Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 years ago
> 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.
Thanks, I should check it out.
How do they explain Germany though?
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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.
> 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.
I don’t think that is the only possible outcome. Where moderation is done well lot of people, in fact most people, simply don’t notice it. They just have a pleasant time with other pleasant people. So no, “everyone whining“ is not the best possible outcome. “Most people having a good time, a minority whining” is the best possible outcome. And of course it takes hard work, and maybe even a little bit of luck with the initial conditions.
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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.
> I would definitely take the Turkish way of shrugging off rules
Having lived most of my life in Turkey, it gets old really fast.
For one thing, there's a certain culture that is a mixture of extreme fatalism, not giving a shit about anything that doesn't immediately benefit you, low respect to other people, and the worst part of it, seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive, that is so pervasive in Turkey.
When this culture is given a lax rule structure, what you get is a chaotic, every man for himself, free-for-all place devolving further and further into a low CGI Mad Max movie. Only reason why it still hasn't completely collapsed into chaos is because people are still afraid of the punishment. If you think I'm exaggerating, next time you're there ask a restaurant owner if you can smoke, right under the no-smoking sign and pay attention to what they say: do they tell you that'd disturb other customers? or do they tell you of the ₺20k fine they got that one time and they can't let you because of that.
I can tell for you as a lived experience that significantly more people in Turkey cut in lines than people in Germany. Why do they do that I ask myself, the only explanation I could find until now is because fuck you, that's why. If you were as cunning, as manly, as bold as they are you'd be at the front of the line, but you aren't, so fuck you. They know there won't be repercussions for that action, and that's the only bar to clear for them to do it.
Maybe this way of living fits some, I myself find this despicable. I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world, but I fully believe it seeps into everything else in the society and over time makes it unlivable.
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Even in an imaginary ideal environment, if act of obeying existing rules is debatable, there'll be the problem of everyone considering themselves as a sufficient authority on making judgements with a limited context and a huge bias on interpretations that benefit them. At one point it just makes sense to ask people to use the right channels to push change instead of 80 million people making individual judgements on every issue every day and hope for the best.
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> Spent a few weeks in Munich where I was shouted at for crossing a totally empty street against a crosswalk light.
I don't understand this. I live near Munich, people cross against a red light all the time. Maybe you were doing it near children? That's a real social faux-pas, because they're not supposed to normalize jaywalking.
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I'm Argentinian. I love breaking the rules and I love living in a place where rules are rarely enforced. It's almost a sport for me. "Why? Why should go along with this? Fuck that"
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I grew up overseas, moved to America and I have felt absolutely liberated by the freedom I now have when it comes to following rules. I think it's productive that people can definitely choose to follow their own gut and conscience when it comes to their own lives.
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> I grew up in America which is fairly rule-obeying.
I also grew up there. I think there’s a low level compliance with what I’d call daily/minor rules. Cigarette butts tossed wherever you are when you finish one, speed limits are barely even advisory, jaywalking widely practiced, etc.
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"Lived in Australia and New Zealand which are disgustingly, obsequiously devoted to following tiny guidelines."
As someone born in, and having spent most of my life in New Zealand, I have no idea what this means. I'm not being defensive, but I just don't understand. Maybe I'm 'too close' to see it. Perhaps I'm thinking about civic rules (e.g. jay-walking, speeding) and you're thinking of, e.g. industry like construction?
As an Australian it is news to me that we are obsessed with obeying "tiny guidelines".
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I think what you are noticing is the difference between a liberal democracy and autocracy. Where in one there exists a social construct of rules, where in the other rules require enforcement to exist, as they do not exist in the social consciousness
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.
Well, I had similar thoughts. I am reading the comments about laws and rules here and I am thinking: You people have never been in Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan.
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.
Agree. IMHO, the problem can be solved with enhanced bandwidth(that is, to use things beyond text, IRL we have mimics and voice tone so emojis are a start) of the communication.
> 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.
That sounds fantastic actually fighting everyday bribery is such a nice feeling. I spent some time in a country with corrupt officers it was a real life drain for me, it was why I could not live abroad.
The Wikipedia article is a little bit light on the bribery aspect, but there seems to have been considerable efforts made before 2012. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Poland
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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.
Well, the consensus is that the no music after midnight rule was an attempt to squash the western lifestyle(it had serious impact on the livelihood of the musicians and the venues). At places where the rule was enforced people simply continue their night somewhere without live music. It made no sense in the context of Covid, it made sense in the context of islamist trying to destroy the non-islamists.
Anyway, what's the difference between a rule and a guideline? Is a red light a rule or guide? IMHO Guideline is a literature, rules are arrangements with an intent(i.e. let's agree to stop on red light with the intent of organising the flow so we don't crash into each other).
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It’s 100% ridiculous.
The virus doesn’t care when the gathering is happening.
So why would you forbid live music, or gatherings, but only after midnight?!
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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? :)
> From ChatGPT:
Please do not use a hallucinating LLM as a source for any substantive issue.
>> 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.”
It was a range
> 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.
> And the context that was provided strongly implied that the rule was important.
You're assuming that.
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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.
The test says not to interpret it like that:
"please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
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
In the US, usually the law is structured in such a way that the powers of the police are at the state level. A city or park authority isn’t empowered to restrict their actions in pursuit of her duty.
At the end of the day, as a person living their life, it really isn’t your business to know whether an airplane is intruding on park airspace. You should not drive in the park as a private citizen. If you’re a ambulance driver on official business, you should know what applies to you.
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For anyone who has read the introduction, that's the only valid answer to that question in the context of this game:
"You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules [...]. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
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The thing is, you don't generally get to know the context or the intent. You can't have a discussion with the sign, nor can it lecture you. A rule against starting a fire might be because the land owner doesn't like burnt patches on their meadows, or it might be because the vegetation is super dry and if you set fire to it you kill not only yourself but also all the surrounding villages, or something in between.
You could argue that the sign should include enough context to convince the reader to follow its instructions, but (a) you end up with signs with tons of writing in tiny font that everyone just ignores because TLDR (and yes, these do actually happen quite frequently in parks around here), and (b) if there is some combination of letters you can put on a sign that works to stop people lighting fires, the meadow guy will put that on his sign because he doesn't want fires and those syllables work. So you've just pushed the problem one level back, but the real question remains the same: do you risk doing the thing you want to, or do you respect the sign?
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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.
Ha! "shapes" was a typo there for me. I meant collections or strings. Was trying not to bias it too far to where I was going.
But, yes. There is some ambiguity there. That is still perfectly consistent with my point. To think that you can separate use of language from the intent of the use is a fool's errand. One that we often partake in.
Consider for even more fun, many laws are enforced such that the intent of the law is not the only intent consulted, but the intent of the person that broke it. I don't know why humanity is full of so many smart people that all think they can make intent not necessary. When most places context is removed, the results are often catastrophic.
> 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
The justification for textualism is that it's better to be wrong in a precise way, than to try to be right in a fuzzy way. But both models are wrong. Bit rot is real and applies to laws. It's not possible to keep laws up to date with what they would be if lawmakers had infinite resources to dedicate to lawmaking and maintenance, even ignoring the huge issue of democratic consensus and parliamentary procedure issues.
(All models are wrong! Some useful!)
The law is a tool which imperfectly models the goals of the lawmakers.
For lawyers judges, the beauty of law is that the law has plenty of room to support contradictory interpretations.
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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.
Both "No vehicles" and "in the park" already require you to have external knowledge. What is a vehicle? What constitutes park grounds?
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Correct. But you (and the experimenter) are assuming that rules exist in a vacuum, which in practice it isn't
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Yes, but that is an actual situation in real world.
> supersede some local rule
aka, there's some other rule that isn't listed then?
Which isn't what is being discussed here.
Yes, you're assuming that this is a jurisdiction where police or ambulances have authority over local rules
> 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.
Yeah, the game is very specific about other rules not applying. It's about "what exactly is and is not in" (in the airliner and space station question) and about "what exactly is and is not vehicle" (all others)
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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