Comment by hahajk
3 years ago
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.
I found some old posts of mine from when I was 15. If anyone ever finds them I will have to kill them.
It's not that I was mean or nasty, or pushing any boundaries – I was never like that – I was just ... 15.
Also turns out what people meant with "your English is very good" was "your English is very good for a 15 years old non-native speaker", and not "your English is very good".
> Social norms are quite culture-specific.
This is an argument against migration then.
It's not. Nowhere did I say or imply that.
Not really a surprise to anyone, I hope? Integration is always the second step in any serious immigration policy.
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.