Comment by crazygringo
3 years ago
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.
You might be interested in reading the classical book about cultural difference by Geert Hofstede as it provides another perspective on this.
He describes what he calls uncertainty avoidance cultures that try to reduce uncertainty by making lots of rules. These end up being impossible to follow, so it's generally expected that you don't. He contrasts this with cultures that are low on uncertainty avoidance that have fewer rules, but on the other hand it's expected that they are followed.
This is probably to some degree a caricature.
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The intent of moderation is "don't be horrible to each other and/or the space".
Unfortunately, people who are horrible to other people and/or spaces generally refuse to accept this, and therefore either need more specific examples of what being horrible entails to compare their behaviours against - leading to proliferation of edges, epicycles and rule-gaming - or you have a codicil along the lines of "the decision of what is horrible is up to the moderator and is final", leading to, at best, everyone whining about how unfair, arbitrary and partial the policy is now they can't be horrible to each other any more, all at once.
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Two things really jump out at me..
I grew up in America which is fairly rule-obeying. Lived in Australia and New Zealand which are disgustingly, obsequiously devoted to following tiny guidelines. Spent a few weeks in Munich where I was shouted at for crossing a totally empty street against a crosswalk light.
On the plus side, I lived in Argentina and Spain for a long time where basically there is no enforcement of anything.
I will say I am proud of people there (in the Latin world) for being humans. mostly ... usually... trying not to make dumb decisions, but... well, having to make decisions, and making them. You see if you live in England or the US or Commonwealth for awhile, people have forgotten how to make any decisions if there isn't a rule for it.
And yet the freest society I ever lived in, judged on the day to day freedom of individuals violating petty laws, was Vietnam. At the same time, it was the most totalitarian place I ever lived as far as what information you could access or what you could say. Still, if you wanted to drive the wrong way down a highway with an child on the back of your motorcycle, you can do that in Vietnam.
Personally I don't like the UK / Australia model where everyone obeys some stupid rule written on the wall over their own intelligence. Of course, I also don't love the Argentinian model where everyone thinks they're smart enough to bang on the button that says "don't touch". Also, it's not cool to wantonly endanger your child while being terrified of mentioning the name of the dictator. But I am a fan of man... and I would definitely take the Turkish way of shrugging off rules when they don't suit you over the British way of following them to the point of worship.
I think I was going to get to some great conclusion here, but I don't have one.
I like when no one is watching me, but I also like when someone is watching other people.
[edit] my conclusion! privacy and freedom come at the cost of people ignoring rules. People from rule-bound countries experience a burst of freedom when going somewhere that lives as people live, not by the rule-book. People from "chaotic societies" as you said, who have a mind for all the corruption they see around them, find some relief in escaping to ordered societies. Neither is good or bad, they are both modes of existence; both modes are necessary. If either were to disappear, we would have far too much chaos or far too much order, and no one would be able to escape to where they belong.
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Defining rules based on intent works when there’s less corruption. Otherwise the rule will be vague enough to extract a bribe or a blackmail by the enforcing authority. Once corruption is under control you can have things like prosecutorial discretion. On the other hand, having so many rules that no one can reasonably know, understand and follow will also lead to bribes and extortion by law enforcement if corruption is common. Essentially, corruption can take advantage of either scenario and make the life of general mostly law-abiding citizens’ life much harder. So, corruption is the issue and not necessarily the laws.
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This is exactly why criminal law requires two things: the actus reus and the mens rea. Act and intent.
So, great point.
I guess the only problem on the internet is it is very hard to determine intent, see Poe's law.
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> That's true but without assuming intent you end up blindly following rules.
Right but overly generic rules make that worse. And overly specific make a lot of work and allow stuff to still go thru cracks. It's hard problem to make following rules with intent but without rule-enforcers using it for their own whims
> 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
If the culture of the country teaches you to follow the rules, people follow the rules
If the culture of the country teaches you rules are annoyance to go around or bribe around, well that happens.
I live in post soviet country (Poland) and got on the end of the slow and painful transformation from the latter to the former. For example ~15 years ago it was common knowledge that you need to bribe examiner if you want to pass driving license the first time. At the time it was somewhat probable, I passed at 3rd time with 2nd time failure being my arrogance but 1st being something absolutely minor that could be summed up as "I looked at right mirror with my eyes instead of theatrically moving my head right to signal to examiner I really looked at right side'.
And my step-mother, which is a terrible driver did pass via bribe at around same time.
Similar thing happens with MOT tests, usually bribed to ignore lack of working cat.
And the single out cases of bribing still happened, just government invested a lot of effort to fight it so it is no longer "the norm" accepted by the people as the way to live. Which on top of being a lot of effort takes generational change to really root in, back in my parent's young days you couldn't even have a car if you weren't either well connected (grandpa had Wartburg with sunroof option purely because he was in military and won few contests) or bribed the right people.
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> 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.
Do you actually know that the latter sign is more effective than “don’t touch”? If it actually is, there are other possible explanations. The fact that it’s personally addressed to “you” could make it more effective. The fact that it’s simply a more unique/unexpected way to convey the message may cause people to be less likely to reflexively dismiss the more common directive of “don’t touch”.
This is why there is a difference between rules and guidelines.
Guidelines are suggestions. They're all about intent. "Don't have live music after midnight" isn't a ridiculous guideline for COVID, because it usually implies a gathering. It is a ridiculous rule because rules have to be rigid and well defined, because rules are enforced. Squishy rules aren't rules, they're covert dictatorial powers.
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(I'm Turkish living in the US.)
I think that's part of it. Another part is Turkey's legal system is based on Swiss law. From ChatGPT:
The legal systems of the United States and Continental Europe differ in several ways. One major difference is that the US follows a common law system, which is based on the precedent set by previous court rulings, while Continental Europe follows a civil law system, which is based on a comprehensive legal code.
In other words, the US legal system is based on intent with laws providing guidance to courts to assess intent. In Turkey, the legal system writes everything down and courts assess if you followed the code.
I think even this conversation itself demonstrates how hard it's to moderate content in the internet. Maybe we need lawyers? :)
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>> instead the signs said "you have no reason to touch this"
I'm going to assume that those buttons were placed out of the reach of most three year-olds.
Hong Kong has a million written rules with harsh penalties that are never policed. It was bizarre to me but spoke volumes about the local culture!
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> until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures?
That contains its own embedded example. “This music is not being performed 1 hour after midnight; it is being performed 23 hours before midnight.”
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> Every human action is with an intent.
Not true, see sleepwalkers.
> 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.
> No, it's not assuming, it's interpreting based on prior experience in communication.
It's assuming the intent without sufficient context to know what it actually is. Because very little context was provided. And the context that was provided strongly implied that the rule was important.
> Then the sign would mention that, simple as that.
We don't even know if there was a sign. None of that was specified.
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> 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
This is how I interpreted the test, but you're making a good point.
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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.
I voted that a police car/ambulance driving into the park _was_ breaking the rules, though breaking the rules may be justifiable in some circumstances. The smoke signal example you gave is similar - if I’m lost, I care more about being found than the punishment for starting a fire. If the ‘no campfires’ rule was punishable by death (and enforced), perhaps I wouldn’t risk a smoke signal
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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.
> You pretty much have to assume intent, though?
That's the crux of the issue.
And the game calls this out at the very beginning. It encourages you not to speculate on if it should apply, just if it does apply.
The OPs assertion that this was easy missed the point.
> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.
I don't believe it was obvious, and it wasn't stated goal. These are vehicles. The rule applies to them.
The fact that we disagree is the entire point of this game.
Context always matters. Most people aren’t programmers or engineers and don’t appreciate or benefit from the level of micro-scoping that you crave.
A great example of when this does happen that you can google is parking signs in NYC. There’s a bunch of very specific rules that accommodate dozens of scenarios. As an engineer, I’d be hard pressed to actually determine the legality of a parking scenario in a more complex scenario.
At the end of the day, “No vehicles in the park” is a pretty clear instruction. The idea that first responders would be an exception is both covered in superseding law and a core principle. Preservation of human life supersedes the health of the turf.
> Regular expressions can describe context free shapes of symbols.
What is "shapes of symbols"? Do you mean "characters"? If you are trying to say that "regular languages" are a proper subset of (less expressive than) "context-free grammar" languages , probably best to leave it at that, and let people look up those well-documented terms if they want to learn more. Making up a new term distracts people who know the normal terms, and is just as confusing for people who don't.
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> 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.
Human nature is absolutely the problem, just the one that can't be fixed, just worked around.
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.
You should really look into how judges interpret laws (rules, basically). There are two schools I know of: purposivism and textualism (I agree with the latter and it doesn't take into account intentions. That's the basis of how the recent case Van Buren v US was decided, I would recommend reading it: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf). But in both, you have things like canons of interpretation and background principles and so on. It's always awesome to see how people who have to deal with the problem have thought about it, because they have usually invested a lot of time into it and come up with insights. See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation
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And now I’d say you’ve rediscovered part of the authors intent.
Shared intent, across cross border platforms, is awfully hard if not impossible to achieve with anything approaching consistency.
> 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.
This is core to the Gricean Maxim of Quantity [1], according to which one gives as much information as needed but no more. If the sign says "No vehicles in the park" and nothing else then any reasonable person should assume that the reason for the sign is so obvious that no further clarification is needed.
Unrelated, it is also the reason why a hot-dog is not a sandwich, pragmatically speaking.
[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html
> 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.
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
You're assuming another rule here, which not only isn't written but is even explicitly excluded in the very beginning of this experiment.
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> supersede some local rule
aka, there's some other rule that isn't listed then?
Which isn't what is being discussed here.
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> It doesn't matter, the rules on police and emergency vehicles usually supersede some local rule about a park.
Nobody said it was a local rule. It could be a federal rule about a federal park. And it could be there for a more important reason than keeping ATVs off the hiking trails.
The game didn't say the park is contained in another land. It's a "hypothetical park". It could even exist in a virtual reality that doesn't have any other rules for all we know.
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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.
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>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.
In fact, in Germany, everyone would be authorized to enter that park with a vehicle if it were necessary to avoid serious danger or to save others from serious danger. This is referred to as 'rechtfertigender Notstand'.
> 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.
Pretty sure that's because people need time to notice the siren and take appropriate action, not because of some rule
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> 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.
The instructions read:
> Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park." Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Violation of a rule is a logical operation. It's the answer that comes before the ", but ..." part. Things you explicitly don't have to do in the context of this game:
- You don't have to like the rule
- You don't have to consider exemptions (because that's not what the rule asks for)
You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated. I think it's absolutely fascinating that this is so controversial and a testament to the authors game design.
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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".
Except the blurb at the start clearly says there are no exemptions. The only rule is "no vehicles in the park". So all you're judging is 1.) is it a vehicle? and 2.) is it in the park?
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Here where I live, the latter is actually precisely how the traffic law enforcement works: emergency services get tickets in the post for traffic violations same as everyone else, and it is up to the officials to check their logs and respond with "the vehicle was responding to an incident", which is a valid defence and gets the violation dismissed; or not, as the case may be, if it turns out the crew ran a red light while on their way home or something.
In any case, the question of whether the rule was violated is entirely separate from the question of what, if anything, the consequences of this should be; and it is the former that I understood the game to be asking.
The fact that there is so much debate over the question of what the game was even asking the player to do, with both sides convinced that their interpretation is the obvious correct one, does as much to support the thesis that people have an enormous amount of trouble agreeing on the intent of a simple short piece of text as the rest of the game itself.
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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.
So you would've considered the Honda Civic to not be violating the rule, if it had been unregistered?
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My approach was that the tank and the emergency vehicles were all strictly violating the rule, and that in a reasonable world they would all have some external dispensation for being allowed to violate the rule.
Would a dune buggy be allowed?
"Honest, officer, it's unregistered!"
(driving a tank through the park)
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.
It's more complex: in many countries if an ambulance hits a car while running a red light because of an emergency, the ambulance is at fault, as they were breaking the rules.
So the rules still apply to them, they just won't be pursued on theoretical grounds (getting fined/arrested sheerly because of the infraction, without any other consequences)
> 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.
If you take moderation far enough you become a publisher
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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.
Yes, let's have chatgpt-5 decide what I can or cannot write, what a capital idea.
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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.
The whole discussion hinges on the definition of "vehicle", which is not defined. If I take my definition as being "a vehicle that meets the definitions of a motor vehicle in the UK Road Traffic Act 1988, but not including those in use as emergency service vehicles" then the majority are indeed correct. And that's how I answered, because it's consistent with my expectations for a sign like that which has been placed by a human authority. If you choose the rather broader definition (from Wikipedia) of "machine that transports people or cargo" then more scenarios are excluded. But that's a more fuzzy definition too: is a remote controlled car (neither carrying people nor cargo) really not included in the category of "vehicle"? In practice you won't typically find humans placing signs with that intent.
So I agree with the parent and grand-parent comment. Without a context in which to understand the terms presented, even an apparently-clear statement and introduction can be entirely unclear. I suspect that if you pointed to an actual physical sign and a scenario unfolding in front of them, and asked people whether they objected, rather than asking as an abstract concept on a computer screen, you'd get a different distribution of answers.
Right, but Dan only has to agree with himself, not with everybody else who reads the guidelines and tries to extrapolate from them.
> 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.
On the contrary, "precise rules" make things harder for many people in the community, because the more precise you get, the more attention people pay to them, and the more work they put into getting as far with those precise rules as they can (after all, if the rules are precise, surely it's OK to come right up to their edge, like the railings at a scenic overlook).
One weird subtext of this discussion is the idea that imprecision in the guidelines is costing "the subjects" something. But getting moderated doesn't cost you anything; on the contrary, it costs Dan. You just adjust and move on.
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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.
In the absence of a definition of vehicle I chose to define it as any device that is a conveyance. Thus a wagon, rowboat, and skateboard are all vehicles in the park (even if not in use).
However, the tank was not functional. Since it cannot convey it is therefore not a conveyance and therefore not a vehicle. It’s only shaped like a familiar one.
I matched the majority only 11% of the time.
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A non functional tank. It is the same as a painting of a tank or a statue.
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I was similar, a bicycle is a vehicle and I even called the toycar a vehicle because I think they were talking about those cars kids build and race down hills. I was considering more about "how is this typically powered?" and "what is the F=ma if it hit someone?"
If it's typically not human powered, a human typically rides it, it's typically heavy, and typically accelerates enough to seriously injure another person with minimal damage to yourself it's a vehicle. That's why skateboards and horses aren't vehicles but the bike and toy car was. Even the bike is dicey but it's fairly unanimous throughout the world that a bike is a vehicle.
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.
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
Allow me to introduce you to the dictionary[0]
Vehicle (noun)
1. a means of carrying or transporting something
...such as
... a: motor vehicle
... b: a piece of mechanized equipment
2 : an agent of transmission : carrier
3: a medium through which something is expressed, achieved, or displayed
----------------
You're thinking of specifically a __motorized__ vehicle. Which is a different thing than "vehicle". I think you'll agree that a bicycle and skateboard carry people and transport them. This is the same reason a wagon violates the rule. Almost everything on there was a vehicle. I think the only ambiguous ones are paper airplane, matchbox car, toy boat, and kite and I said those weren't because they can't transport things and are not motorized. But hey, technically they can be a medium through which someone expresses their joy.
No painting or dancing in the park.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vehicle
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Skateboard is harder.
But in many many jurisdiction bicycles is explicitly a vehicle. One that people over certain age cannot drive on sidewalks and must use road. Or designated ways. Ofc, it is also banned in some places.
Also it sometimes acts unlike pedestrian like having to yield to cars when crossing safety crossings.
Obviously some people think bicycles are vehicles and some don't. For this reason, I applied the logic that if the park wanted to ban vehicles including bikes, they would write "No vehicles, no cycles" and so while I think a bike is a vehicle, I don't think it violates the intent behind the "no vehicles" rule.
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I can't fanthom how a "no vehicles" sign would NOT apply to bicycles. What else would you call a bicycle if not a vehicle? It would be clear to me that park is catering to pedestrians and not cyclists (or car drivers).
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I similarly can't fathom how a bicycle is anything other than a vehicle. It has wheels and gears, it's a machine, it speeds you up significantly, you get one an off it, you have to learn to ride it, it can carry additional items. And you have to follow traffic rules (which is like circular reasoning but shows that governments say it is a vehicle).
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.
The second page of instructions actually specifically addressed that: "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
I went with "yes, violation" with the understanding that it's one that would be allowed. Perhaps I was wrong to mix "would" and "should".
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I even disagree that there was any nuance. I wasn't told "you're doing content moderation, there's a rule, the rule is violated but there could be some mitigating circumstances, do you allow the content?". I was told: is there a vehicle in the park, and I said yes because a police car is a vehicle and it's in the park.
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Yes, this is the only thing I disagreed with the majority on, and that’s because I answered “was there a vehicle in the park”. I don’t think anyone disagrees that the vehicle should be able to go to the park and we should amend the rule. I came away thinking content moderation with better rules is actually quite achievable
And the instructions very clearly state that you should not take into account whether in this case it would be OK to violate the rule. Just whether the rule was broken or not. As such, a police car or ambulance in the park very clearly violate the rule and thus you must choose that answer.
The question wasn’t about being called out on it (or punished/prosecuted/whatever). It was simply asking if it violated the rule.
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.
The question specified that it was only asking whether the rule was violated, not whether the violation should be permitted (e.g. because the police doing their job is more important than the rule)
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.
In other words, absent any actual formal specified intent, people interpret the rules to best suit their own self-interest.
if you got kids at the park, you'd imagine bikes as being a nuisance. If you're the one riding the bike, you'd imagine the park is meant for you to enjoy and thus the boke isnt a nuisance.
This is exactly the point being made by the questionaire!
Or, small children annoy people with bikes, because some people try to take small children where not appropriate, and this is dangerous when small children change direction unpredictably.
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Those people get annoyed by everything and try to impose on people and prevent joy in the world.
Bikes riding fast in parks and murdering children does not happen anywhere at any significant scale. It's a made up fear, just like the "stranger danger" of the past.
Anger at cyclists for driving fast and breaking laws is an emotional response to feeling jealous that bikes are zipping past them while they're sitting there waiting in traffic for 10 minutes at a red light.
How often do you see motorists get pissed off and honk at other motorists running a red or yellow on a left hand turn? They want people to break the law in that instance but will honk at cyclists for the most minor of transgressions. That's all they proof I need to conclude motorists don't give a shit about the law or safety (the classic I just want cyclists to follow the law because if they don't I can hurt them and I'll have to live with a guilty conscience! defense) and care more about reducing their travel times.
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.
Absolutely.
And we're showing why the author is correct: because a lot of people jump to conclusions, hold fast to their assumptions, and assume everyone else thinks like them; even after having had it all clearly explained with a tailor-made interactive game, and even in the face of abundant direct evidence to the contrary.
> 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
Code 2 means emergency vehicles are responding to an emergency, have their lights and sirens on, and are thus permitted to violate traffic rules.
Code 3 means that emergency vehicles are responding to a non-emergency, backup for a scene which is mostly under control, etc. But it is not urgent enough to warrant lights or sirens.
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> 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.
how is it getting into the park? If it's rolling, IMO it's still a vehicle. If a truck is dropping it off, still a no-no
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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?
Aha, I love a man of principle. I would say that I would have had a sandwich in that case, as I believe that the structure of the food item should only be considered as it enters your mouth, completely removed from an explanation as to how that food item came to be up to that point.
However, I wonder you you would reconcile an uncut, folded pizza not being a sandwich against a meatball marinara, which to my understanding is a single piece of sliced bread with meat and sauce in the middle. Is this not a sandwich?
If you gnaw off the fold, does the remaining part become a sandwich? If you bite off a piece that excludes the fold, does it become sandwich in the mouth? Fascinating mystery, right up there with the transubstration in that cannibal religion!
so an open-face sandwich is technically not a sandwich in your definition then! Even tho it's in the name!
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Is a pizza folded in half on itself and cut at the fold just a cheese and pepperoni melt?
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.
Ok, I wrote "any" but I think the one with bread in the middle would be accepted by most (club sandwich). Can't edit on this app..
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.
11% here too.. Although it looks like 11% is the majoritiy of results here.. Interesting
Ah, a fellow member of the elite 11%!
Now, I wonder which specific items we agreed on, if any.
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> 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?
My view is that a ravioli is a type of pop tart, which I do view as a sandwich
No, they are small dumplings
Sandwiches have open sides
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."
> 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."
>> 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__).
Seems like they did
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> 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?
You're missing the point of the game.
It isn't simple.
> 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.
Disingenuous?
The game is trying to demonstrate that content moderation, even using simple explicit rules, is hard and will lead to disagreements.
The game has absolutely nothing to do with whether vehicles should actually be allowed in the hypothetical park, let alone if there should be fines.
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The only one that I don't understand is the horse.
A horse is not a vehicle. A horse is a horse, of course.
And no one can talk to a horse, of course.
> "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.
The people do.
But the moderator can still use vague rules to do what people would not agree upon while still claiming it is within rules, and there always will be someone agreeing with it
That was not how I interpreted the results. Nor the discussion elsewhere on this page where some people included skateboards and bicycles under "vehicle" and some did 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.
edit: curiosity won, not all questions, GPT4: https://gist.github.com/comboy/71caac8afdc1b92d103c4ec7c42e4...
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."
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.
> You wouldn't be trying to give a ticket to planes flying overhead
except you have just applied an assumption (which is often true) that may not be true depending on circumstances - that the planes were excluded because it couldn't have caused any negative effect.
For example, if the park had been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese#Isolation_and_unco... , and the intention was to keep the indigenous peoples isolated.
But this isn't a part of the rule, and it is an interpretation of the rule by the administrator. A different administrator might interpret planes that fly higher than audible altitude would be OK, while another one might consider a visual detection altitude to be a violation. And another might consider no altitude to be permissible (because if they crashed right there, they'd be falling into the park).
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If you didn't think a bicycle violated the rule, what about an e-bike? Or a fully battery-powered bike that doesn't require pedaling?
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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
The game was pretty clear that the question was not if it "should be allowed to violate the rule", but if it violates the rule in the first place.
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> 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?
The instructions specifically say not to apply this kind of logic.
Well my view was that the answer is yes the ambulance violates the rule, but violating the rule is morally fine there. But still pedantically yes the ambulance does violate the no vehicles rule.
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> matches the intent of the sign
GGP made up the sign. The instructions describe a rule, not a sign.
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?
Yes? I don’t understand the idea that being allowed to disregard a rule means that you aren’t violating it at all.
The whole exercise specifically asked us to ignore context, "common sense", etc. If we were supposed to consider an exception for park services, it would have been explicitly stated.
Of all the forums for an insistence on rigidly, literally following rules to make people's heads explode, HN is not exactly the most surprising, but it is one of the funniest.
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> If people don't agree on it, then the clarity you feel is an illusion.
Well, no, people can just be wrong.
Wrong people can have quite a lot of influence in an internet forum, so that's a distinction without much difference.
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> 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.
> There are people with authoritative knowledge, and you ask them the questions, and they give a "yes or no".
Given that there have been many cases of lawmakers not understanding the impact of their own laws. Contracts unraveled by punctuation errors, complex interactions between rules, people managing parks often not being the same as people writing the rules, ... . I find this claim to be completely removed from reality.
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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.
You weren't being asked to enforce a rule, you were being asked to determine if a rule has been violated.
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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.
Yes, exactly my interpretation - which makes this a rule violation. Whether this rule violation should be persecuted is a different matter though :)
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.
Yes, I'm not questioning whether in real life this sign would cause issues or not. The question is "Does this violate the rule?", To which the answer is "yes" for an ambulance.
Whether it's fine in certain scenarios to break some rules it's a different topic though.
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> The reason to allow emergency vehicles to go through the park must then outweigh the benefit of the ‘no vehicles allowed rule’.
Exactly, the Hippocratic oath supersedes the no vehicle rule.
> 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.
It sure _may_ be. Nevertheless, the efficient way of solving the problem is making concise and accurate rules, and perhaps explicitly expressing the intent.
If the rule or intent is ambiguous, problems may be considered inevitable.
In the above game, you really can't guess the intent. Of course this is partly, because it's an abstract example. But the intent can't really be "no cars or carsy things", because the real intent in "no cars in the park" would be perhaps a combination of no loud noises, no high speed, no heavy objects, no pollution etc.
I realize this may not be an agreeable point since I only got 11% in the game with the assumption that a vehicle is something used for transport (excluding wearables) and that the rules would be seen somewhere in or around the park (so not in the air).
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.
If it's even odds then I expect it's a losing bet no matter what anyone writes down - that's why in the imagined scenario it's forced. The pertinent question isn't whether you expect to lose money by playing, it's whether you expect to lose less money by including non-motorised vehicles in your write-up than by excluding them.
Personally my instinct is that I'd lose more money by specifying skateboards and bikes as I've usually seen those addressed by their own signs rather than being included under "vehicle".