Comment by atchoo
3 years ago
> 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.
I think it's a fascinating practical example of how "baked in" cognitive bias is. The sort of people that use HN tend to be highly analytical. Yet nonetheless we see a massive public display of people rationalizing their failure to directly answer the question that was very clearly and unambiguously asked while pretending that they did.
The logical exercise is extremely close (by design) to one that commonly occurs in everyday life. In real life people want to bend the rules to achieve a certain outcome when applying them. They don't want to say "well a rule was violated but I'm exercising discretion". That's on full display here even though no meaningful outcome is actually being determined in this case.
> pretending that they did
In psychology, different comprehension of what rules mean is a fundamental difference between personality types. It might better to accept that different people understand the world differently instead of sorting them into right and wrong by your own biases.
> They don't want to say "well a rule was violated but I'm exercising discretion"
From the other perspective, hyper-rationality is a dysfunction where excess analytical/logic/precision prevents an individual from understanding what language means or how to act in the real world. To believe a rule is violated "because of logic" instead of trying to understand intent would be an example of that.
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"break" / "violate" have same semantic ambiguity. You can't separate language from the rest of one's comprehension of the world e.g. most would probably agree that in general, "a rule" cannot prevent someone from saving a life. Overriding moral necessity is built into the understanding of the limitations of "a rule". It's implicit and does not need to be spelled out explicitly.
When you face this sort of thing in philosophy, the clarifying step is to move past language and look at behaviour which would be the enforcement.
> You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated
You can't dismiss ambiguity with a "you just need to"!
In conventional language we get the ambiguity expressed as distinctions like "technically you have a broken a rule but..." i.e. there are "technical" interpretations of rules that are specific/pedantic/unrealistic that in practice are not what is meant or enforced.
I expect there will be a desire here to over value "technical" interpretations as if they were more accurate having stripped cultural conventions and such but that is a means to misinterpret language not find truth.
Please note that I have 0 interest in inciting anger in this absolutely (to me) fascinating topic. The way I present my arguments are very strongly detached from how this should be handled in any real world scenario. On that part from, what you wrote, I am relatively certain that we would be in easy and relaxed agreement. I don't want people to die in parks because EMTs are vehicles. Please keep that in mind while reading on :)
> You can't dismiss ambiguity with a "you just need to"!
Granted, ambiguity is built into language – for example, what exactly is a vehicle seems to not be conclusively answered for every edge case, and I would allow for the confusion around that – but if you are creating additional ambiguity by overloading the task you have been given and adding "technical" distinctions and "implicit" rules, you are not only no longer playing the game, which is for you to judge if the proposed rule has been violated.
You can of course chose to not judge if this rule has been violated in favor of something else you think more interesting. In that case you are playing a different game.
Interpretation is a tough one. Something might be technical or implicit to me. It might not be technical or implicit to you. Or vice versa. Mostly, on most things, we might agree – but if we do it this way, there are bound to be cases, where we don't, which is precisely the dilemma the creator of the experiment is talking to.
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No room of 100 people will ever agree if a rule that was broken was only technically broken. What should be an exception is in fact an opinion.
Rules can absolutely prevent you from saving a life, for example a rule preventing rescue workers from entering a dangerous area like a cave until conditions improve. Or a police no chase rule.
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