: politics, argument, and of course content moderation.
I wish you included a statistic my race and gender effects vs the average user. Got me curious and feeling unresolved.
Nobody tell this guy about Wittgenstein :)
I'm sure a fuzzy inference system is being trained in the background based on visitors' responses.
Wonderful presentation. What's not clear to me is what the percentage at the end of the game represents?
According to most Reddit moderators: no vehicles in the park (unless the vehicle is in front of a sunset or we have to save our democracy by allowing vehicles with megaphones to drive around the park spouting the exact political ideology of the moderators)
The rule “no vehicles in the park” isn’t complicated. It’s complicated when it’s “no vehicles in the park except the moderators and their friends.”
This proves that most people can't understand a simple rule, or don't know what a vehicle is.
The people's names were an annoying distraction. I'm aware that it was done intentionally.
i don't believe that they were chosen at random, i think they were race baiting
Prigozhin rolls his tanks through the park on his way to Moscow. Does he violate the rule?
Stopped playing after the first question because I don't care and i don't know why anyone would. After all this is just a website asking questions without context. It seems as interesting to me as the political debate in Star Wars Episode I that was famously mocked by the Simpsons.
I don’t get it. Only the car was a violation. Everything else was obviously not
i did 7 questions and agreed with 29% of the majority. can see why i'm writing on some "reddit alternative" platforms as much as i'm writing on reddit.
I got 11%, not sure what that means, but I was very lax it seems.
When one answers these questions, one must consider the reason behind the rule, the spirit of why vehicles are not allowed in the park: because this disturbs the park for many others in the park. It makes the park less enjoyable. People won't want to come to the park if it's full of cars.
Content moderation is about the same thing. It's about trying to minimize the negatives for everyone else while restricting the least. Part of Western cultural values seems to be that we want people to be free to have opinions that don't match the majority or those in control.
This is why the actions Elon Musk is taking in "moderating" Twitter are so problematic- they aren't about minimizing negatives for most users, they're about minimizing negatives For Elon Musk. This short sighted behavior erodes the platform in the long term.
The only thing this convinced me of is that content moderation is even more brainless and straight forward than I thought. There wasn't a single question that didn't have a straightforward commonsense answer.
Actually pretty clever way of demonstrating the point.
In the olden days of internet forums we would consider this type of thing rules lawyering [1]. The rules were put in place to protect the community from trouble makers and trolls.
The main forum I frequented has a dispute resolution area where people could appeal infractions. It was full of people arguing about this type of stuff over something as trivial as a week long ban from some topic forum. Occasionally there would be an over zealous mod too.
Interestingly while the moderation of increasingly large and consolidated online communities becomes more automated and inflexible I’ve noticed that attitudes to rules around our public spaces have eroded into pure selfishness.
It seems there is nowhere people won’t drive and abandon their cars. Cycle tracks, footpaths (sidewalks) grass verges, parks, playing fields etc. it seems that this is simply accepted.
I’ve seen police and private security lazily patrol around parks where vehicles are not allowed in their cars. There’s no appetite for a physical on foot presence. You rarely see police on the street. The exception was during Biden’s recent visit to Dublin, there was literally a Garda on every street corner for a week.
Our local sports club patrons abandon their cars all over the grass area at the entrance to the local park when there is a half full car park right across the road.
Outside our local supermarket people will leave their cars on the footpath outside the store rather than park in a space mere metres away.
All of this is confounded by a police force (Irish Gardai) that don’t seem to give a damn.
I argued with a guy on Thursday who drove down a segregated cycle lane and up onto the footpath so he could leave his car right outside the house he was visiting. He saw nothing wrong with it. Only when I pointed out the kids trying to get around his car did he finally show some shame for his behaviour. I was furious.
Car brain is a growing problem.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_lawyer
So, maybe we need use the Jury system then, say 9 of them, with diversified backgrounds(e.g. 3 liberals, 3 conservatives, 3 independents, also consider age and gender,etc), and they vote online for edge cases, majority wins.
it will not be optimal, but better than a group of censors who share the same ideology and bias, or even worse, one or too persons make the calls randomly based on their own likes and dislikes.
Or design an AI agent to do that and save manual labor, but do let a jury to check its results regularly to make sure it works as expected, as much as possible.
My result, have no idea what it means though..
—-
Results
You agreed with the majority: 11%
most people including me pressed yes to every question. it was 12% of the respondents.
Fascinating!
Totally was not expecting that to be the point, but I'll go along with the concept for being creative.
I answered the questions expecting a logic puzzle, but it is very much not that.
ITT: HN attempt an amateur discussion of legal theory, without referencing decades of scholarship on the topic
you just need to define vehicle and park bounds first
This is not a game.
i got 11%
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
The park may only have one rule, but the quiz has several , including disregarding exceptions to the rule. Yet there are people arguing here that rule shouldn’t count because they disagree with it. Even on a meta level, this is an interesting exploration of how people interpret rules.
This is always the way with these hypotheticals. People only disagree because they don't want to stick to the hypothetical. But the flip side of that, if you do stick to the hypothetical you also need to be clear that it is therefore of limited use in the real world. Is an ambulance in the park breaking the rule? Cleraly. Does that have any relevance to what we would expect to happen in the real world? Nope.