Comment by edmundsauto
3 years ago
All the discussions over interpretation are missing the point of the exercise, which is to show how hard it is to find agreement over something as emotionally neutral as "is the vehicle in the park".
Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".
I am kind of floored at how badly all the top comments have missed the point, considering how clearly the point was made by the author.
It has basically nothing to do with your interpretation, or how "good" you are at understanding the literal or intended meaning of the sign. The point is about how hard it is for all of us to agree on these matters.
Except the top comments aren’t doing that. They’re all saying it’s a flawed contrived example and despite that the actual results show most people agree. And not only that, the questions get ranked by decreasing agreement which shows that it’s pretty easy to make a cut off if put up to vote.
Are bitcoins allowed in the park or beanie babies since people consider them investment vehicles? Are pill capsules allowed in the park as they are vehicles for medicine? Are brains allowed in the park because they are vehicles for consciousness?
All the example shows is that rules need definitions or they need juries. And why is subjectivity even bad? It’s impossible to do anything without some degree of it. It’s also impossible not to have rules, like there are hundreds of unstated ones going on all the time and no one including the author is objecting to them. They aren’t objecting to the rule against DNS attacks or a thousand other examples.
We agree that it is flawed and it is obviously contrived, because the difficult decisions happen at scale and in edge cases. This is content moderation on easy mode; difficult stuff happens at scale and in the greyest of areas and have to be applied consistently.