I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is. In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed. This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.
I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.
I don't think you do get the point - the point is that unless you define every single word in a rule (like how legislation has a definitions page), it's very hard to do simple content moderation in a way that everyone agrees
Regardless of whether you do actually get the point, when multiple comments indicate that they think that you didn't get the point that tells you that you have failed to communicate that you got the point. Doubling down doesn't help
This whole debate is funny because it's exactly what the game itself is about. Everyone sees this as a very clear, unambiguous thing, and the other side must be misunderstanding it. If only I explain it the right way, they'll be forced to concede to my point of view. It's the only valid one! They can't possibly understand it and come to a different conclusion!
I do not know how to communicate "I got the point" more than "I got the point". Please tell me how to communicate "I got the point" better than saying "I got the point".
They think I didn't get the point, but they're wrong. Hope that helps!
It's definitely a rhetorical challenge, and even if TFA is using a poor analogy, it does serve to illustrate this problem, which feels to me like part of what it is trying to communicate.
I have a lot of experience thinking that I get the point of someone else's argument, and then realizing later that I didn't actually get the point, or not in a way that was useful to both parties in the conversation
When I don't feel understood it's usually because the counterparty hasn't said things that allow me to recognize that they have internalized what I'm trying to communicate
Changing tack a little, I think that this is one of the things that I admire about some legal writing, that they are intentionally addressing the act of communication in addition to the substance of what they are communicating. In addition there is a recognition that their words have consequence
In this case, there are just three angry internet commenters who want to tell someone else they're wrong. It's not GP's problem. I agree with GP -- it's a bad metaphor. GP doesn't owe you litigating that in depth.
This is silly, though? Rules and legislation is also usually layered in such a way that other rules can supercede.
Such that, if your model of how rules and regulations work is that they are all active at all times.... I have really bad news for you. For fun, consider that there is still the 18th amendment to the US constitution. There is just also now the 21st amendment to go with it. And at no point did we have to redefine words for that trick.
I'm not sure if you do, honestly. The point of the exercise is exactly the ambiguity that stood out to you.
Also, the question was very explicitly not asking if an ambulance in the park is "okay." The question is asking is it a rule violation.
It's an excellent analogy, in my opinion, because what it's trying to be analogous to is the general ambiguity of language that makes content moderation difficult. It's hardly even an analogy because it is about precisely an identical concept: determining whether behavior is violating a rule.
it's a nearly perfect analogy for a laymans view of what content moderation should look like.
"my children will see no violence" looks wonderful on paper but there are a great many edge cases where this simple rule is plainly broken all the time in harmless ways.
in reality, what crosses the line one has in mind when they create the simple rule is created is far, far more complex than anyone who makes these rules is prepared to admit.
there is so little "black and white" in these things; it's almost entirely "grey" areas. that's what this quiz is meant to convey.
Heh, I thought the quiz was almost entirely not grey areas. It seems like the police car and ambulance were about as gray as it got, the others seem pretty obviously non-gray.
That's why the analogy is so good! The police car and ambulance were the most obvious ones to me (other than the Honda Civic); surfboard and ice skates were much tougher. It shows how we're really seeing things through our own lenses, even when they seem so obvious that no one could conceivably disagree.
Also interesting: the fact that 50% more people described a skateboard being used as a vehicle than a skateboard being carried.
That makes a ton of sense. I was always confused by that. Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone. Those comments were always greenlit. Maybe I just take stuff to literal. But some people sure have a hard-on for the death penalty...
For whatever reason, it seem like people usually exclude acts undertaken in connection with the state’s monopoly on violence from the scope of these things.
The spirit is that governement is an extension of "the people" and as such this violence is an extension of their own - i.e. in a healthy society the violence perpetrated bt the state is fully known and sanctionned by its citizens.
Like having prisons or letting police use lethal force on dangerous people, some things fit this description - but at some point lines have to be drawn and the leashes have to be reigned in if the violence is not agreed upon anymore - institutionalised racism and the likes.
Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
All rules have countless unspoken caveats and are inherently only able to be interpreted in a cultural context; rules cannot be made so specific as to remove the need for that context. Problems come in when essential parts of that context are not shared by everyone who interacts with the rules.
> Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
Having rules against advocating for violence means that you want to prohibit such calls (otherwise you would have written down such exceptions and admit that calling for violence is sometimes OK).
Let me put it this way: what Reddit secretly wants is not standing up against advocating for violence, but avoiding the reputation risk that might happen if there exist to many post that advocate for violence in a way that causes an outcry.
In other words: the hidden problem is rather Reddit's "secret" agenda behind the rules.
In the US legal system, probably elsewhere as well, we have the concept of an "affirmative defense." That means "I committed the crime, but it's OK because of extra facts." That's different from denying one or more elements of the crime.
Example #1: I didn't poison Joe. I was out of town when it happened.
Example #2: I poisoned Joe. He had been sentenced to death, and my job is prison executioner. That's why I injected him with poison.
The second example is an affirmative defense. A murder occurred, but it was not illegal because it was authorized by the state.
I have a feeling that lawyers who took this quiz were more likely to answer yes for the ambulance and police car, but nonlawyers would answer no. That's because most people were answering the question "would they get in trouble?" But lawyers might have been thinking "is there a valid defense to a violation that actually did occur?"
In your example, calling for the death penalty isn't advocating for violence because executing someone in the justice system is legally permissible (let's not get into ethics or morality). The Reddit rule is generally understood to cover only illegal violence.
Strictly speaking, I think calling for the death penalty is advocating for a legal ruling. The violence following such a ruling is a second-order consequence.
It's calling for the state to kill someone. Doesn't seem any less an advocation of violence than advocating for a vigilante killing or advocating for some specific person to do the killing.
I was solely addressing the fact that both are violence, and asking for either is advocating for violence. Exercise for the reader to decide if they think either is moral or just, which is a completely different issue.
By that logic, no one is advocating violence unless they intend to participate in the violent act directly. It’s a logically consistent position, but it’s also a highly implausible one.
Of course one can advocate for violence without participating in it directly. For example, you could call for a riot. Or for the death of someone directly.
No reasonable person would confuse “the traitor should get the death penalty” with “kill the traitor!”.
I guess I’m not a reasonable person then? Advocating for state sanctioned killing is no different to me, in terms of advocating violence per se, than advocating anyone else do the killing. There are surely other distinctions to be made, but “the state should implement violence” isn’t categorically different from any other actor in the same configuration.
Now the interesting question is, what would happen if I was to ask for the death penalty on a crime that does not carry the death penalty? Or only carries the death penalty in countries with legal systems that we object to, like Iran?
> Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone.
Note that taking it literally even calling for imprisonment is advocating for violence (unless convict accepts imprisonment voluntarily and not under threat of legal violence by law enforcement).
I mostly thought it was easy to tell if the rule was being violated (the vast majority disagreed with me), but where it gets much more complicated is deciding if a rule should be allowed to be violated. I think most people don't want rules that are blindly enforced without consideration to circumstance/context. We carve out exceptions to rules everywhere in life.
I think what's being noted is slightly more nuanced than what you're responding to. The analogy is slightly flawed because a few additional indicators remove a lot of the ambiguity, which is possibly not the case at all with moderation, which is often about far more nebulous things. In that way, the comparison is flawed.
Asa an example, I'm seeing most people (based on people saying they match the majority at 11%, but there's some indication that may be broken) that chose to go with the common understanding of what the sign meant (as opposed to some literal definition they decided to follow) seemed to have an inherent idea of how we might better define "vehicle" to match those expectations (such as whether the conveyance provides power itself or whether it requires power from a person, or whether it houses a person, or whether it is assisting normal motion in some manner).
Also, without further analysis of the data it's hard to tell whether removing or redefining slightly a few questions might bring a core consensus far above 11%. And even if we can get this specific question to a good consensus, there's no real proof that it indicates that content moderation could similarly come to a consensus on specific concepts (I doubt it could for many important things).
In those ways, this is a clever and interesting experiment to take part in, but I'm not sure how much it really says about content moderation, as I think (as perhaps the GP thinks) it was made slightly too simplistic in an effort to be approachable, and in that case lost some of the aspects it was trying to convey.
Yeah, he needs a better example. Vehicle has some ambiguity when you hint about it in the introduction, but not much. If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere. But then I don't know how people would get into the park.
And separately, a lot of the ambiguity in content moderation comes from people trying to frame what they don't agree with as something that's against the rules. If a vocal group doesn't like ice skaters, you can be sure they'll be giving detailed explanation why skates are a literal vehicle.
> If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere.
Perhaps as a non-native speaker I miss some linguistic subtlety, but does not "mode of transportation" mean "thing to (help) bring person from A to B"? Thus whether skating is a mode of transportation (or not) should be rather clear.
In this sense it should not matter whether the transportation is recreational or not, i.e. you can also recreationally drive a car or recreationally go by train.
What are A and B here? Points in space? Distinct venues? Are we counting the primary use or any possible use? (e.g. most of the time, the point for drivers is the transportation, but most of the time, the point for skateboarders is leisure). These things are why I agree with the above poster that mode of transportation is practically more ambiguous than vehicle
> most of the time, the point for drivers is the transportation, but most of the time, the point for skateboarders is leisure
Via going by skateboard, a transportation happens. Whether you do it recreationally or not does not have anything to do with whether a skateboard is a mode of transportation (or not).
You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles," they are usually things like "no hateful language," which is so vague, that "no vehicles" is beginning to look pretty cut-and-dry by comparison
Is it? It seems there's a clear majority that vehicle = operational motor vehicle. The only two that are even close to 50/50nare the non functioning memorial tank, and the bicycle. I guess that shows a disagreement between those assuming functioning is a requirement, and those reading into the intent (which is devices operating at human scale in pedestrian spaces capable of achieving a speed that would cause injury). But neither of those interpretations are surprising
> You completely totally and absolutely missed the point. It is about moderation, and rules there are usually MORE vague than "no vehicles,"
my complaint - that "no vehicles" isn't a great analogy - is because it's not vague enough. I didn't state that outright, you just assumed something different.
>
I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is.
Exactly. I being a non-native English speaker, just to be sure, looked up in a dictionary: the most common German translation of "vehicle" is "Fahrzeug".
Of course, as it is quite common, there do exist laws in Germany
Just to bring up a linguistic point (it is far more common in German than in English to carefully analyze words if subtle parts of the meaning are to be cleared up): actually, one could argue (contrary to the Wikipedia article) that "Fahrzeug" comes from "fahren" (to drive); thus a "Flugzeug" (airplane) is not a Fahrzeug, because it flies (Flug -> flight) instead of driving (but as mentioned: the Wikipedia article states a different opinion: Flugzeuge are Luftfahrzeuge, while, say, cars are Landfahrzeuge, i.e. both vehicles belong to sub-categories of Fahrzeuge).
---
But back to the topic: as a non-native English speaker
- all my arguments are based on the most common German translation "Fahrzeug" of "vehicle". What if some subtleties are lost in this translation?
- I doubt that the typical English native speaker tends to think as deeply about words as is not unusual in Germany (when I did analyses of English words to native English speakers they nearly always admitted that they never ever thought of such analyses)
The crux of this really is about whether the ambulance is violating the rule "no fahrzeug in the park".
Personally, I feel it's unamigious that the ambulance is violating the rule as written. Whether it should be granted an exception to the rule is a different question. Such is the difficulties of content moderation.
It's also apparent to me how a rule enforcer sufficiently distant from the scenarios would declare that the space station violates the "no vehicles in the park" rule, no matter how ridiculous that sounds.
It seems pretty spot on to me! A "vehicle", like "hate speech" or "words that glorify violence", is an category that humans create, and the things that fit in that category vary from person to person and situation to situation.
I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?
think the fundamental difference is that “vehicle” can be broken down into a number of concrete subcategories that cover the vast majority of vehicles that people use in practice, while “hate speech” and “speech glorifying violence” are often very nebulous and hard to define.
It's true that “vehicle” can be vague, but it's also true that in many contexts it's well-defined. The very common ”no entry for vehicular traffic” road sign applies to bikes and mopeds and cars, but not pedestrians, wheelchair users and roller skaters, for example.
Similarly, you can operationalize the “no vehicles allowed in the park” rule by enumerating the different types of vehicles people might wish to drive in the park:
- A bike? No.
- A moped? No.
- An unpowered scooter? Yes.
- A powered scooter? No.
- A skateboard? Yes.
- Roller skates? Yes.
- A wheelchair? Yes.
- A powered wheelchair? Yes.
- A car? No.
etc. The point isn't whether you agree with all these decisions (maybe skateboards shouldn't be allowed in the park?), but rather that you can enumerate two or three dozen vehicles and cover virtually all the vehicles people might possibly use in real life. Occasionally new categories need to be added (e.g., electric bikes or drones weren't really common 30 years ago) but mostly this can settle all possible debates.
And yes, it's still possible for some weirdo to build a supercharged wheelchair that can go 80 kph, but that's the extreme exception, and if the guy keeps driving through the park at 80 kph repeatedly eventually he will get arrested and then he will claim he is in the right because he's driving what's technically a wheelchair, and then a judge will rule that a wheelchair that can go 80 kph isn't actually a wheelchair in the sense intended by the law, and the rules will be updated to say “powered wheelchairs with a maximum speed of 15 kph” and that's the end of that.
The problem with “hate speech” and “glorifying violence” is exactly that they are very hard to nail down in an objective and clear way, and the majority of cases where someone is banned for “hate speech” involves vague and subjective judgement.
For a concrete example, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter on the grounds of inciting violence by tweeting “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” There is some really creative reading going on in here. How would you substantiate the rule against inciting violence in a way that it clearly covers this statement? People aren't allowed to announce that they won't be attending some event? That seems overly broad. Sitting presidents aren't allowed to announce they won't attend their successor's inauguration? This feels like it's overly specific, covering only this one event.
So that's the fundamental difference here. “No entrance for vehicles” is a rule that can be operationalized by enumerating and defining the kind of vehicles that people might think of using to enter the park. While “hate speech” defies objective definition.
I don’t know why we insist on pretending that there’s no way to figure out what counts as “hate speech” or “glorifying violence”. If you look on any social network you’ll find you can report people for saying things that clearly fall under those categories. Like if you’re calling someone a slur, or threatening them, or telling them to kill themselves, those are all pretty clearly out of bounds!
And, I mean, to be clear: there will always be weaselly “oh-but-I-didnt-technically-break-the rules” comments like that Donald Trump tweet. But the whole point of this is that you’ll never be able to make a rule with an objective definition! These are not mathematically defined sets; someone will always need to make a judgment call.
Can you not with the victimhood mentality? There isn’t a single major social network — let alone many — on which explicitly calling for genocide does not run afoul of the moderation policy, and we both know it.
> I don’t know why we insist on pretending that there’s no way to figure out what counts as “hate speech” or “glorifying violence”.
what if this was a forum that rebels to the gov't are using to discuss how they will form the revolution? Is that now disallowed, because what they discuss could be considered hate speech?
What if this group of rebels (or freedom fighters as they call it) is someone you personally want to support?
What if this group are labeled terrorists by other governments?
It's not so black and white tbh. It's only black and white when you imagine yourself to be the authority.
> the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
They're often ambiguous though. Lime bikes and motorized skateboards have been a recent edge conditions in vehicle laws that have needed to be specifically addressed.
But, yes, normally laws will actually define their terms.
Since the "legislature" in this example did a really lousy job of definitions, I only counted the one car as violating the rules.
> This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!
I disagree, lawyers would have no work then. Laws are not as specific as you would think they are and it is to provide a diverse gamut of powers and broad discretion in their application.
For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
There is plenty evidence of people exercising free speech such as wearing cuss words on shirts and their speech being stifled by police through intimidation and arrests. Most famously Cohen v California and for example more recently Wood v Eubanks (25 F. 4th 414 - Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit 2022) with very similar facts to Cohen v California.
Here is another one "Battery is an unlawful application of force directly or indirectly upon another person or their personal belongings, causing bodily injury or offensive contact." I go onto the bus and my shoulder hits the shoulder of another passenger. I did not have consent to touch them and they are upset by the contact / found it offensive. Am I guilty of battery?
In the test "No vehicle sin the park" there is no ambiguity that an ambulance is a vehicle, but clearly 1/3 of people don't think it breaks the rule, presumably largely because it's for an emergency purpose despite the rule not having an exemption for such a scenario. Neither would a rule that says "no hate speech". What is hate speech? Would speech stating "I hate..." Nazi's or a genocidal leader or regime be hate speech? So what are the exemptions, what are the discretions? How do we define things?
What about support for LGTBQIA+? Some countries only recently have become more amenable to these groups, but plenty of jurisdictions and cultures are still very much opposed to them. Is homophobia hate speech? What is transphobic speech? Is stating there are only two genders transphobic?
The same could be said about support for Ukraine which is positive in the Western world but would be illegal in Russia. But then, what about Taiwan and it's disputed status with respect to China? What about other contested borders and lands?
The fact that even when there is no ambiguity people don't entirely agree whether a simple rule is broken is entirely the point of the exercise. And now, you expect platforms and countries to exercise those rules and laws when evidently people can't even agree on a simple rule.
> For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
By the way, there's no "hate speech" exception in U.S. first amendment jurisprudence.
A vehicle is any kind of tool that makes locomotion for any animate or inanimate object easier. This includes wheeled craft, seafaring vessels, shoes, aircraft.
The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.
Full on pedantry here, but a snowmobile will still work without snow, perhaps not long, but while it works it will be faster than walking. A motorcycle goes faster than walking without gas downhill. You can also use it as a really heavy dandy horse.
>In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed.
I think that's a further example of ambiguity.
A park that had a rule in the 1990s saying "No motorized vehicles" probably wouldn't have wanted to prohibit electric bikes or electric mobility scooters, but such a rule would do that.
Do content moderation rules define "violence" or "harassment"?
> often to be about being motorized or speed.
This more precise definition would include the toy car, quadcopter, ISS, and airplane, all of which fewer than 20% of respondents believe are vehicles.
> It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed.
It doesn't actually. It asks if a particular rule has been violated, not whether the violation is or should be acceptable (and it makes that distinction very explicitly even!).
The objections you have to the exercise don't actually seem that well founded, and the analogy appears even better due to the nature of your objections.
The number at the end is unclear - it says I agreed with the majority 11%, but then it shows a bunch of charts. Yet the three I said were vehicles (the car, the police vehicle, and the ambulance) are the only 3 above 50% support, so it seems I agreed with the majority 100%. I even opened a second session in another browser and hit yes to everything to see if the numbers in the chart was the amount that agree with me, and no, the numbers didn't invert so it seems the chart is measuring yes answers.
The problem is that I also got 11% just saying yes to everything. It would seem surprising to me to have the same percentage of maximalists as there is for people who are in the majority on every question
I came to the comments to find out what's going on with the 11%. I was worried that if I agreed with the majority just 11% of the time I must have reversed the buttons or something. But my choices mostly agree with the graph, so I don't think I made an error. I guess everyone gets 11%?
I got 12%, and after also not knowing what it means, and seeing no units whatsoever on the y-axis of the chart, have to leave feeling the author completely and utterly missed their opportunity to convince me of whatever argument they were making. You lose me completely at inability to convey meaningful data from the experiment.
Am I crazy/dumb or is the chart super confusing? I really had to stare at it to figure out how to read it, and I'm still just guessing the vertical scale is percent of the whole that think each item is a car.
I agree. This has to be the worst, most unintentionally confusing graph I've ever seen. And I don't solely blame this website because many people make this mistake too: For crying out loud, how can you make the simple mistake of not labeling your axis? People online who make graphs—stop not labeling your axes! It's the whole point of the graph!
And 11%, why is everyone getting 11%? Is it a backend error? Who knows! If that 11% had a label, it would be easier for us to know whether it's working as intended or not.
Given that “kite” is the lowest and “Honda civic” is the highest, I’m assuming the bar chart shows % of people who classified it as a violation, regardless of color. For me, the last three are red, and they are also the only ones above 50%. To me that means I agreed with the majority 100% of the time.
But it says I had 11% agreement with the majority.
You can get not-11% by choosing to skip before the end. IF you skip after 7 questions, it's "You agreed with the majority: 29%" — same whether I say yes to all or no to all.
So I don't think it's related to yours answers. It's just the weighted average of what people said for the set of questions you answered, or something like that. Not actually your score at all.
I also got 11% and think that number may be a result of some kind of flawed calculation. The final chart distribution of each "vehicle" paints a much clearer picture.
Same, the only three I marked as violating the rule were the car, the police and the ambulance. And it told me I agreed with 11% but showed a bar chart showing that basically everyone agreed with me. It was confusing.
Also breaking a rule is fine for an emergency vehicle.
I also took away the opposite of what the author tried to convey.
But I also got a bad impression of their argumentative integrity because they tried to use a strawman to illustrate their point - only it backfired anyway.
An ill defined rule that lacks examples and definition is not a good way to prove people interpret a good faith attempt at rules differently.
And the longer explanation at the end simply dismisses the notion of giving any examples or even trying to give a clear rule by hand waving and basically saying a motivated person can find ambiguity in anything.
So because a rule or law can’t be defined to perfection without the slightest ambiguity then we should just have anarchy? I’m sorry for the bluntness but that’s asinine.
This entire thing is showing that people have different interpretations, you can't resort to "that did _not_ violate the rule" to say that it's super obvious and the only answer.
I phrased my answer a bit difficult. What I meant was exactly that, instead of stoplisting a few items, like most people appear to have done, I allow-listed only a few (which is emphasizing the fact that vastly different interpretations exist).
Yeah, I don't get what the score means. Also saw 11%. Clearly the number means something other than what people think it means, which is maybe the real test.
What, exactly, is the graph showing? % of people who said "Yes this is a vehicle in the park" or % of people who agree with you ? It's very difficult to tell as I said yes only to the car and the memorial...
Your first interpretation is correct. No one thinks a kite is a vehicle. Everyone thinks a private car is a vehicle. Everything else is in between.
If your answers were consistent with a consistent population, there would be a threshold above which all your bars turn red. Any churn in that consistency (my last six bars are a mixture of red and green) shows a deviation of some kind, but I don’t know how this accounts for when there is no overall consistency and everyone disagrees.
I see. This graph is pretty confusing imo. My first idea for a visualization is to use a stacked bar chart that always adds up to 100% with "No it's not a vehicle" above "Yes it is a vehicle." Use 4 colors, dark red, light red, dark green, light green, and emphasize your choices with the dark ones.
Add a couple checkboxes with interactivity:
- Show only "Is vehicle" bars
- Show only "Is not vehicle" bars
- Show only answers that agreed with me
- Show only answers that disagreed with me
And a "toggle colorblind mode" although I'm not sure what colors would be ideal for that.
Any other ideas for how to make this thing actually readable?
What it appears to be actually calculating is that 1/9 of items had majority consensus that they were against the rule. It doesn't appear to take your actual selection into consideration, only the amount of questions answered
You are right, the "all violate" and "all do violate" options both give 2/7 = 29% for the first 7, which is the majority opinion (car and ambulance violate, the others do not).
Perfect illustration of how tricky it can be to draw a firm line.
Another survey in this same genre is "the rape spectrum" with >5k respondents ranking scenarios: https://aella.substack.com/p/the-rape-spectrum-survey-result...
Tough topics to discuss (I see why the OP went with vehicles in the park). I'm glad I'm not in the content moderation business!
Yeah. Sometimes I see private Facebook groups by otherwise smart people, where one rule is something like "racism of any kind is forbidden". As if the addition of "of any kind" made the concept of racism any less vague.
I think that it might make expectations about moderators' interpretations less vague.
That still seems as if it adds some useful information. It's informing people ahead of time that moderators will probably not interpret "racism" in the narrowest possible sense, or likely even in a medium grey-area sense, but rather in a broad sense.
Nitpick: The summary at the end labels your choices as "You think it is not a vehicle" or "You think it is a vehicle" based on whether or not you said the situation violates the rule, but some of the scenarios were clearly about whether or not something was in the park, rather than whether or not it was a vehicle. I can think a plane or a space station is a vehicle without thinking it violates the rule about not being in the park.
Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
Given that the whole exercise was about meticulous line drawing I think this bit of nitpicking is entirely appropriate. Clearly “is a vehicle” and “is in the park” were the two major axes that each question needed to be plotted on.
Interestingly, some people added others that weren't explicit in the rule. For example, the person riding a skateboard was considered a violation by roughly twice as many people as the person carrying one, despite both being identical on the "is a vehicle" and "in the park" axes. I suppose unless someone's definition of vehicle depends on it being in use.
Despite the instructions explicitly saying not to I suspect many people (like me) could not help but “look through” the stated rule to infer its intent, especially for the more unusual examples. It’s quite a lot harder to imagine a real world rule that prohibits a carried skateboard vs one being used, even if both situations represent the same 2-vector in the rule’s truth table. It’s hard to turn off the part of your brain that applies past experiences to every new situation.
It’s funny, I first thought the game was going to be a commentary on the “no mechanical transport in the wilderness” rule that he mentioned at the end. You cannot have a bicycle in the wilderness. You can’t push it or carry it. I guess this simplifies enforcement. If someone is camped with a bike, they can be ticketed.
I have friends that do long bike camping trips, and they sometimes want to pass through areas of wilderness on their trips. What do they do? They take apart the bike and pack it, because you are allowed to have bike parts in the wilderness.
> because you are allowed to have bike parts in the wilderness.
I would love for someone to try disassembling less of the bike and still getting ticketed, just to see how that line ends up getting drawn. Is a bike without a seat still a bike? What about a bike with no tires? Does 50% of the bike need to be "contiguous" to be considered a bike? If it can be ridden? What if there are no pedals? Is a unicycle considered a bike?
Yeah applying a very loose, or perhaps pedantic, definition of vehicle (it doesn't specify size, for example) combined with a reasonable understanding of "in" ie including air space in proportion to the size of a regular park led me to say most things were in violation of the rule. Those were the only relevant factors, all the other info was fluff.
I considered ISS to be outside it, and that was pretty much it. My views weren't shared with too many, about 11%.
You draw the line between ISS and commercial airplane? That seems like an odd place for it. I would think the limit of "in" would be at the prevailing treeline or maybe requires ground contact (I haven't fully decided yet), and beyond that it's "above" rather then "in."
The problem with treeline (or any similar threshold) is that even having that defined doesn't solve for the fact that we don't know the altitude of the quadcopter. That's why I'm leaning more toward ground contact.
Yes, any liquid or solid works to maintain contact. Gas eliminates contact. Otherwise you could say shoes prevent contact!
Just like "contactless" payment cards, which for some reason involves the word "tap" as well, even though tapping is the act of making brief contact, and is not required for the communication to succeed, and that successful communication could be referred to as making contact, but I digress.
Things don't even actually touch each other though. At no point does an atom of my stuff make contact with an atom of your stuff, right? things can be uncomfortably close to each other but the Van der Waals forces mean it'll never actually touch. to be pedantic.
But commercial airlines do not need permission to “trespass” over my property when they fly over it - because my property is not considered to extent infinitely into the sky (in the same way that, under any reasonable definition, a park isn’t). Countries are different because we have considered it and explicitly defined airspace boundaries.
The instructions say to ignore all other rules/laws besides "no vehicles in the park" because the jurisdiction is unknown. International agreement doesn't seem like it should break through this barrier, although I understand why others may disagree.
The notion of permissions afforded by "airspace rights," even those internationally agreed, therefore cannot be used when deciding how to answer the questions in this game. Even if we could lean on that here, airspace rights actually were infinite for a very long time -- there's even a Latin phrase saying "up to Heaven and down to Hell" -- until modern air travel began.
Instead of rights/laws, we must focus only on what it means to be "in the park" by common use of the phrase. At some point you're above it rather than in it, perhaps. It may happen to be the case that people do most often think of this altitude threshold roughly equivalent to modern airspace rights, but personally I'm not so sure.
If I stab someone in the eye with a pencil, then the pencil was clearly a weapon. However, I'm not violating a "no weapons" policy simply by carrying a pencil.
Depends on the meaning of rule and violation I guess. I interpreted it as a sign posted at the entrance of the park. I interpreted violation as something that would be stopped by the park rangers.
Their point is that "was the rule violated" is a combination of "is a vehicle" and "in the park", hence both axes are relevant factors. If pushed, I would concede that the ISS is a vehicle, but I would consider the bounds of the park to end far lower than where the ISS orbits, so despite being "a vehicle" it doesn't violate the rule because I don't consider it "in the park". "Is it in the park" isn't relevant for most of the questions, but it's still an important part of the premise.
Same - I used the simple "rule" that basically everything that's in the park and used to carry people or goods is a "vehicle" at least by some people's standard. But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
That would depend on your definition of "carry." I personally wouldn't say that shoes "carry" people any more than floors do (which is to say, they don't).
I would say those two things are very different. The ground (floors are inside) is the cooperating object upon which leading objects carry.
The shoes carried the person on the ground, the car carried the person on the ground, the horse carried the person on the ground, etc;
An interesting dilemma does occur if we are walking barefoot: our feet carry us but are part of our whole, so we cannot reasonably consider them or ourselves a vehicle. But in a general day-to-day sense we would say they carry us.
It is very interesting what you brought up because I think it shows some people consider their outfit as an extension of themselves. Then again, many people also do for their car :)
I would say those two things are very different. The ground (floors are inside) is the cooperating object upon which leading objects carry.
Since we're already taking it too far, I want to point out that you can have outside floors, and you can have floors that are not supported by the ground.
An airplanes floor in flight, or a dance floor in your backyard are examples of both.
IMO the definition of a vehicle comes down to how wieldy, how large, and how powerful the device is - for instance car is obviously a vehicle as it's very powerful, has a large turning radius, and large area. The interesting thing about this is that there's an argument that scooters are not vehicles but skateboards are - scooters are far easier to control (i.e. more wieldy) whereas skateboards have a tendency to launch the user in one direction and the skateboard in the other, which makes it rather unwieldy.
I would argue it's able mechanical advantage. Everything you listed is a vehicle. Also, skateboards are far more agile than scooters when used by people who know how to ride them. Scooters are just easier for novices.
I would only consider skates to be slightly ambiguous because they are shoes that are mounted but worn. but still, i say vehicle
Other definitions include an agent of transmission (e.g. for and infection) and a medium though which something is displayed (dance is the vehicle for my creativity). Would have been interesting to see the different definitions exploited vs more strained classification of shoes or skates or whatnot as vehicles.
Oh hahaha! This one didn’t occur to me, but ‘no vehicles in the park’ can literally be translated to mean no people in the park. I’m a vehicle for my musical ideas. They are vehicles for their heart & lungs. People are vehicles of cold viruses.
Yep. Obviously this is a thought experiment, and the site did tell users to take the problem as stated very literally. So I basically went with two simple rules:
I said, no. A wheelchair is not a vehicle. In my opinion, the wheelchair is an extension of the person, and not a separate object as long as it is being used by someone who needs it.
This seems a fun direction of thought. So does it cease to become a vehicle as soon as someone sits in it, and resume its functionality as a vehicle as soon as it is abandoned?
Sorry, I didn't mean it that way. I have older parents who can walk short distances but I'd rather they have the choice to use a wheelchair at an airport.
In general, no testing. Unless some people are being jackasses and doing something absurd like standing on wheelchairs jousting with long sticks holding up everyone in line.
What is your definition of need? If I need to meet friends in the park in five minutes I clearly need a car to get there in time. So the car would not be a vehicle in that case?
Does a wheelchair become a vehicle if somebody who _can_ walk without it sits in it? Does that mean everyone in wheelchairs must be harassed (to find out if they need it)?
Since the preamble mentioned this was a test of language literalness, before I answered the question, I looked up the definition of “vehicle”: “A means of carrying or transporting something” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vehicle
While it might be uncommon to call a wheelchair a vehicle, it fits the literal definition. I don’t understand the ‘extension of the person’ rationale, you’re still using the word ‘wheelchair’, and it’s obviously a separate object from a person. How would that rationale differ if you were talking about cars? Can I argue a car is an extension of me as long as I’m using it while I need it?
It's a common sentiment among wheelchair users that the freedom they enable makes them feel like an extension of a person. In that context, for the purpose of the "vehicle" question, there's not much difference between a wheelchair, prosthetic leg, or eyeglasses.
I wouldn't say I'm entirely convinced, but it's at least convincing enough that I said that a wheelchair did not violate the "vehicle" rule. I can't define "vehicle" in a way that would satisfactorily justify that decision, but I'm comfortable with that.
The Merriam-Webster definition tends towards a vehicle being something with a power source (something where the power source is not manual/manus/human) capable of moving other things. That would include any sort of powered chair, but not be a problem for a standard wheelchair. Interestingly the Oxford American dictionary explicitly includes a cart as a primary example however, and Wikipedia’s primary example of a vehicle is a bike.
It isn't so clear to me. If it conveys a human in any way that humans don't naturally move unassisted then in my mind it qualifies as a conveyance and hence a vehicle, especially in the sense of the the French véhicule, from Latin vehiculum (“a carriage, conveyance”), from vehere (“to carry”)
Personally I wouldn't call a wheelchair a vehicle for purposes of this question, but I think some people would call a wheelchair a vehicle, yes.
After all, bicycles are clearly vehicles, and bicycles and wheelchairs are both things with metal frames, wheels and seats designed to convey humans around under their own power.
Other than the placement of the wheels, the main difference is the character of its use.
Speed and impact on the user are meaningful differences. I don't like bikes in parks (except those designed for them) because the bikes are moving much faster than anything else. For that reason I might feel that a small child on a bike is more permissible than an adult. Also that the carried skateboard is not a violation - I understand the rule to be about vehicle use more than presence
> I understand the rule to be about vehicle use more than presence
Which I guess is part of the point - the rule specifically does not say anything about use, only presence - but people (including me) are still interpreting the rule with a "usage" axis. Perfect demonstration that the "simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply" assertion has fallen over at the first hurdle.
> I think some people would call a wheelchair a vehicle
I think, just being overly annoying and literal, that the game shouldn't be answered by asking whether anyone would call a wheelchair a vehicle, but whether a wheelchair is a vehicle in the sense meant in the rule statement. I don't think it is, personally, though it's probably the closest non-vehicle in the list.
Strictly speaking, by the definition of "would anyone call this object a vehicle", every single thing on the list is a vehicle, because apparently at least ~2% of the quiz respondents said they were vehicles - including kites!
Kites, toy cars and toy boats are toys (to me). Slippers, skis and skates are footwear. A toboggan isn't normally attached to a person's body, so a vehicle.
Drones and balloons I would say are in the park, whereas aircraft (at normal altitudes) I would say are not. Unfortunately: I'd like more parks to have a protected square inch of silence.
Humans carry all kinds of goods and often carry people. Even if we limit "goods" to exclude our personal effects, someone carrying takeout across a park—especially for someone else—could be considered a vehicle by that definition.
Additionally strollers, wagons, and other baby or child conveyances would also qualify.
> But you can fly a plane across the globe without going through 15 separate immigration rituals, so for most practical purposes (obviously excluding things like no-fly zones or bomber planes) the plane is not "in" any of the areas it passes over.
But you were specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction, and that's why this can happen. The 15 countries it flew over are members of the ICAO, which delegated some of their sovereignty to the common good of easy air travel. It could have easily worked out some other way; fly over our country without stopping for immigration, and we blow up your plane. (You can see this in action if you fly your plane from Canada to do a low approach over the White House. You probably won't be home for dinner.) Similarly, in the US, the FAA decides who can fly over your property and how low. These are not universal constraints on existence, just actual laws that people wrote down because nobody could agree on the details. I'd venture a guess that if you asked the average property owner if airplanes could fly over their property and stare at them in their hot tubs, they'd say "no". However, the law simply doesn't agree with them, and a satellite is photographing your underwear as we speak!
But it's not really a local thing; I'd be shocked if there was a park which meaningfully controlled it's airspace. Practically the bounds of a park only go so high.
I mean, while it's not technically just the park, I'm sure there are several parks on US Military bases where the airspace is restricted. Also, we can be the change we wish to see in the world: any park can be a park with a controlled airspace if you bring enough surface-to-air missiles into the park.
That's how you see it, but not how most people see it. The "corner crossing" lawsuit got a LOT of coverage on Hacker News. Landowners claimed that merely floating over their property was trespassing. The courts disagreed.
Trust me, if there weren't any laws, people would be shooting down airplanes above their farms, or at the very least, writing a lot of angry letters to the FAA. The laws that we have right now allowing the freedom of air travel were hard-won and unpopular among those affected.
Therefore, the park in this exercise would mostly like try and shoot down the International Space Station, or else risk the reputation of not being strict against surfers carrying surfboards. It's exactly the same thing.
Ignoring the fact that many of the corner crossing cases were bad faith arguments by landowners intentionally attempting to abuse the situation, I don't think anyone would argue that the park boundary is a prism that extends vertically to infinity.
Why wouldn't it? If you think most people would consider a satellite passing overhead, an airplane flying high overhead, the Moon, the Sun, other objects in space etc. when directly overhead to be "in" a park, I think you'd be mistaken. And the results here bear that out, at least to the limited extent there were relevant questions.
Similarly a subway train passing underneath the park is not "in" the park, nor are vehicles that are at the antipode of the park on the polar opposite side of the Earth.
You can fly a plane across the globe but the plane's flight path must be approved by each of the 15 countries before it is allowed in their airspace.
The countries often ask for passenger lists and manifests before they allow your plane to do so and have, in the past forced planes to land to get to passengers or suspected passengers on the plane they have an interest in.
If you live in the U.S., people flying very low over your house probably are trespassing, you have air rights. (True in other countries too.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights Before commercial flight was common, air rights used to extend into space. Now they’re limited, but you have at least a few hundred feet.
Parks do have airspaces, obviously and literally, and more to the point, in the U.S. there’s existing legislation defining the altitudes that are considered “in” and out of the park.
I agree the question is intentionally ambiguous. I disagree that laws aren’t relevant, precisely because they will disambiguate. This isn’t specific to US laws, most countries globally have flight regulations. The game is using words and concepts to ask questions that can only be defined and answered by laws. The altitude and location matter, if you want to answer the question correctly. You cannot moderate the situation, and the question cannot be answered correctly without knowing the altitude and location and laws that apply, and that doesn’t mean that moderation is hard, it means the author is fabricating unnecessary amounts of ambiguity.
Asking intentionally ambiguous questions that existing laws already answer in order to make a point about the difficulty of moderation kind-of undermines the author’s intent here. He was trying to prove that unanswerable corner cases always exist, but it’s not true for the specific case of airlines over parks once you know the laws.
What about them? Both of those can violate air rights, and in the US both have FAA regulations that apply. I’m using the US as an example because I live in the US, but many many countries have similar regulations. Small drones need a remote pilot license, and drones large enough to carry a human require an actual aircraft pilot’s license just like any other airplane or helicopter. In a public park in the US, small drones are required to stay under 400 ft altitude above ground, inside the airspace of the park. (Small drones are also required to not fly directly above other people.) Aircraft with people in them are required to fly higher than that, which thus defines an altitude threshold above which is considered outside of land-based public and private property boundaries.
The question in the quiz about flying airplanes over a park can be correctly answered with 3 pieces of information: the aircraft type, the park’s location, and the altitude. The question cannot be answered without that information. Contrary to the author’s attempted point, the correct answer to the question is not a matter of language ambiguity.
Interesting! But you didn't answer the question of if you consider a small quadcopter is a vehicle or not, just that there are rules about them. Small ones don't carry a person, or much of anything really.
Is a quadcopter at 399 ft in the park then? If it's at 401 ft, then it's not?
Yeah I saw all those rules. The FAA killed flying drones as a legal hobby for me.
Oh yeah I think a quadcopter can easily count as a (tiny) vehicle, if it’s, say, carrying a camera. I liked how someone pointed to the Merriam Webster page for “vehicle”, which includes things like “an agent of transmission” and “a medium through which something is expressed”. People fit the literal definition of vehicle!
The plane question stated the plane was `over` the park which implies it is not in the park. If the question instead said `through` the park, the answer would differ.
Given that a helicopter at that speed is a clear hazard to anyone below it and will blow a person below it off their feet, and could easily be pushed around or into the ground at any time (sudden gusts of winds do happen, although I have no real experience with helicopters so I may be wrong on some specifics), that is through.
"the park" includes not only the ground, but also a certain area above the ground - otherwise someone riding a bike through the park wouldn't be in the park (as they are not touching the ground) but their bike would be. That would be absurd.
Given that the whole point of the website and the discussion is the fuzziness that any such rule implies, I'm pretty sure they _do_ see the point, but decided to play the interpretation game anyway. What's your point?
Let's say we imagine a dome over the park which is geometrically a convex hull that encloses all the tree tops. Everything in that dome is in the park.
Your list of altitudes didn’t go high enough to change the answer. ;) Drones (in the US and the UK) must be limited to 400ft/120m and are still considered “in” the airspace of the ground they’re over. Commercial aircraft flying at 35,000ft AGL are not considered to be in the airspace of a specific park or private property when over the U.S. (and most of the world, I suspect), but they are considered to be inside the country’s airspace, since park & private property airspace has a limited ceiling, but country airspace extends up to space.
Depends on how you word the question. If you say the helicopter is flying 10 feet over the park, by the rules of this game it's objectively not a violation. If you say it's 10 feet above the ground inside the park, objectively a violation.
In the U.S., by FAA law, flying a helicopter 10 feet off the ground in a public park is both over the ground and through (or “in”) the park. There’s no either-or.
The question intentionally left out the altitude of the vehicle in order to trick us into thinking it’s a harder question to answer than it really is. I agree that ‘over’ tends to somewhat imply out, and ‘through’ tends to imply in, and would indeed change the distribution of answers.
In at least some countries (such as the U.S., and I would speculate practically all countries in the age of commercial flight and private drones, but I don’t know that for a fact) there are laws that define whether flying “over” a public park means in our out, and the park’s bounding volume is defined with a specific altitude ceiling. (It may be different depending on the type of aircraft, e.g., civilian drone vs emergency helicopter vs commercial airliner, etc.)
The author’s trick worked. People are arguing over whether a hypothetical airplane is in the hypothetical park without knowing the altitude or location, rather than pointing at the fact that he question is intentionally under-specified and the right answer depends on important details that were left out.
Posting “racial epithets” is banned on social networks but if I post a video of a politician saying a racial epithet to raise awareness. Does that violate the rule? We aren’t debating whether or not it was a racial epithet.
That seems like good analogy to content moderation. You have to ask "is the forbidden content actually on the site?"
For example you can have a rule like "no sharing pornographic content", but then are people allowed to share links to forbidden content? Links to sites that are 100% links to forbidden content? Links to sites that have one link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? Links to sites that have one extremely prominent link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? How prominent? Etc etc etc.
Hehe, that's a fair take, but I must also mention that I've encountered far more porn unwittingly/unexpectedly on Twitter than I EVER, ever, ever have on reddit. Again speaking to the utility of moderation in general.
I assure you there is far more than softcore and often on accounts where it isn’t obvious until you’ve viewed the offending tweet that there may be X-Rated audiovisual content.
I’m sure much of it violates the rules but my initial inclination is always to browse away, not report.
People on certain apps often have links to profiles that I basically can't read because every post is NSFW. I used to be able to at least peek with Nitter but now I just insta close most Twitter links.
I'm pretty sure a few explicit Google searches with "site:twitter.com" should pull up plenty.
And I'm not talking softcore, unless my descriptions are way off base.
Granted those aren't necessarily unwittingly, I can usually guess it's going to be like that, but I've definitely "fallen into a rabbit hole" so to speak at other times.
On reddit, if you're not subbed to porn subreddits, you normally wouldn't see it. Though the homepage was still jacked up enough a few days ago that I was seeing softcore stuff on page 1 or 2 with the country set to Mexico.
Twitter moderation has cratered .. reports to the contrary otherwise.
You'll see a fair degree of NSFW porn if you firehose capture all images, on the "hate speech" front (repeatedly calling disabled, minority, indigenous, queer people names, cyber stalking, etc.) it's reached the point where (for instance) Australia has warned Twitter it will start issuing daily fines of up to $7K AUD [1]
The increased porn & veering into CSAM territory is tailwinding that trend.
That is a pretty clear distinction. A separate site has separate administration, can be blocked separately, etc. Otherwise you have additional rules: disallow direct links to forbidden content that causes it to render on the page, disallow linking to specific forbidden content, disallow links to on blacklisted domains, allow only whitelisted domain links.
What if it's a discussion about Terms of Service (ToS), and for some particular reason the Pornhub's ToS is relevant? The site itself is nsfw but if someone makes a claim that their tos says it's okay to kick puppies then you kind of have to link to it to support your claim. And how many ways around linking directly to the domain are there? hub for pron, bay of pirates, etc.
If "in the park" is meant as an analogy for "on the platform" in content moderation, then curiously enough Twitter suspended @RealDonaldTrump for off-park action (Jan 6).
The "pulled a wagon" one is another aspect. Is the answerer assuming a vehicle pulled the wagon? I immediately wondered if the wagon was pulled by hand or animal or a vehicle.
> 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).
> Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
No actually I do think it does and is captured beautifully in the game. Things that clearly once vehicles are arguably no longer - like the war tank.
Like Michelangelo's David, is the nudity porn? is it obscene? for who? Is this a website about art? or a porn site? education site? a site for children?
Each one of those sites have differing views of the exact same thing.
Nobody provided the definition of vehicle either. The summary references lawyers using a variation of this game, but most legalese I've seen as a layperson usually starts by defining terms.
I don't think it really matters. The point I guess was that an ambulance or police car is obviously a vehicle, and obviously in the park. And yet enforcing this seemingly simple and logical rule becomes so absurd that some people would decide that a police car is not a vehicle just because it should be allowed in.
Yes, defined terms are critical. As the exercise went on, I kept refining my mental model of what a “vehicle” was in the context of the park sign.
I eventually came up with a mental model that was something like “an artificially powered or mechanically advantaged means of conveyance or transport, especially one that creates negative externalities to other park goers inconsistent with typical use and enjoyment of public park space.” But that wasn’t absolute - the non-functional tank was, in my mind, quite obviously a vehicle, and so was prohibited. Someone at a higher pay grade is going to have to make an exception there. The skydiver - ehhh, it was a stretch to call him a vehicle, but by my heuristic he broke the sign’s rule.
>But that wasn’t absolute - the non-functional tank was, in my mind, quite obviously a vehicle, and so was prohibited.
Was, or is? The non-functional tank was a vehicle, but is currently a non-functional lump of steel and is thus no different to a statue. A statue is obviously not a vehicle, and a statue of a car is still not a vehicle.
I had almost exactly the same definition, but interestingly I let the skydiver go free, and I figured the tank would be okay because it was stationary (and I think in my head I assumed someone else had allowed the memorial!)
In the end, I only banned the car and the boat, and the boat was only really on a technicality. In retrospect, I might have been being too lenient, but I think it had a lot to do with just the stuff that I wanted to see in the park, which is pretty interesting from a moderation perspective.
Horse is a fun one. I started to wonder does putting saddle and reins on one change things... So if you ride without them it is fine, but if you put those on it becomes a vehicle...
Travois is other one I kinda struggled... Just a a-frame even if you drag it in clearly is not one to me.
No, I felt a bit "betrayed" by this as well but also probably the point of the exercise? I dunno. Obviously there is rhyme to reason as to why you're offered to skip after 7 questions. I'm not sure why, but somewhere after 10 I started to feel like I wanted to go back and re-answer.
It's exactly the point of the exercise. Whether something is a vehicle and whether said thing is "in" the park are both separate dimensions of logic that each individual applies differently towards their decision making. This is exactly why content moderation has trouble to stay consistent and rarely pleases everyone, because so many nuances from non-intersecting aspects of logic/context/culture/opinions are forced to consolidate into a binary choice (violation vs. non-violation).
You've missed the point of my comment too. We all agree that the exercise is pedantic by design, and that the goal of the exercise is to show how much variance there is in interpreting them.
The point, that you've missed twice now, is that the results are presented using incorrect language.
A point that does not exist is a point that's not possible to be missed. It's okay to admit you don't know anything about content moderation, and frankly it's a blessing to not know anything about it. Best of luck.
Similarly, the question asks "does it violate the rule" not "should the vehicle be allowed in the park". Of course driving an ambulance into the park violates the rule - but it's ok the break the rule for emergencies!
Which of course illustrates that in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply. Especially in content moderation.
Dunno about other jurisdictions but the written Polish law actually has some quite prominent references to unwritten, socially defined rules, both in the civil and the criminal law.
The instructions explain that, so it shouldn't interfere with the decision making, but the thing that the instructions don't talk about is whether the park extends indefinitely into the sky. One need not even consider the legal aspect of this (airspace rights: historical versus modern) but merely consider what it means to be in the park! Personally, I think that if the vehicle is making contact with the ground then it's "in" the park, but if it's not making contact with the ground then it's "above" the park.
That's absurd generally, but for purposes of this rule specifically, I think it works out totally fine, yes. Because if you replace the human jumping with a vehicle jumping (being that the rule is regarding vehicles, not humans) then the answer to the question of whether a violation has occurred is "yes" -- repeated violations does not matter when answering. For flying vehicles, only taking off or landing in the park is a violation.
How about hovering? at what height does it become not the park? 10 centimeters above the park is one thing and space is at 100 kilometers, but there's a lot of room in between those for disagreement.
At what point is a helicopter hovering above the park in violation?
This is why you need a lawyer familiar with the local regulations, which clarify these things. Thus this test is invalid because there should be an “there is not enough information to answer” answer.
I think getting lawyers involved is more for if you want to know what the law is. For this, we just want to know what is. It's very common for legal definitions to differ from normal definitions.
I was thinking along these lines as well but after reading the explanation at the end of the game, I’m not so sure.
The rule is no vehicles in the park. I’ve also concluded that an ambulance or police responding to a call didn’t violate the rule but saw that a lot of people seemed to think it did. And it made me think.
The rules say to not apply any other rule but the stated one. And if you follow the rule to the letter, a police car in the park is a vehicle in the park , violates the rule. It’s dumb but it does.
Common sense says it shouldn’t but the rule says it does and the instructions say to only consider the rule with no nuance.
The instructions beforehand were very clear that you should answer whether the scenario violated the rule, not whether it should be allowed.
I suppose that's the beauty, intentional or not, of this exercise... Since the point was to highlight human behavior your response is still a valid, important datapoint despite you "failing" to complete the exercise according to the instructions.
Did this change? For me it says "You think it is (not) a vehicle in the park," which doesn't match with your description of your issue with the results.
What this highlights is that online we have lost - or at least eroded - social norms. If I see a sign that says "no vehicles allowed", it's obvious they don't mean wagons and strollers. In almost all cases the police and the public are 99% in sync. Online, though, the moderators are forced to do a careful study of every action and become asinine literalists lest a horde of boundary-pushers ruin it for everyone.
I think what it highlights is that the meaning of words depends on context and stripping all context from a rule and situation makes that ambiguous. Reading more into it than that seems silly.
Thank you! Language, specifically legalese, tries to make precise something that can't ever be. It's why "language prescriptivists" annoy me because it's not even a preference difference it's simply impossible, you can't define any word completely. Worse even if you could your definition is only good for a point in time.
Even simple things like chairs, you can't write down a definition that includes everything that humans consider chairs and excludes everything humans don't consider chairs.
Social norms are quite culture-specific. Online people from all countries and cultures interact, and that's where some misunderstandings come from.
It's not a big problem if everyone is civil and existing moderation mechanisms aren't overwhelmed; people quickly learn from online faux pas and the online social norm is restored.
I think it goes even beyond that. Online you can get a lot more socioeconomic, age-related mixing than IRL. On some websites there is a large contingent of actual children/college students who have never worked or don't understand certain social norms due to inexperience. Or, if you live in a bubble of highly paid professionals like many on this site (honestly, including me), you can be completely shocked seeing how the working class people you see but don't actively converse with (beyond pleasantries) think.
Also, on pseudonymous sites, you may not even be able to know this at a glance. Sometimes on reddit I have been baffled at the replies I've received, until I realized it was coming from a child, or an older conservative person living on disability.
I found some old posts of mine from when I was 15. If anyone ever finds them I will have to kill them.
It's not that I was mean or nasty, or pushing any boundaries – I was never like that – I was just ... 15.
Also turns out what people meant with "your English is very good" was "your English is very good for a 15 years old non-native speaker", and not "your English is very good".
To me the issue is one of pragmatics: the instruction say "ignore your local law" but they don't say "ignore reality".
Taking the ambulance example: it would indeed break a literal interpretation of "no vehicles in the park" and would also fall under the instruction "ignore your local laws". The issue, however, is that 99% of all parks in the world would allow ambulances, and those that don't would have a specific clarification as to why (archeological site, dangerous, etc). At that point, if it didn't allow ambulances then it would almost certainly not be a park either.
If I wanted to get agreement I would specifically write "forget what you know about the human experience and pretend you're a cold robot with no feelings and no idea about social contracts".
two people are tried for the exact same crime, the lawyers used the same responses, questions, etc. all the discovery and testimonials are equal. The only thing different is the judge, jury, defendant, prosecutor, and defendants lawyer.
could one of these people be acquitted but the other not? Say if one committed the crime so did the other, ie everything being equal except personality and demeanor of key players.
The majority of comments and people participating in a forum generally both have common sense and are good actors. It's the borderline cases that are difficult, and of course there are boundary pushers of all sorts persuasions. Some are right, some are bad actors.
I said no to every question as even in the cases where a vehicle did enter the park, it was only one and the rule says "no vehicles". Remember that the No Homers Club was allowed to have one Homer.
You're overthinking this. To recap the rules of the game:
1. Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park."
2. Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Your job was to determine if rule 2 ("this rule") has been violated. By playing the game, you are fulfilling your job and thus the rule is never violated.
spelling error in "propultion" ("propulsion") in the question "Keisha plays with a Matchbox car in the park. A Matchbox car is a toy car with wheels that turn; it has no means of propultion other than Keisha pushing it." BTW.
Just because "some people" believe something doesn't mean you have to make a webapp "debunking" them, and just because law is often complicated with many edge cases doesn't mean it can't be simpler or partly automated.
Everyone here implicitly knows that natural languages have ambiguity this is why formal languages were invented and it's painful that governing bodies hasn't caught up in many places. Imagine a world where you could diff laws from federal to state, state to state, stateA.city to stateB.city or StateA.cityA to StateA.cityB.
or a log where you could see exactly when a law was changed and why.
So the point is that content moderators will inevitably encounter ambiguous situations where they must use context to make a judgment call? And that no matter what call they make, there will be some people who believe it is the wrong one? Are those contentious points? Seems fairly obvious to me that would be the case in content moderation as well as many areas, notably law, which he mentioned.
> In a way I regret having said what I said about obscenity—that's going to be on my tombstone. When I remember all of the other solid words I've written, I regret a little bit that if I'll be remembered at all I'll be remembered for that particular phrase.
The thing that really proved this game's point for me is the comments here from people giving slightly different versions of "well it's obvious what 'vehicle' means".
It’s weird that I barely see any comments like that. most people seem to be simply saying the game is silly because it’s so contrived and gives no definition of vehicle.
I’m honestly not sure what the point of the exercise is. I went through and answered honestly, and looking at the end results it seems that most people agreed with me (the only significant minority disagreements were about the bike and the tank). Overall, it looks like almost all of the cases have a clear opinion?
I expected it to get into difficult edge cases, like somebody riding a motorcycle or landing a plane, but it never went there. A plane flying overhead doesn’t constitute “in the park”, and it looks like almost everybody agrees on that point.
Count the number of times you have used the words “most”, “almost”, “only disagreements…” etc. in your two paragraphs, despite the fact that all of them were relatively simple scenarios like you said. That is the point of the exercise. Yes people mostly agreed on most things, but they did not absolutely agree on everything. And those 20-30% of people arguing about 20-30% of edge cases is where all the disagreements and flame wars and toxicity comes from.
I mean, this is an online poll. There are always going to be people who argue, "technically, shoes should be considered a vehicle!". But when it comes down to it, those same people aren't going to make content moderating decisions based on those philosophical arguments. These examples fall sorta flat for me because they don't present an actual difficulty with moderation, just an imaginary one to get people arguing over semantics. Such arguments should be ignored.
I thought the same - the surprising thing to me is that most people disagree apparently; my match was 11% with the majority.
In my mind the rule would obviously have related list of reasonable exceptions filed away somewhere; the simplicity of the rule is to improve the effectiveness of preventing the common case violation of regular people driving their cars through the park, causing damage and impacting the people using the park for its intended purpose.
In my opinion almost all of the examples provided were either obviously not applicable or were perfectly reasonable exceptions (and I don't think exceptions violate a rule).
It would have been better if the page defined "vehicle" since people's definitions may vary. The one I used was basically "Something used to carry people or goods". That meant that a toy car wasn't a vehicle, only a representation of one, but even a toy car could conceivably be made to carry something else at which point it would become a vehicle. I also struggled a bit with the disabled tank, since it's clearly designed for the transport of people, but while it's non-functional it couldn't fill that role. A car that's parked is also incapable of transporting people, but I think most people would argue the rule was still being violated by its presence.
Based on this I think the likelihood of me enjoying the park is inversely related to how hard the park moderators have to squint to apply the park rules. I'm totally cool with people having a park where a stroller counts as a vehicle but it's not a park I would want to spend my time. (The only one I agreed with was the one where a random person drove their kia into the park)
I think the police and ambulance examples are interesting. To me, they're clear and blatant violations of the rule. To be sure, I certainly think it's ok that they broke the rule, but they still broke the rule. Yet some (45% of respondents) clearly think the rule wouldn't apply to them in the first place?
One thing that makes this exercise fairly useless is that any real world law or rule would have exemptions for such circumstances, and a definition of “in the park” and what a vehicle is… not just one sentence with no clarification. Beyond that, also a history of previous legal interpretation to which one could refer.
I actually disagree. I assume every law is subject to "at the discretion of the DA/judge" (or whoever is in charge). Do you think everyone needs to account for every emergency circumstance possible in every law? In real life, there's the law and then there are mitigating circumstances.
(A few years ago I could have said "we don't get ticketed by an AI that only follows the rules it was given." Well, we do now in many places and that's a problem.)
Legal decisions are made based on historical interpretation, assumed intent of lawmakers and legal precedent. If needed legal interpretation can go back the English Common Law or the Magna Carta. A law or rule like this could be challenged in court as so vague as to be meaningless, and unenforceable.
This exercise is not about a court of law but any random online forum, for example the kind we are on right now. If you look up the HN participation guidelines you will find they are exactly as vague as the rule in the exercise and open to endless interpretation.
I understand the point of the exercise is to shed light on the vagaries of internet moderation. It’s not a very precise analogy. HN is essentially private property, and nobody needs to wonder things like “is flying a satellite over HN the same as posting on HN?” or “what is a a comment?”
My reasoning was that in emergencies, typically, certain rules don't apply to certain groups of people if their actions are related to the emergency. Therefore, a police officer driving a police car into the park (assuming they're doing it because of the emergency) is not a violation of "no vehicles in the park" because for that officer, in that situation, there effectively is no such rule.
In the real world, we might debate whether it was actually an emergency and so on, but here we're told straight up.
I think the instructions are ambiguous. The instructions first say to disregard any "rule in your jurisdiction which overrides certain rules", or whether your "religion allows certain rules to be overridden". But both of these hypotheticals are reasons why you might disregard the desires of the hypothetical park owner who instituted the rule. This is different from the police and ambulance examples, where the park owner would almost certainly want to allow those vehicles.
The instructions then continue, "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)." But again this could be interpreted two ways.
One interpretation is that an emergency vehicle entering the park would technically violate the rule, but everyone (including legal and religious authorities and the park owner) would agree that the violation "should" be allowed. However, I interpreted "should" more in line with the previous statements as referring to some kind of controversy (park owner says it's not allowed, but for legal or religious or moral reasons I think it should be allowed). Under this interpretation, the rule has an implicit exception for emergency vehicles, so they are not violating it. The exception is just so obvious that it's not worth including (especially given the text length limits of the signs where park rules tend to be written down).
My interpretation might sound like a stretch. But imagine if the rule instead said "No vehicles in the park, including emergency vehicles." Wouldn't that be materially different? Yet the difference doesn't affect whether a violation should be legally/religiously/morally allowed. At most, it might hint that there might be some practical reason why emergency vehicles shouldn't enter (perhaps it's dangerous), and perhaps a reasonable emergency vehicle operator should take that information into account when determining whether violating the rule would be justified. But that's only an indirect effect, and there's clearly more to it than that. Regardless of whether there is any justification, the clause would clarify that the park owner really doesn't want emergency vehicles, when otherwise we would assume they do. And to me that difference is best interpreted as affecting "whether the rule is violated".
The exception for emergency vehicles is just another rule. And even that rule can be more complex, like a police car could be not allowed to drive on railways. Or military rules that are above emergency vehicle exceptions. A police officer is not above the rules.
And in the given case we had none of them. It was just one simple rule - no vehicles inside the park.
The instructions for the exercise tell you straight up to ignore any and all exceptions, yet 30% of people chose to apply their own judgment in the police and ambulance case because it felt right to them. Very telling.
If you believe that the spirit of rules is more important than the text, then those people were obeying the spirit of the rule to not include exceptions, not the text.
Following the letter of the law or rule to an absurd conclusion without any common sense is a typical example of bureaucratic nightmares.
It should be comforting that people are able to use independent judgement when faced with a nonsensical situation, situations that illustrates a glaring lack of detail to the law or rule rather than anything else.
Basically the more terse a rule is, the more it requires the enforcer to use their own judgment.
That game would only be supportive of the point the author wants to make if the rule had a few paragraphs of examples and defined vehicle.
Instead the author hand waved away the case of a rule with examples by saying that nit picker could always find ambiguity. So instead they gave a overt terse rule that defies common sense. It’s a strawman attempt of a example.
We should first examine the origins of morality. That will allow us to understand the goals and motivations behind rules. If one of the goals of a moral system is also to get across the message that "We are in charge, remember it and don't mess with us or with the system", then deliberately vague rules are a feature of the system for those that can benefit and wield the law and social opinion against others. Rules can be interpreted to the advantage of the group that runs the show.
> Following the letter of the law or rule to an absurd conclusion without any common sense is a typical example of bureaucratic nightmares.
Deciding that something violates the letter of the law is not an absurd conclusion. That's just step one, and the more important places to involve judgement come after that step.
Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
Uncle Jim Bob trying to drive his Buick around is what's obviously prohibited as that's the vehicle/driver most likely to cause harm...
> Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
By this logic, it’s ok for a police officer to drive through the park’s green on his way to work, with no emergency.
I agree with you, but also the first time I did it I started answering in a different way, before realizing I should change my interpretation.
I started answering by interpreting the choice as "is this allowed in the park", not "does this violate the rule".
I'm not sure if this page makes its point better or worse if you know what it's testing. It's interesting though how explicit you have to be if you want people to not add any additional context. But also, so much of the questions rely on context. So it feels like an unfair test, but it's hard to say exactly why.
I think a questionaire telling you to ignore all preconceived notions about a topic in a note and then ask fairly unspecific questions about that, will have a lot of people answer without ignoring their preconceived notions about that.
I'd assume the answers would be different if the questions was phrased differently, restating the assumptions and some of the consequences, e.g., that there might be exceptions, we just don't look at them yet.
When one answers these questions, one must consider the reason behind the rule, the spirit of why vehicles are not allowed in the park: because this disturbs the park for many others in the park. It makes the park less enjoyable. People won't want to come to the park if it's full of cars.
Content moderation is about the same thing. It's about trying to minimize the negatives for everyone else while restricting the least. Part of Western cultural values seems to be that we want people to be free to have opinions that don't match the majority or those in control.
This is why the actions Elon Musk is taking in "moderating" Twitter are so problematic- they aren't about minimizing negatives for most users, they're about minimizing negatives For Elon Musk. This short sighted behavior erodes the platform in the long term.
* means of carrying or transporting something (planes, trains, and other vehicles) such as a) motor vehicle or b) a piece of mechanized equipment - Websters Online Dictionary
* 1) any means in or by which someone travels or something is carried or conveyed; a means of conveyance or transport: a motor vehicle; space vehicles. 2) conveyance moving on wheels, runners, tracks, or the like, as a cart, sled, automobile, or tractor. - dictionary.com
* a machine, usually with wheels and an engine, used for transporting people or goods, especially on land - Cambridge Dictionary
Any of these definitions could have been applied successfully to the series of questions on the website without ambiguity (edit: without ambiguity, but each would have led to different sets of conclusions). Which is to say, the entire point of the excercise reduces down to finding out which definition of the word someone is working from. This is only a problem if we're dealing with something that can't be defined, or something that we refuse to define.
This is why legal documents often have important definitions listed. In the last case, the answer hinges on the definition of “machine”. Pick a definition of that, and I’ll tell you if a boat is a vehicle.
Continuing to stick with the Cambridge Dictionary.
> ((a piece of (the set of necessary tools, clothing, etc. for a particular purpose) with (some; an amount that is not exact but is fewer than many) moving parts that uses power to do a particular type of work) used for transporting people or goods)
Yup, that's technically a rowboat - as long as it has oars included (whether or not they're physically attached: "set of"). Take the oars out of the equation, and it's not a machine anymore...just a piece of a vehicle (like how a tire isn't a car).
As it’s enforced today, that would be relatively easy to define, but I don’t think anyone wants to actually say out loud what that definition would be.
"Travois" seemed the most interesting one. Based purely on the first page of Google images, it struck me as somewhere between a horse and a carriage, but ever more on the vehicle side.
it has no wheels so it is just dragged, maybe behind a horse but people can drag them too. horses walk and carriages roll, so it's not really between them. it's the asymptotic limit as wheels shrink to zero.
There was one question about some sort of thing that was pulled that started with the letter T. I had no idea what that was. But then later it goes into detail defining what a Matchbox car is. I thought that was odd. Was the assumption that everyone would know what the T- thing is, but not a Matchbox car, part of the test?
Also, many people said the International Space Station was a vehicle in the park. I find that suspicious and question if people were choosing random or opposite or spurious answers just to pull the levers. I would like to hear from people who do believe the ISS is a vehicle in the park. What is your justification?
"travois". It's basically a sledge dragged along the ground and pulled by (usually) a horse.
I think "travois" is something you either know or you know you're going to have to look it up, so there's no risk of confusion. "Matchbox car" seems like something someone might not know, but just think "oh, a car, I know what a car is" without realizing it's a toy.
That said, I also felt like the description didn't explain it well enough. There are electric toy cars that kids actually ride in and drive around. The thing about a matchbox car is that it's the size of a matchbox.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadIt also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.
I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.
They think I didn't get the point, but they're wrong. Hope that helps!
I have a lot of experience thinking that I get the point of someone else's argument, and then realizing later that I didn't actually get the point, or not in a way that was useful to both parties in the conversation
When I don't feel understood it's usually because the counterparty hasn't said things that allow me to recognize that they have internalized what I'm trying to communicate
Changing tack a little, I think that this is one of the things that I admire about some legal writing, that they are intentionally addressing the act of communication in addition to the substance of what they are communicating. In addition there is a recognition that their words have consequence
Such that, if your model of how rules and regulations work is that they are all active at all times.... I have really bad news for you. For fun, consider that there is still the 18th amendment to the US constitution. There is just also now the 21st amendment to go with it. And at no point did we have to redefine words for that trick.
Also, the question was very explicitly not asking if an ambulance in the park is "okay." The question is asking is it a rule violation.
It's an excellent analogy, in my opinion, because what it's trying to be analogous to is the general ambiguity of language that makes content moderation difficult. It's hardly even an analogy because it is about precisely an identical concept: determining whether behavior is violating a rule.
"my children will see no violence" looks wonderful on paper but there are a great many edge cases where this simple rule is plainly broken all the time in harmless ways.
in reality, what crosses the line one has in mind when they create the simple rule is created is far, far more complex than anyone who makes these rules is prepared to admit.
there is so little "black and white" in these things; it's almost entirely "grey" areas. that's what this quiz is meant to convey.
it is extremely effective at this.
Also interesting: the fact that 50% more people described a skateboard being used as a vehicle than a skateboard being carried.
That roller skates are clearly either a vehicle or not, but a police car is a gray area?
note that the question was whether the rule “no vehicles in the park” has been violated, not whether it should be allowed to be violated.
People are saying that it's not, and that it's a strawman for what a layman's view of what content moderation should look like.
Like having prisons or letting police use lethal force on dangerous people, some things fit this description - but at some point lines have to be drawn and the leashes have to be reigned in if the violence is not agreed upon anymore - institutionalised racism and the likes.
All rules have countless unspoken caveats and are inherently only able to be interpreted in a cultural context; rules cannot be made so specific as to remove the need for that context. Problems come in when essential parts of that context are not shared by everyone who interacts with the rules.
Having rules against advocating for violence means that you want to prohibit such calls (otherwise you would have written down such exceptions and admit that calling for violence is sometimes OK).
Let me put it this way: what Reddit secretly wants is not standing up against advocating for violence, but avoiding the reputation risk that might happen if there exist to many post that advocate for violence in a way that causes an outcry.
In other words: the hidden problem is rather Reddit's "secret" agenda behind the rules.
Example #1: I didn't poison Joe. I was out of town when it happened.
Example #2: I poisoned Joe. He had been sentenced to death, and my job is prison executioner. That's why I injected him with poison.
The second example is an affirmative defense. A murder occurred, but it was not illegal because it was authorized by the state.
I have a feeling that lawyers who took this quiz were more likely to answer yes for the ambulance and police car, but nonlawyers would answer no. That's because most people were answering the question "would they get in trouble?" But lawyers might have been thinking "is there a valid defense to a violation that actually did occur?"
In your example, calling for the death penalty isn't advocating for violence because executing someone in the justice system is legally permissible (let's not get into ethics or morality). The Reddit rule is generally understood to cover only illegal violence.
There may or not be exceptions in universe that this sign is in. The sign clearly has no exceptions however.
The death penalty is a legal ruling that is often not even the final decision.
No reasonable person would confuse “the traitor should get the death penalty” with “kill the traitor!”.
Note that taking it literally even calling for imprisonment is advocating for violence (unless convict accepts imprisonment voluntarily and not under threat of legal violence by law enforcement).
A: *saying something stupid as a joke B: "I hope the country will impose death penalty to those who support it"
Or when it's used as discussion, like this, is it violating the rule?
Asa an example, I'm seeing most people (based on people saying they match the majority at 11%, but there's some indication that may be broken) that chose to go with the common understanding of what the sign meant (as opposed to some literal definition they decided to follow) seemed to have an inherent idea of how we might better define "vehicle" to match those expectations (such as whether the conveyance provides power itself or whether it requires power from a person, or whether it houses a person, or whether it is assisting normal motion in some manner).
Also, without further analysis of the data it's hard to tell whether removing or redefining slightly a few questions might bring a core consensus far above 11%. And even if we can get this specific question to a good consensus, there's no real proof that it indicates that content moderation could similarly come to a consensus on specific concepts (I doubt it could for many important things).
In those ways, this is a clever and interesting experiment to take part in, but I'm not sure how much it really says about content moderation, as I think (as perhaps the GP thinks) it was made slightly too simplistic in an effort to be approachable, and in that case lost some of the aspects it was trying to convey.
And separately, a lot of the ambiguity in content moderation comes from people trying to frame what they don't agree with as something that's against the rules. If a vocal group doesn't like ice skaters, you can be sure they'll be giving detailed explanation why skates are a literal vehicle.
Perhaps as a non-native speaker I miss some linguistic subtlety, but does not "mode of transportation" mean "thing to (help) bring person from A to B"? Thus whether skating is a mode of transportation (or not) should be rather clear.
In this sense it should not matter whether the transportation is recreational or not, i.e. you can also recreationally drive a car or recreationally go by train.
Via going by skateboard, a transportation happens. Whether you do it recreationally or not does not have anything to do with whether a skateboard is a mode of transportation (or not).
If 5 different sets of people argue about 5 different issues, each at 20%, then 100% of people are in disagreement. Total failure;
You don't have to have silly rules like that, though.
my complaint - that "no vehicles" isn't a great analogy - is because it's not vague enough. I didn't state that outright, you just assumed something different.
Exactly. I being a non-native English speaker, just to be sure, looked up in a dictionary: the most common German translation of "vehicle" is "Fahrzeug".
Of course, as it is quite common, there do exist laws in Germany
> https://gesetze.io/definitionen/fahrzeug-f9r8
what is a "Fahrzeug" and what is not, and also a German Wikipedia article that goes quite deeply into this topic:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrzeug
Just to bring up a linguistic point (it is far more common in German than in English to carefully analyze words if subtle parts of the meaning are to be cleared up): actually, one could argue (contrary to the Wikipedia article) that "Fahrzeug" comes from "fahren" (to drive); thus a "Flugzeug" (airplane) is not a Fahrzeug, because it flies (Flug -> flight) instead of driving (but as mentioned: the Wikipedia article states a different opinion: Flugzeuge are Luftfahrzeuge, while, say, cars are Landfahrzeuge, i.e. both vehicles belong to sub-categories of Fahrzeuge).
---
But back to the topic: as a non-native English speaker
- all my arguments are based on the most common German translation "Fahrzeug" of "vehicle". What if some subtleties are lost in this translation?
- I doubt that the typical English native speaker tends to think as deeply about words as is not unusual in Germany (when I did analyses of English words to native English speakers they nearly always admitted that they never ever thought of such analyses)
Personally, I feel it's unamigious that the ambulance is violating the rule as written. Whether it should be granted an exception to the rule is a different question. Such is the difficulties of content moderation.
It's also apparent to me how a rule enforcer sufficiently distant from the scenarios would declare that the space station violates the "no vehicles in the park" rule, no matter how ridiculous that sounds.
I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?
It's true that “vehicle” can be vague, but it's also true that in many contexts it's well-defined. The very common ”no entry for vehicular traffic” road sign applies to bikes and mopeds and cars, but not pedestrians, wheelchair users and roller skaters, for example.
Similarly, you can operationalize the “no vehicles allowed in the park” rule by enumerating the different types of vehicles people might wish to drive in the park:
etc. The point isn't whether you agree with all these decisions (maybe skateboards shouldn't be allowed in the park?), but rather that you can enumerate two or three dozen vehicles and cover virtually all the vehicles people might possibly use in real life. Occasionally new categories need to be added (e.g., electric bikes or drones weren't really common 30 years ago) but mostly this can settle all possible debates.And yes, it's still possible for some weirdo to build a supercharged wheelchair that can go 80 kph, but that's the extreme exception, and if the guy keeps driving through the park at 80 kph repeatedly eventually he will get arrested and then he will claim he is in the right because he's driving what's technically a wheelchair, and then a judge will rule that a wheelchair that can go 80 kph isn't actually a wheelchair in the sense intended by the law, and the rules will be updated to say “powered wheelchairs with a maximum speed of 15 kph” and that's the end of that.
The problem with “hate speech” and “glorifying violence” is exactly that they are very hard to nail down in an objective and clear way, and the majority of cases where someone is banned for “hate speech” involves vague and subjective judgement.
For a concrete example, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter on the grounds of inciting violence by tweeting “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” There is some really creative reading going on in here. How would you substantiate the rule against inciting violence in a way that it clearly covers this statement? People aren't allowed to announce that they won't be attending some event? That seems overly broad. Sitting presidents aren't allowed to announce they won't attend their successor's inauguration? This feels like it's overly specific, covering only this one event.
So that's the fundamental difference here. “No entrance for vehicles” is a rule that can be operationalized by enumerating and defining the kind of vehicles that people might think of using to enter the park. While “hate speech” defies objective definition.
And, I mean, to be clear: there will always be weaselly “oh-but-I-didnt-technically-break-the rules” comments like that Donald Trump tweet. But the whole point of this is that you’ll never be able to make a rule with an objective definition! These are not mathematically defined sets; someone will always need to make a judgment call.
what if this was a forum that rebels to the gov't are using to discuss how they will form the revolution? Is that now disallowed, because what they discuss could be considered hate speech?
What if this group of rebels (or freedom fighters as they call it) is someone you personally want to support?
What if this group are labeled terrorists by other governments?
It's not so black and white tbh. It's only black and white when you imagine yourself to be the authority.
They're often ambiguous though. Lime bikes and motorized skateboards have been a recent edge conditions in vehicle laws that have needed to be specifically addressed.
But, yes, normally laws will actually define their terms.
Since the "legislature" in this example did a really lousy job of definitions, I only counted the one car as violating the rules.
I disagree, lawyers would have no work then. Laws are not as specific as you would think they are and it is to provide a diverse gamut of powers and broad discretion in their application.
For example, the first amendment does not offer an unlimited right to say what you want, when you want, and however you want. At what point does said speech become prohibited hate speech, inciting violence, verbal assault, defamation etc...?
There is plenty evidence of people exercising free speech such as wearing cuss words on shirts and their speech being stifled by police through intimidation and arrests. Most famously Cohen v California and for example more recently Wood v Eubanks (25 F. 4th 414 - Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit 2022) with very similar facts to Cohen v California.
Here is another one "Battery is an unlawful application of force directly or indirectly upon another person or their personal belongings, causing bodily injury or offensive contact." I go onto the bus and my shoulder hits the shoulder of another passenger. I did not have consent to touch them and they are upset by the contact / found it offensive. Am I guilty of battery?
In the test "No vehicle sin the park" there is no ambiguity that an ambulance is a vehicle, but clearly 1/3 of people don't think it breaks the rule, presumably largely because it's for an emergency purpose despite the rule not having an exemption for such a scenario. Neither would a rule that says "no hate speech". What is hate speech? Would speech stating "I hate..." Nazi's or a genocidal leader or regime be hate speech? So what are the exemptions, what are the discretions? How do we define things?
What about support for LGTBQIA+? Some countries only recently have become more amenable to these groups, but plenty of jurisdictions and cultures are still very much opposed to them. Is homophobia hate speech? What is transphobic speech? Is stating there are only two genders transphobic?
The same could be said about support for Ukraine which is positive in the Western world but would be illegal in Russia. But then, what about Taiwan and it's disputed status with respect to China? What about other contested borders and lands?
The fact that even when there is no ambiguity people don't entirely agree whether a simple rule is broken is entirely the point of the exercise. And now, you expect platforms and countries to exercise those rules and laws when evidently people can't even agree on a simple rule.
By the way, there's no "hate speech" exception in U.S. first amendment jurisprudence.
You really do not.
The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.
I think that's a further example of ambiguity.
A park that had a rule in the 1990s saying "No motorized vehicles" probably wouldn't have wanted to prohibit electric bikes or electric mobility scooters, but such a rule would do that.
> often to be about being motorized or speed.
This more precise definition would include the toy car, quadcopter, ISS, and airplane, all of which fewer than 20% of respondents believe are vehicles.
> It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed.
It doesn't actually. It asks if a particular rule has been violated, not whether the violation is or should be acceptable (and it makes that distinction very explicitly even!).
The objections you have to the exercise don't actually seem that well founded, and the analogy appears even better due to the nature of your objections.
I get what the author hopes to do, but it’s really a bad go at it.
Although perhaps that’s because arguing a losing position is hard.
Edit: Okay I have no idea what it's meant to be (other than "11")
Not sure given the other responses if this number is acurate?
But also I got 11% here.
And 11%, why is everyone getting 11%? Is it a backend error? Who knows! If that 11% had a label, it would be easier for us to know whether it's working as intended or not.
But it says I had 11% agreement with the majority.
I also couldn't see two different colors on my dimmed phone display until I zoomed way in. I'm not even colorblind.
I too got 11% but stuck assiduously to powered vehicles on the ground of or launched from the park.
I did not include the tank.
I also got the exact same percentage saying 'yes' to everything.
I also got the exact same percentage saying 'no ' to everything.
27 * .11 ~= 3, fwiw
So I don't think it's related to yours answers. It's just the weighted average of what people said for the set of questions you answered, or something like that. Not actually your score at all.
18 when I stopped after just the first 7 questions
Also breaking a rule is fine for an emergency vehicle.
I also took away the opposite of what the author tried to convey.
But I also got a bad impression of their argumentative integrity because they tried to use a strawman to illustrate their point - only it backfired anyway.
An ill defined rule that lacks examples and definition is not a good way to prove people interpret a good faith attempt at rules differently.
And the longer explanation at the end simply dismisses the notion of giving any examples or even trying to give a clear rule by hand waving and basically saying a motivated person can find ambiguity in anything.
So because a rule or law can’t be defined to perfection without the slightest ambiguity then we should just have anarchy? I’m sorry for the bluntness but that’s asinine.
Edit: reading further, yes, everyone gets 11%.
If your answers were consistent with a consistent population, there would be a threshold above which all your bars turn red. Any churn in that consistency (my last six bars are a mixture of red and green) shows a deviation of some kind, but I don’t know how this accounts for when there is no overall consistency and everyone disagrees.
Add a couple checkboxes with interactivity:
- Show only "Is vehicle" bars
- Show only "Is not vehicle" bars
- Show only answers that agreed with me
- Show only answers that disagreed with me
And a "toggle colorblind mode" although I'm not sure what colors would be ideal for that.
Any other ideas for how to make this thing actually readable?
The "majority 11%" means that 1/9 of your answers were above 50% (as you can see it on the charts).
That still seems as if it adds some useful information. It's informing people ahead of time that moderators will probably not interpret "racism" in the narrowest possible sense, or likely even in a medium grey-area sense, but rather in a broad sense.
Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.
I have friends that do long bike camping trips, and they sometimes want to pass through areas of wilderness on their trips. What do they do? They take apart the bike and pack it, because you are allowed to have bike parts in the wilderness.
I would love for someone to try disassembling less of the bike and still getting ticketed, just to see how that line ends up getting drawn. Is a bike without a seat still a bike? What about a bike with no tires? Does 50% of the bike need to be "contiguous" to be considered a bike? If it can be ridden? What if there are no pedals? Is a unicycle considered a bike?
I considered ISS to be outside it, and that was pretty much it. My views weren't shared with too many, about 11%.
The problem with treeline (or any similar threshold) is that even having that defined doesn't solve for the fact that we don't know the altitude of the quadcopter. That's why I'm leaning more toward ground contact.
Just like "contactless" payment cards, which for some reason involves the word "tap" as well, even though tapping is the act of making brief contact, and is not required for the communication to succeed, and that successful communication could be referred to as making contact, but I digress.
International agreement says that objects at the altitude if the ISS are not counted in the park, that’s not local jurisdiction
The notion of permissions afforded by "airspace rights," even those internationally agreed, therefore cannot be used when deciding how to answer the questions in this game. Even if we could lean on that here, airspace rights actually were infinite for a very long time -- there's even a Latin phrase saying "up to Heaven and down to Hell" -- until modern air travel began.
Instead of rights/laws, we must focus only on what it means to be "in the park" by common use of the phrase. At some point you're above it rather than in it, perhaps. It may happen to be the case that people do most often think of this altitude threshold roughly equivalent to modern airspace rights, but personally I'm not so sure.
This is why some people (including myself) chose that an ambulance driven into a park wouldn't be a violation of the rule.
I would say those two things are very different. The ground (floors are inside) is the cooperating object upon which leading objects carry.
The shoes carried the person on the ground, the car carried the person on the ground, the horse carried the person on the ground, etc;
An interesting dilemma does occur if we are walking barefoot: our feet carry us but are part of our whole, so we cannot reasonably consider them or ourselves a vehicle. But in a general day-to-day sense we would say they carry us.
It is very interesting what you brought up because I think it shows some people consider their outfit as an extension of themselves. Then again, many people also do for their car :)
Since we're already taking it too far, I want to point out that you can have outside floors, and you can have floors that are not supported by the ground.
An airplanes floor in flight, or a dance floor in your backyard are examples of both.
Rollerblades, skis, snowboards, skateboards, scooters, bikes.
IMO the definition of a vehicle comes down to how wieldy, how large, and how powerful the device is - for instance car is obviously a vehicle as it's very powerful, has a large turning radius, and large area. The interesting thing about this is that there's an argument that scooters are not vehicles but skateboards are - scooters are far easier to control (i.e. more wieldy) whereas skateboards have a tendency to launch the user in one direction and the skateboard in the other, which makes it rather unwieldy.
I would only consider skates to be slightly ambiguous because they are shoes that are mounted but worn. but still, i say vehicle
Other definitions include an agent of transmission (e.g. for and infection) and a medium though which something is displayed (dance is the vehicle for my creativity). Would have been interesting to see the different definitions exploited vs more strained classification of shoes or skates or whatnot as vehicles.
- Would anyone call it a vehicle?
- Is it in the park?
In general, no testing. Unless some people are being jackasses and doing something absurd like standing on wheelchairs jousting with long sticks holding up everyone in line.
While it might be uncommon to call a wheelchair a vehicle, it fits the literal definition. I don’t understand the ‘extension of the person’ rationale, you’re still using the word ‘wheelchair’, and it’s obviously a separate object from a person. How would that rationale differ if you were talking about cars? Can I argue a car is an extension of me as long as I’m using it while I need it?
I wouldn't say I'm entirely convinced, but it's at least convincing enough that I said that a wheelchair did not violate the "vehicle" rule. I can't define "vehicle" in a way that would satisfactorily justify that decision, but I'm comfortable with that.
A bicycle actually goes on roads, follow rules and get a ticket for jumping a red light.
You can take roller skates off, get out of a wheelchair, and get off a bicycle.
Imagine you were wearing roller skates being pulled by a dog.
Imagine you were sitting in a chair, with a roller skate bound to each leg of the chair, rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a flea in a roller skate rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a dog in a wheelchair rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a flea on a dog in a chair with roller skates on its legs rolling down a hill.
I don't think that's particularly clear and I think a non-negligible number of people would disagree
After all, bicycles are clearly vehicles, and bicycles and wheelchairs are both things with metal frames, wheels and seats designed to convey humans around under their own power.
Other than the placement of the wheels, the main difference is the character of its use.
Which I guess is part of the point - the rule specifically does not say anything about use, only presence - but people (including me) are still interpreting the rule with a "usage" axis. Perfect demonstration that the "simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply" assertion has fallen over at the first hurdle.
I think, just being overly annoying and literal, that the game shouldn't be answered by asking whether anyone would call a wheelchair a vehicle, but whether a wheelchair is a vehicle in the sense meant in the rule statement. I don't think it is, personally, though it's probably the closest non-vehicle in the list.
Strictly speaking, by the definition of "would anyone call this object a vehicle", every single thing on the list is a vehicle, because apparently at least ~2% of the quiz respondents said they were vehicles - including kites!
It might include a powered mobility scooter.
Drones and balloons I would say are in the park, whereas aircraft (at normal altitudes) I would say are not. Unfortunately: I'd like more parks to have a protected square inch of silence.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Square_Inch_of_Silence
1. https://onesquareinch.org/
a thing used for transporting people or goods
On this basis, I conclude that wheelchairs, roller skates and carried skatebords are vehicles, and horses are not (as thing implies non-sentience).
Or if it was motorised?
Is the correct resolution to deny (b)?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "in the park" represents within the analogy.
Additionally strollers, wagons, and other baby or child conveyances would also qualify.
But you were specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction, and that's why this can happen. The 15 countries it flew over are members of the ICAO, which delegated some of their sovereignty to the common good of easy air travel. It could have easily worked out some other way; fly over our country without stopping for immigration, and we blow up your plane. (You can see this in action if you fly your plane from Canada to do a low approach over the White House. You probably won't be home for dinner.) Similarly, in the US, the FAA decides who can fly over your property and how low. These are not universal constraints on existence, just actual laws that people wrote down because nobody could agree on the details. I'd venture a guess that if you asked the average property owner if airplanes could fly over their property and stare at them in their hot tubs, they'd say "no". However, the law simply doesn't agree with them, and a satellite is photographing your underwear as we speak!
But what if it's a single unit (no warhead) which only works via kinetic contact, then perhaps not a vehicle.
Trust me, if there weren't any laws, people would be shooting down airplanes above their farms, or at the very least, writing a lot of angry letters to the FAA. The laws that we have right now allowing the freedom of air travel were hard-won and unpopular among those affected.
Therefore, the park in this exercise would mostly like try and shoot down the International Space Station, or else risk the reputation of not being strict against surfers carrying surfboards. It's exactly the same thing.
So where do you draw the line?
Similarly a subway train passing underneath the park is not "in" the park, nor are vehicles that are at the antipode of the park on the polar opposite side of the Earth.
To me, that doesn't change the answers much. You still have to have some definition of vehicle that inevitably assumes some context.
That to me means any human-propelled thing smaller than say a motorbike is not a vehicle.
So I only said 'is indisputably a vehicle' to cars and similar (even if was an ambulance or police car)
The countries often ask for passenger lists and manifests before they allow your plane to do so and have, in the past forced planes to land to get to passengers or suspected passengers on the plane they have an interest in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
Parks do have airspaces, obviously and literally, and more to the point, in the U.S. there’s existing legislation defining the altitudes that are considered “in” and out of the park.
Whether any airspace is included in the park is completely ambiguous in the game.
Asking intentionally ambiguous questions that existing laws already answer in order to make a point about the difficulty of moderation kind-of undermines the author’s intent here. He was trying to prove that unanswerable corner cases always exist, but it’s not true for the specific case of airlines over parks once you know the laws.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/become_a_drone_...
The question in the quiz about flying airplanes over a park can be correctly answered with 3 pieces of information: the aircraft type, the park’s location, and the altitude. The question cannot be answered without that information. Contrary to the author’s attempted point, the correct answer to the question is not a matter of language ambiguity.
Is a quadcopter at 399 ft in the park then? If it's at 401 ft, then it's not?
Yeah I saw all those rules. The FAA killed flying drones as a legal hobby for me.
Is an airplane in your park if you put a roof over it? Is an airplane in your house?
"the park" includes not only the ground, but also a certain area above the ground - otherwise someone riding a bike through the park wouldn't be in the park (as they are not touching the ground) but their bike would be. That would be absurd.
You see the issue, yah?
In at least some countries (such as the U.S., and I would speculate practically all countries in the age of commercial flight and private drones, but I don’t know that for a fact) there are laws that define whether flying “over” a public park means in our out, and the park’s bounding volume is defined with a specific altitude ceiling. (It may be different depending on the type of aircraft, e.g., civilian drone vs emergency helicopter vs commercial airliner, etc.)
The author’s trick worked. People are arguing over whether a hypothetical airplane is in the hypothetical park without knowing the altitude or location, rather than pointing at the fact that he question is intentionally under-specified and the right answer depends on important details that were left out.
I say none are vehicles but I could see how one might.
For example you can have a rule like "no sharing pornographic content", but then are people allowed to share links to forbidden content? Links to sites that are 100% links to forbidden content? Links to sites that have one link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? Links to sites that have one extremely prominent link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? How prominent? Etc etc etc.
I’m sure much of it violates the rules but my initial inclination is always to browse away, not report.
I'm pretty sure a few explicit Google searches with "site:twitter.com" should pull up plenty.
And I'm not talking softcore, unless my descriptions are way off base.
Granted those aren't necessarily unwittingly, I can usually guess it's going to be like that, but I've definitely "fallen into a rabbit hole" so to speak at other times.
On reddit, if you're not subbed to porn subreddits, you normally wouldn't see it. Though the homepage was still jacked up enough a few days ago that I was seeing softcore stuff on page 1 or 2 with the country set to Mexico.
You'll see a fair degree of NSFW porn if you firehose capture all images, on the "hate speech" front (repeatedly calling disabled, minority, indigenous, queer people names, cyber stalking, etc.) it's reached the point where (for instance) Australia has warned Twitter it will start issuing daily fines of up to $7K AUD [1]
The increased porn & veering into CSAM territory is tailwinding that trend.
[1] https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/esafety-d...
How far does the airspace extend?
> 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).
(If Schrodinger brings a backpack into the park but doesn't know what's in it, is that a violation? Did you pack your own luggage today, sir/maam?)
Same goes for things like kites and quadrocopters.
The labels at the end now say:
> You think it is not a vehicle in the park
> You think it is a vehicle in the park
No actually I do think it does and is captured beautifully in the game. Things that clearly once vehicles are arguably no longer - like the war tank.
Like Michelangelo's David, is the nudity porn? is it obscene? for who? Is this a website about art? or a porn site? education site? a site for children?
Each one of those sites have differing views of the exact same thing.
Love this exercise.
I eventually came up with a mental model that was something like “an artificially powered or mechanically advantaged means of conveyance or transport, especially one that creates negative externalities to other park goers inconsistent with typical use and enjoyment of public park space.” But that wasn’t absolute - the non-functional tank was, in my mind, quite obviously a vehicle, and so was prohibited. Someone at a higher pay grade is going to have to make an exception there. The skydiver - ehhh, it was a stretch to call him a vehicle, but by my heuristic he broke the sign’s rule.
Was, or is? The non-functional tank was a vehicle, but is currently a non-functional lump of steel and is thus no different to a statue. A statue is obviously not a vehicle, and a statue of a car is still not a vehicle.
Seems unlikely to have been pushed by people.
“Matthew, head of an organization of WWII veterans, puts a non-functioning WWII-era tank into the park as a war memorial.”
In the end, I only banned the car and the boat, and the boat was only really on a technicality. In retrospect, I might have been being too lenient, but I think it had a lot to do with just the stuff that I wanted to see in the park, which is pretty interesting from a moderation perspective.
Travois is other one I kinda struggled... Just a a-frame even if you drag it in clearly is not one to me.
For an exercise that is, by it's own admission, pedantic by design that's a pretty glaring fault
Rules are pedantic by their nature, that's the whole point of interpreting them.
The point, that you've missed twice now, is that the results are presented using incorrect language.
Which of course illustrates that in the real world there are always multiple conflicting rules that apply. Especially in content moderation.
I think it might be worse than that, there are sometimes rules which aren't actually rules which can still (sometimes!) override rules which are.
At what point is a helicopter hovering above the park in violation?
The rule is no vehicles in the park. I’ve also concluded that an ambulance or police responding to a call didn’t violate the rule but saw that a lot of people seemed to think it did. And it made me think.
The rules say to not apply any other rule but the stated one. And if you follow the rule to the letter, a police car in the park is a vehicle in the park , violates the rule. It’s dumb but it does.
Common sense says it shouldn’t but the rule says it does and the instructions say to only consider the rule with no nuance.
I suppose that's the beauty, intentional or not, of this exercise... Since the point was to highlight human behavior your response is still a valid, important datapoint despite you "failing" to complete the exercise according to the instructions.
Even simple things like chairs, you can't write down a definition that includes everything that humans consider chairs and excludes everything humans don't consider chairs.
It's not a big problem if everyone is civil and existing moderation mechanisms aren't overwhelmed; people quickly learn from online faux pas and the online social norm is restored.
Also, on pseudonymous sites, you may not even be able to know this at a glance. Sometimes on reddit I have been baffled at the replies I've received, until I realized it was coming from a child, or an older conservative person living on disability.
It's not that I was mean or nasty, or pushing any boundaries – I was never like that – I was just ... 15.
Also turns out what people meant with "your English is very good" was "your English is very good for a 15 years old non-native speaker", and not "your English is very good".
This is an argument against migration then.
How would you phrase the question/game so that 100% of people all get the same answers as you?
How would you expect others to phrase the question, so that you'd 100% agree with their answers?
Taking the ambulance example: it would indeed break a literal interpretation of "no vehicles in the park" and would also fall under the instruction "ignore your local laws". The issue, however, is that 99% of all parks in the world would allow ambulances, and those that don't would have a specific clarification as to why (archeological site, dangerous, etc). At that point, if it didn't allow ambulances then it would almost certainly not be a park either.
If I wanted to get agreement I would specifically write "forget what you know about the human experience and pretend you're a cold robot with no feelings and no idea about social contracts".
could one of these people be acquitted but the other not? Say if one committed the crime so did the other, ie everything being equal except personality and demeanor of key players.
not everything is black and white.
1. Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park."
2. Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
Your job was to determine if rule 2 ("this rule") has been violated. By playing the game, you are fulfilling your job and thus the rule is never violated.
Everyone here implicitly knows that natural languages have ambiguity this is why formal languages were invented and it's painful that governing bodies hasn't caught up in many places. Imagine a world where you could diff laws from federal to state, state to state, stateA.city to stateB.city or StateA.cityA to StateA.cityB. or a log where you could see exactly when a law was changed and why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
When the highest court in the land can't get a good grasp on whether a law has been broken or not you know you've hit a thorny problem.
* A truck is driven over the corner of the park, but it uses a ramp so it never physically touched the ground of the park.
* One tire of a car drives 10cm on along the edge of a park, but the truck’s satnav has a different datum than your cadastral data.
A Wyoming federal court just ruled the truck wasn’t in the park [1], I agree!
* the platted boundary of the park extends into the road.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wyd.606...
I expected it to get into difficult edge cases, like somebody riding a motorcycle or landing a plane, but it never went there. A plane flying overhead doesn’t constitute “in the park”, and it looks like almost everybody agrees on that point.
Did you read the summary at the end?
So emergency vehicles, toys etc are only an issue to a rule-lawyer. Not to normal people.
In my mind the rule would obviously have related list of reasonable exceptions filed away somewhere; the simplicity of the rule is to improve the effectiveness of preventing the common case violation of regular people driving their cars through the park, causing damage and impacting the people using the park for its intended purpose.
In my opinion almost all of the examples provided were either obviously not applicable or were perfectly reasonable exceptions (and I don't think exceptions violate a rule).
(A few years ago I could have said "we don't get ticketed by an AI that only follows the rules it was given." Well, we do now in many places and that's a problem.)
In the real world, we might debate whether it was actually an emergency and so on, but here we're told straight up.
The instructions then continue, "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)." But again this could be interpreted two ways.
One interpretation is that an emergency vehicle entering the park would technically violate the rule, but everyone (including legal and religious authorities and the park owner) would agree that the violation "should" be allowed. However, I interpreted "should" more in line with the previous statements as referring to some kind of controversy (park owner says it's not allowed, but for legal or religious or moral reasons I think it should be allowed). Under this interpretation, the rule has an implicit exception for emergency vehicles, so they are not violating it. The exception is just so obvious that it's not worth including (especially given the text length limits of the signs where park rules tend to be written down).
My interpretation might sound like a stretch. But imagine if the rule instead said "No vehicles in the park, including emergency vehicles." Wouldn't that be materially different? Yet the difference doesn't affect whether a violation should be legally/religiously/morally allowed. At most, it might hint that there might be some practical reason why emergency vehicles shouldn't enter (perhaps it's dangerous), and perhaps a reasonable emergency vehicle operator should take that information into account when determining whether violating the rule would be justified. But that's only an indirect effect, and there's clearly more to it than that. Regardless of whether there is any justification, the clause would clarify that the park owner really doesn't want emergency vehicles, when otherwise we would assume they do. And to me that difference is best interpreted as affecting "whether the rule is violated".
I don’t think there’s ever effectively “no such rule” but only “(expected) immunity from consequences of said rule” which is subtly different.
And in the given case we had none of them. It was just one simple rule - no vehicles inside the park.
It should be comforting that people are able to use independent judgement when faced with a nonsensical situation, situations that illustrates a glaring lack of detail to the law or rule rather than anything else.
Basically the more terse a rule is, the more it requires the enforcer to use their own judgment.
That game would only be supportive of the point the author wants to make if the rule had a few paragraphs of examples and defined vehicle.
Instead the author hand waved away the case of a rule with examples by saying that nit picker could always find ambiguity. So instead they gave a overt terse rule that defies common sense. It’s a strawman attempt of a example.
Deciding that something violates the letter of the law is not an absurd conclusion. That's just step one, and the more important places to involve judgement come after that step.
It's telling that 70% would apply immoral guidance. "Just following orders."
Says who? So I can park my car in the park and take the train so long as I don’t “use” the park? Or drive through it on my way to work?
Police/fire/ambulances are there for emergencies, their drivers have better training (theoretically) in safe driving, and the vehicles bring attention to themselves.
Uncle Jim Bob trying to drive his Buick around is what's obviously prohibited as that's the vehicle/driver most likely to cause harm...
By this logic, it’s ok for a police officer to drive through the park’s green on his way to work, with no emergency.
* if the siren is off, then “the vehicles bring attention to themselves” doesn't apply.
* if the siren in on, then they're not violating the park's rules, but they are violating the rules of their emergency vehicle.
I started answering by interpreting the choice as "is this allowed in the park", not "does this violate the rule".
I'm not sure if this page makes its point better or worse if you know what it's testing. It's interesting though how explicit you have to be if you want people to not add any additional context. But also, so much of the questions rely on context. So it feels like an unfair test, but it's hard to say exactly why.
I'd assume the answers would be different if the questions was phrased differently, restating the assumptions and some of the consequences, e.g., that there might be exceptions, we just don't look at them yet.
Content moderation is about the same thing. It's about trying to minimize the negatives for everyone else while restricting the least. Part of Western cultural values seems to be that we want people to be free to have opinions that don't match the majority or those in control.
This is why the actions Elon Musk is taking in "moderating" Twitter are so problematic- they aren't about minimizing negatives for most users, they're about minimizing negatives For Elon Musk. This short sighted behavior erodes the platform in the long term.
* means of carrying or transporting something (planes, trains, and other vehicles) such as a) motor vehicle or b) a piece of mechanized equipment - Websters Online Dictionary
* 1) any means in or by which someone travels or something is carried or conveyed; a means of conveyance or transport: a motor vehicle; space vehicles. 2) conveyance moving on wheels, runners, tracks, or the like, as a cart, sled, automobile, or tractor. - dictionary.com
* a machine, usually with wheels and an engine, used for transporting people or goods, especially on land - Cambridge Dictionary
Any of these definitions could have been applied successfully to the series of questions on the website without ambiguity (edit: without ambiguity, but each would have led to different sets of conclusions). Which is to say, the entire point of the excercise reduces down to finding out which definition of the word someone is working from. This is only a problem if we're dealing with something that can't be defined, or something that we refuse to define.
That's why the only vehicle that made me pause was the tank, since it was at one point motorized, but no longer.
> a piece of equipment with several moving parts that uses power to do a particular type of work
How many oars is "several"? Do they count if they're not physically affixed to the boat?
> ((a piece of (the set of necessary tools, clothing, etc. for a particular purpose) with (some; an amount that is not exact but is fewer than many) moving parts that uses power to do a particular type of work) used for transporting people or goods)
Yup, that's technically a rowboat - as long as it has oars included (whether or not they're physically attached: "set of"). Take the oars out of the equation, and it's not a machine anymore...just a piece of a vehicle (like how a tire isn't a car).
Also, many people said the International Space Station was a vehicle in the park. I find that suspicious and question if people were choosing random or opposite or spurious answers just to pull the levers. I would like to hear from people who do believe the ISS is a vehicle in the park. What is your justification?
I think "travois" is something you either know or you know you're going to have to look it up, so there's no risk of confusion. "Matchbox car" seems like something someone might not know, but just think "oh, a car, I know what a car is" without realizing it's a toy.
That said, I also felt like the description didn't explain it well enough. There are electric toy cars that kids actually ride in and drive around. The thing about a matchbox car is that it's the size of a matchbox.