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The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

• tomrod 3y ago
  Fascinating!
  • dylan604 3y ago
    Totally was not expecting that to be the point, but I'll go along with the concept for being creative.
    • labster 3y ago
      I answered the questions expecting a logic puzzle, but it is very much not that.
• parl_match 3y ago
  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.
  • coolestguy 3y ago
    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
    • parl_match 3y ago
      I do get the point, I'm saying that the analogy was bad.
      • pacaro 3y ago
        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
        • version_five 3y ago
          Or he has a different opinion than you. What is the point of your post, just a lame scolding?
          • jakelazaroff 3y ago
            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!
          • pacaro 3y ago
            I'm not sure that I have an established opinion about TFA, but my tone was poor. I'm well rebuked
        • parl_match 3y ago
          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!
          • pacaro 3y ago
  • iherbig 3y ago
    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.
    • parl_match 3y ago
      I do get the point, I'm saying that the analogy was bad. The point could have been made better.
      • naikrovek 3y ago
        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. it is extremely effective at this.
        • howenterprisey 3y ago
          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.
          • jakelazaroff 3y ago
            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.
  • djsavvy 3y ago
    Did you get through the game to the end text? This is specifically addressed.
    • parl_match 3y ago
      Yes. I stand by what I said.
  • version_five 3y ago
    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.
    • parl_match 3y ago
      Or even something along the lines of "Susan said x."
    • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > 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.
      • Macha 3y ago
        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
        • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
          > 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).
  • dmitrygr 3y ago
    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
    • Macha 3y ago
      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
      • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        Even 20/80 is already a failure, we have wagon, rowboat, quadcopter, bike. If 5 different sets of people argue about 5 different issues, each at 20%, then 100% of people are in disagreement. Total failure;
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      > "no hateful language," which is so vague, You don't have to have silly rules like that, though.
      • jakelazaroff 3y ago
        But also, you could have rules like that.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • parl_match 3y ago
      > 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.
  • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > 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 > https://gesetze.io/definitionen/fahrzeug-f9r8 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 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)
    • madeofpalk 3y ago
      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.
  • jakelazaroff 3y ago
    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?
    • sltkr 3y ago
      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.
  • lamontcg 3y ago
    > 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.
  • NolF 3y ago
    > 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.
    • schoen 3y ago
      > 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.
  • bagels 3y ago
    I used a dictionary to define vehicle. The definition does not match yours.
  • megablast 3y ago
    > I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo. You really do not.
    • parl_match 3y ago
      I really do.
  • teeray 3y ago
    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.
    • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      What if it makes locomotion harder? IS a snowmobiel is a vehicle in the summer? A motorbike without fuel?
      • whelp_24 3y ago
        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.
  • daveoc64 3y ago
    >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.
  • joshuamorton 3y ago
    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.
  • mint2 3y ago
    So is a dissolving pill capsule, which is a vehicle for delivering medicine, allowed in the park?! 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.
• Macha 3y ago
  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.
  • MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
    I think that the 11% majority are the people that had the exact same answers as you for all questions.
    • Scubabear68 3y ago
      I also got 11%. I suspect foul play..
      • Supermancho 3y ago
        I also got 11%
  • bhaney 3y ago
    I think it's giving you a percentage of people who answered exactly the same as you on all questions. Edit: Okay I have no idea what it's meant to be (other than "11")
    • Macha 3y ago
      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
      • bhaney 3y ago
• Yenrabbit 3y ago
  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-results 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!
  • cubefox 3y ago
    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.
    • elishah 3y ago
      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.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      it means that you're also not allowed to say that Formula 1 is better than MotoGP, or that you like Usain Bolt over Valentino Rossi.
• bhaney 3y ago
  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.
  • glitcher 3y ago
    Seems like a very fair nitpick to me considering the semantic nature of the game in the first place!
  • semiquaver 3y ago
    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.
    • tempestn 3y ago
      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.
      • semiquaver 3y ago
        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.
• hahajk 3y ago
  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.
  • loeg 3y ago
    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.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • kccqzy 3y ago
    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.
    • opportune 3y ago
      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.
• petercooper 3y ago
  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.
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    An absolutely unarguable point. Well done.
  • nohaydeprobleme 3y ago
    I also answered no to every question and got the "11%" statistic, matching the percentage that many other users here received.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
    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.
  • lkbm 3y ago
    Now hold on, doesn't the person on skates have two vehicles?
• john-radio 3y ago
  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.
• casey2 3y ago
  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.
• maweaver 3y ago
  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.
• qingcharles 3y ago
  That is an example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it 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.
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    > 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.
• labster 3y ago
  I feel like it’s missing: * 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.
  • eep_social 3y ago
    > over the corner 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.60677/gov.uscourts.wyd.60677.83.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wyd.606...
• lsy 3y ago
  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".
  • mint2 3y ago
    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.
• cmdli 3y ago
  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.
  • paxys 3y ago
    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.
    • cmdli 3y ago
      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.
      • 8organicbits 3y ago
        > These examples fall sorta flat for me because they don't present an actual difficulty with moderation, Did you read the summary at the end?
• JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  It was all about, does the rule intend to apply to thus-and-such. Clearly the intent matters; the rule is made by a park ranger, not by god. So emergency vehicles, toys etc are only an issue to a rule-lawyer. Not to normal people.
  • taberiand 3y ago
    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).
• autoexec 3y ago
  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.
• moojd 3y ago
  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)
• ComputerGuru 3y ago
  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?
  • code_duck 3y ago
    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.
    • ComputerGuru 3y ago
      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.)
      • code_duck 3y ago
        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.
        • anikom15 3y ago
          Only in Common Law countries is this true. In Civil Law countries, you actually do need to account for all exceptions.
    • 3y ago
• mabbo 3y ago
  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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• generalizations 3y ago
  "vehicle:" * 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.
  • jakelazaroff 3y ago
    Let's take the third definition. Do the roller skates count? The wheelchair? The rowboat?
    • ThunderSizzle 3y ago
      None of those have an engine, which both the first and third definitions would say is typical. That's why the only vehicle that made me pause was the tank, since it was at one point motorized, but no longer.
      • jakelazaroff 3y ago
        Typical, sure, but not required!
        • generalizations 3y ago
          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.
• jagthebeetle 3y ago
  "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.
  • fsckboy 3y ago
    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.
• irrational 3y ago
  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?
  • lkbm 3y ago
    "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.
    • irrational 3y ago
      Ah, I made a guess that a travois was either one of those bicycle taxis or one of the two wheel carts that a person pulls.
• maxk42 3y ago
  Wonderful presentation. What's not clear to me is what the percentage at the end of the game represents?
• diego_sandoval 3y ago
  This proves that most people can't understand a simple rule, or don't know what a vehicle is.
• bumbledraven 3y ago
  The people's names were an annoying distraction. I'm aware that it was done intentionally.
  • fsckboy 3y ago
    i don't believe that they were chosen at random, i think they were race baiting
• JshWright 3y ago
  Three questions in I thought “hey, this reminds me of that recent 99% Invisible episode about restrictions on mechanized equipment”. Then I got to the explanation at the end and sure enough…
• dvt 3y ago
  The lesson here is one worth learning, but the vehicle (forgive the pun) is very poor. The lesson is: we can't agree on what to moderate and what not to moderate. There are very good thought experiments here, including citing actual prose. Should we ban parts of the Bible (the sexually explicit ones, or the ones that seem to approve of slavery?), should we ban books like Lolita or the Scarlet Letter? Should we allow Neo-Nazis to protest? What about Stalinists? These are questions worth asking and answers worth hearing, but the problem with the question here is that the rule "no vehicles in the park" already comes with a lot of baggage. For example, it's obvious that the rule is meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park (a rule that we've seen many times in our own parks), so naturally police cars and ambulances will (or should) be exempt, especially if trying to save a life. Otherwise the corollary would be that saving a life is less important than the rule "no vehicles in the park." Which most would very obviously disagree with. I like the idea of the website, but there's probably a better way to convey the complexities of rule-making and rule-following in the context of both our own moral (or religious, or ethical, etc.) frameworks and the social environment at large.
  • jakelazaroff 3y ago
    > These are questions worth asking and answers worth hearing, but the problem with the question here is that the rule "no vehicles in the park" already comes with a lot of baggage. For example, it's obvious that the rule is meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park (a rule that we've seen many times in our own parks), so naturally police cars and ambulances will (or should) be exempt, especially if trying to save a life. Otherwise the corollary would be that saving a life is less important than the rule "no vehicles in the park." Which most would very obviously disagree with. That's the point, though! Everyone arrives at these moderation discussions with baggage, and it's not the same baggage. Like, it is very much not obvious to me that the rule is "meant to prevent driving engine-propulsion vehicles through a park". Plenty of parks prohibit bikes and skateboards. If we care about "saving a life" then I actually don't think we should make an exception for cop cars. Reasonable people can disagree! Even the most obvious-seeming judgments are, in fact, not obvious.
    • 3y ago
• baby 3y ago
  Maybe I'm dumb but I have no idea how to read the result at the end. I agreed with the majority, yet it says 13%. What are the axis of that graph?
  • bagels 3y ago
    No, it needs labels, not dumb.
• vharuck 3y ago
  At the time of my completing the quiz, 21% said riding a skateboard in the park violated the rule. But only 13% said carrying a skateboard violated the rule. I'm puzzled by that. Does a vehicle stop being a vehicle when it's not vehicularizing? It'd get it if it were, "Jane carries a food tray" versus "Joe rides a food tray down the hill." But here the skateboard's purpose is to be ridden.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• nitwit005 3y ago
  This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising. If this included a definition of a vehicle, and asked if a vehicle was in the park, I'd expect consistent answers outside of the oddball aircraft and space station questions. I'd note my local park has such a rule, and the sign has pictures of what are and are not allowed, including a picture of a drone.
  • jjcon 3y ago
    That is exactly the point - who defines racism? sexism? Moderators are going to disagree because of how nebulous those terms are
    • mint2 3y ago
      The world isn’t black and white. It’s typically shades of gray and requires judgement, discretion. And consequences of breaking a rule or law require even more judgement. The world isn’t a “smart”contract.
      • jjcon 3y ago
        Precisely well said
  • sangnoir 3y ago
    > This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising. Here's a common example from real life: "No pornography". Even SCOTUS famously couldn't define obscenity ("I know it when I see it")
    • n8cpdx 3y ago
      Is “No pornography” a rule? It doesn’t specify any prohibited action and on its own isn’t a complete thought, let alone a rule. “I know it when I see it” was in reference to _hardcore pornography_, not obscenity. The Miller Test deals with obscenity perfectly well.
• karmakaze 3y ago
  I don't know that this had the intended effect for me. I answered the questions as I would like the 'rule' enforced. The important thing isn't about believing the rule to be entirely valid and merely enforcing it, it's about which way you want it applied and why. Then you have to try to make everything else also fit into the oddly shaped boundaries that are forming. It's also way better if you can be transparent about it, and in some cases redraw the lines and reformulate how to decide which side new cases land.
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    The opening statement spectically addresses this: > Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
    • karmakaze 3y ago
      It's small-minded actions like this that would ruin any attempts to moderate meaningfully. It can be effective by its own definition, but not serve the community's best interests. This 'rule' and blind applications is what makes moderation easier and worse. The exercise should instead be demonstrating how moderation is hard to do well because it's not always cut-and-dried.
  • makeitdouble 3y ago
    > which way you want it applied and why In the case the article has in mind, you can't silently decide what is ok and what isn't, as they'll be public decisions that create precedents (what formulate as "being transparent") If you say wheelchairs are OK because disabled people need them, someone will ride a golf cart arguing they're disabled and need a cart. And you'll have to publicly explain if you think it's not ok and update the rules accordingly, and that will continue for every i stance of you not agreeing with someone's interpretation. Put another eay, that constant and endless redrawing of the rules to explain what you had in mind is the point of the exercice, except you can't throw away the old rules nilky willy, you're only allowed to add more weird stuff on it
• jrockway 3y ago
  That was fun. I decided early on that a vehicle is any tool that allows something to move. So an ant on a paper airplane or a kite is a vehicle. The surfboard allows someone to move and they carried it into the park, so that's not allowed. Since I wasn't allowed to apply any of my jurisdiction's laws, I also had to ticket the International Space Station for going into my park's airspace. Moon, I'm watching you, you're next. Thinking about it further, no shoes either. They said this was all about content moderation and to me the answer is simple. I would never visit the "no vehicles in the park" park.
• tomohawk 3y ago
  Illustrates how rule keeping in the absence of grace is a dead end.
• tedunangst 3y ago
  Determining whether a horse is a vehicle was the hardest for me. I could see the ambiguity for some other questions, but pretty easy to decide.
• derefr 3y ago
  To me, if I see a rule trying to ban "vehicles" without defining "vehicles", I take my concept of "vehicles" by deduction: I think about all the ways that things that I know of as being "vehicle-esque" could be problematic in various different ways such that you'd want to ban them — being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example); property damage (skateboards, dirt bikes) — and then I guess that the "spirit of the law" is to put whatever requirements in place would be required to reduce the instances of those problems. The banning of certain explicit classes of vehicles is only a byproduct, not the end-goal, of such a rule; and so it doesn't actually matter what is or isn't a vehicle — the word "vehicle" in such a rule is acting as a conceptual stand-in for whatever things cause uniquely vehicle-in-the-park-ish problems; and anything that doesn't cause such problems, isn't "a vehicle." I find that this lens on rule enforcement is a useful guide, because whatever the text of the law ends up saying, the enforcement of the law will hew to the spirit that the text of the rule is being interpreted to have, by those charged with its enforcement. (I.e., the non-working tank is almost certainly a "vehicle" by any definition a bylaw would pose, but if they deliver it to the park on a non-damaging sled, let it sit there for a while, then haul it away on the same sled, then it's not causing any of the problems that "vehicles" cause, and so it's very unlikely that any bylaw-enforcement officer would actually ticket the owner of the tank for having it in the park.)
  • rlpb 3y ago
    I think you might have arrived at the Mischief rule of statutory interpretation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule).
    • thunderbong 3y ago
      This is seriously an amazing rule! Down the Wikipedia rabbit hole for now!
  • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    But this depends on "in what context am I being asked whether a rule is violated"? I didn't start out knowing I was doing content moderation for a website or I might've answered those differently.
• kazinator 3y ago
  If the park is in my neck of the woods, I can just use this definition: "vehicle" means a device in, on or by which a person or thing is or may be transported or drawn on a highway, but does not include a device designed to be moved by human power, a device used exclusively on stationary rails or tracks, mobile equipment, a motor assisted cycle or a regulated motorized personal mobility device [BC Motor Vehicle Act, 1 Definitions] https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96318_01#section1 https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/stat... The words written on some sign on a road or park are not meant to be freely defined by whoever happens to be reading the sign.
  • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    That definition looks like it only applies to highways, whereas this exercise is much broader.
    • kazinator 3y ago
      Did you look up the definition of "highway", or are you substituting your own? It's in there.
      • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
        > highway "includes every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles" By definition, a park where vehicles are forbidden is not a highway. Please don't act smarter than you are.
        • kazinator 3y ago
          A park where vehicles are not forbidden also might not have any highways. Vehicles are defined in terms of being capable of transport on highways, but there are vehicles used off highways. Just because the definition of vehicles refers to highways doesn't mean the definition is not relevant in a situation in which there are no highways.
    • 3y ago
• jmpeax 3y ago
  Anyone who's programmed knows intimately that any such rules/laws by humans in RL is basically undefined behaviour.
• predictabl3 3y ago
  I mean, I know where I am, but good god damn lord so many of you are missing the point by restating it without taking anything from the text provided at the end. Like, missing the point with a planet's berth. Might go a ways in explaining the "mods are entitled jerks" attitude that keeps popping up around discussions of reddit, ignoring that they're the only reason reddit exists in a semi-usable state, ever.
• cwkoss 3y ago
  I wish you included a statistic my race and gender effects vs the average user. Got me curious and feeling unresolved.
• sugarpile 3y ago
  The only thing this convinced me of is that content moderation is even more brainless and straight forward than I thought. There wasn't a single question that didn't have a straightforward commonsense answer.
• ranger207 3y ago
  One thing this doesn't mention bit I think is just as important is tone. Some communities are fine with casual assumptions, others require sources if challenged. Sometimes these things can be encoded in rules, sometimes it's more moderator discretion. So in addition to rules interpretation communities can be distinguished by vibes as well. This is just as valid a reason to moderate as rules
• fsckboy 3y ago
  >I hope that this game has made you reconsider your views on content moderation. why would this game even make me think of content moderation? When you brought it up yourself I felt suckered, realizing I'd been sucked into a poorly thought out yet somewhat politicized "bias test" masquerading as a "survey".
• crazygringo 3y ago
  I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended. To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign. So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite. (To be clear, I think content moderation rules are often difficult to figure out when to apply. I just think the vehicles-in-park rule is much, much, much clearer than many content moderation rules.)
  • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    It is unclear given that you and I don't agree. The question wasnt "does the police have to follow the sign", you made that up.
    • robinson7d 3y ago
      The nuance on that one felt odd. I said that it did violate the rule (even the spirit of the rule, being a large motor vehicle), because it was a binary question. I also felt the rule violation was justified and that they shouldn’t be called out on it.
      • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
        I even disagree that there was any nuance. I wasn't told "you're doing content moderation, there's a rule, the rule is violated but there could be some mitigating circumstances, do you allow the content?". I was told: is there a vehicle in the park, and I said yes because a police car is a vehicle and it's in the park.
        • emmelaich 3y ago
          I agree that the police car is a vehicle and and it is a violation. That's the easiest reading. In a real example, though, there'd be law or authority quoted, and you can be sure that's there would be an exception for emergency vehicles. That doesn't change the meaning of the sign in isolation.
• scoofy 3y ago
  Nobody tell this guy about Wittgenstein :)
• seized 3y ago
  It explains what a Matchbox car is for the approximately zero people who don't know, but it doesn't explain a travois. This seems to be an exercise in signage while simultaneously ignoring common sense...
• Rapzid 3y ago
  Am I the only person who looked up the definition of "vehicle" and counted everything that wasn't a toy seemingly not meant to "transport something" as a vehicle? It seemed like the spirit of the game was a strict interpretation, to the letter, of the rule.
• Sparkyte 3y ago
  The word vehicle is up to interpretation, so it helps to not use umbrella terms like vehicle. Anything used to move goods or person is technically a vehicle. However in the a conventional understanding it is the embodiment of what would move goods or person, functional or not, to carry out a task not recreational unless also used with the intent not recreational. If both it becomes a recreational vehicle. Recreation / Not Practical = Other Not Recreational / Practical = Vehicle Recreational / Practical = Recreational Vehicle You don't have to agree with me on this. I know the definition says otherwise, I'm just speaking on the perception of what people think in society a vehicle is. As it would sound really funny to refer to toys as vehicles. Also to expand on this. Drones they are recreational but also practical, you might use your drone for recreational things but nothing practical so it is just a drone. But the second you start flying packages it becomes practical. This makes it a recreational vehicle. If it is exclusively for delivery like Amazon Drone, it is just a vehicle.
• anikom15 3y ago
  This is not a game.
• ngngngng 3y ago
  I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, although I find the method kind of confusing. There's a community I recently watched spring up on Reddit with the entire goal being to have a space to discuss Utah without every second comment being "Fuck Mormons". It grew pretty quick within the first day, but then the creator and community had a couple discussions on the best way to describe and enforce that rule. No discussion of Mormonism at all? No positive or negative sentiment towards the religion, but you can mention it in passing? It's certainly not an easy problem.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• denkmoon 3y ago
  I find the results confusing. I said a wheelchair is not a vehicle in the park. On the results page I see wheelchair has a score of 16.3. So this means 16.3% of people said the wheelchair is allowed in the park and 83.7% of people think the wheelchair is not allowed in the park? If so, I now understand why moderator decisions seem insane. It's because they are.
• warthogschool 3y ago
  It would help a lot to know the reason for the rule. Perhaps the park is filled with lots of rare, delicate plants and only narrow dirt pathways. Or perhaps the pathways are somewhat wider and allowing in a wheelchair or a small wagon wouldn't be a problem. Without knowing the reason, it is hard to make a wise decision. At least for a problem like content moderation, people will have some idea about the goals or reasons for the rule, although certainly different people may have different opinions about how important the various goals and reasons are. But trying to enforce an arbitrary rule without a good understanding of why, on which to base judgement calls, sounds foolishly futile.
• eyelidlessness 3y ago
  As a metaphor for content moderation, there’s a clear bias to the examples, which I don’t object to per se, but there’s also a fairly large blind spot in the way the bias is presented. Depending on interpretation, all or nearly all of the examples fall into these categories: - Subjective categorization of restricted content, good intent - Subjective interpretation of scope, neutral intent - Clear intent to flout rule if subjective interpretations apply What isn’t present in any of the examples is a case where the rule is clear but breaking the rule is intended and masked. That’s where a lot of content moderation struggles, and (because?) it’s where a lot of malicious and abusive users concentrate, and intentionally create ambiguities where there wouldn’t be any without such malicious intent. And knowing that doesn’t make content moderation any clearer, probably the opposite, but it’s worth recognizing that that’s the point. A few clever jerks can convince well meaning people to reinforce or excuse their abuse, and can convince well meaning moderators that obvious dog whistles are hard to interpret, and then they turn rules over on themselves without any recourse.
• jrm4 3y ago
  Lawyer here. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. I teach legal research and I do some open discussions in the beginning and (no judgment of course) someone ALWAYS brings up "if they wrote the laws clearer..." nope. nope nope nope. This is not how it works.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • subarctic 3y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is. The laws can't be written clearer? Even if they were, you'd still get stuff that's ambiguous? As a lawyer you don't write the law so you have to go with what's written? You like interpreting vaguely written rules?
    • Rury 3y ago
      It's just how language works. Language is inherently ambiguous in the strictest sense. It's why at times you need to use more and more words to convey a clear message to someone, but in some sense, it's a never ending rabbit hole. Most of the time though, you don't need to be super precise in order to get a general message across to someone. Just something good enough. It's why, as some other people noted, you sometimes can't tell anyone anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
      • subarctic 3y ago
        That's a great read, thanks for linking it. The twist at the end is kind of funny because it makes you think, "do I really get it"? I guess sometimes words just aren't enough, you need actual experience. Which I guess if we're taking legal stuff, that's where case law comes in, right?
        • jrm4 3y ago
          Well, in a way, it's not "just words" or "experience?" It took me a long time to love the law, well after I was out of law school -- which was basically getting over the cynicism. It's just overwhelmingly the best method of dealing with perhaps the MOST DIFFICULT task possible, resolving disputes between/among imperfect unpredictable humans. The "messiness" of it is just as much a feature as a bug, and thus the most important part really does become, for lack of a better way to say it -- "faith?" in law?
• pmarreck 3y ago
  Is there a collection of games like this which are really thought experiments? I found that doing this and the Staying Alive game https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/stayingalive/Default.aspx https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/stayingalive/Default.a... were very relaxing.
• Nocturium 3y ago
  [flagged]
• ajani 3y ago
  Rules, if taken as written, are never clear. Try to define "furniture". You may say "Something to sit on". But what about a table. Ok, something to keep things on. But then is a soap dish furniture? Furniture is a concept. It has fuzzy boundaries of meaning. And the meaning is only ever clear in context. And context is not just what is said alongside the concept. It is also the exchange itself in a particular situation. When 14 years olds play ball in a "garden" area of a park, it's clearly disruptive. It can hurt someone, destroy the foliage etc. But when you play ball with a couple of 4 year olds in a garden, no one will suggest you stop. It is understood that a 4 year old in a play area with teenagers is at risk of being harmed, and so better to keep them in the garden area. Rules, and the standardization of some of them into a system of law is problematic only if taken literally. As long as the what is written is understood to be a scaffold for actual meaning derivation from context there is no problem. This is the reason why judges, juries and courts exist - to interpret the law. And in the absence of formalization or systematization, common law applies. And at a very simplified level, common law is mostly common sense. Common as in shared among many. Common sense as in the sense and meaning shared among most of us implicitly.
• AbraKdabra 3y ago
  I was waiting for something more "insightful", it sets the expectations too high and then instead I got hit by the content moderation crap stick, a vehicle is a vehicle and if an ambulance is driven into the park is violating the rule, wether you like it or not, the rule doesn't define morality. What a waste of time.
• nocoiner 3y ago
  I really thought the seemingly blatant stereotypical names were going to be a factor in the assessment. Though I guess now that I think about it, I don’t know that I could point to a name that I think would be non-stereotypical in the 21st century. Maybe the names of the average upper middle class elementary school class - a lot of those seem to me to be pretty minimally correlated with ethnicity these days. In a heavily white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of the not too distant past, there were clearly “default” names and “other” names, and I do think that’s less and less the case. Or at the very least, it’s no longer acceptable to think about the “default” names as being normal and every other type of name as signifying something outside the mainstream of society. Still, there’s some deeply weird socioeconomic stuff that goes on with naming kids. There have got to be some good studies about those trends.
• smcin 3y ago
  The author's site also links to their other games (https://games.novalis.org/ https://games.novalis.org/), and Semantle (https://semantle.com/ https://semantle.com/), a semantic-similarity-based Wordle type guessing game (using word2vec similarity), is quite neat. Was popular in 2022: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=semantle https://hn.algolia.com/?q=semantle
• QuadrupleA 3y ago
  I kinda answered in terms of "what interpretation of the sign gives parkgoers the best overall experience". Don't legal situations generally consider the spirit of the law, not just the letter of the law? The HN guidelines come to mind here, they're a mix of more literal ("don't use uppercase for emphasis") and spirit/intent ("anything that good hackers would find interesting"). Seems to work here - but curious how many pedantic struggles dang & co. encounter.
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    That kind of proves the point. The starting paragraph asked you explicitly to ignore local laws or personal beliefs and take actions based on only the most literal definition of the rule, and yet almost half of people chose to ignore this and use their own rules. Like how they do for content moderation.
    • QuadrupleA 3y ago
      Well in that case the whole ruse of the park is pointless, and the game should just be "click the words that are vehicles". And matchbox cars and space stations are included.
      • Gigachad 3y ago
        That's exactly what it told the reader to do. Ignore everything else but the literal question, is it violating the rule of no vehicles in the park.
        • QuadrupleA 3y ago
          The exact phrasing in the intro is "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." But it's still a park right? On earth? What jurisdiction on earth blocks matchbox cars and space stations? Or even ambulances and police cars, which were the main ambiguous ones? Does some country not allow ambulances in its parks? Am I supposed to include the entirety of modern human culture as we know it as a "local jurisdiction"? I don't think the intro instructions were very clear.
• Reki 3y ago
  Jim backs his RV into the park. He does so without his vehicle entering the park. Pam comes to the park and begins to live in Jim's RV. Bob, an alien, lands his spaceship in the park and initiates first contact. Tim, a pipercub pilot, lands his plane in the park after suffering an engine failure. Sam rides the subway home underneath the park. Jordan, a maintenance worker, repairs a broken light in the park from his cherrypicker. Robert, Jordan's boss, alleges he broke the rule. Another light needs to be replaced, so Robert fixes it, but ensures the cherrypicker's wheels are outside the park. Tom, a tow truck driver, tows Tamika's car. Bill emails a complete 3d cad model of a car, which happens to use a fiber line running under the park.
  • subarctic 3y ago
    >Jim backs his RV into the park. He does so without his vehicle entering the park. He backs his RV into the park? That means his RV enters the park, right? What does the V stand for in RV?
    • sedatk 3y ago
      They’d probably meant a trailer.
• QuadrupleA 3y ago
  A lot of comments here about how the intro instructed us to make a very literal interpretation. I'm not so sure. The exact wording is "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." Rephrasing an earlier comment here, but - it's still a park right? On earth? What jurisdiction on earth blocks matchbox cars and space stations? Or even ambulances and police cars, which were the main ambiguous ones? Does some country not allow ambulances in its parks? Are we supposed to include all of modern human culture as a "local jurisdiction"? The instructions of the game were pretty unclear, that seems to be what's sparking a lot of the debate.
  • Drew_ 3y ago
    No the instructions are clear. Figuring out where the park is just isn't part of the exercise. In fact, by the letter of the rules, it's impossible to find out. Pick any definition of "local jurisdiction" you want and you still don't know where the park is. It is not necessarily in that jurisdiction (or out of it either). It's not necessarily even on earth or in this universe either.
    • QuadrupleA 3y ago
      It's not about finding the particular jurisdiction. It's that any jurisdiction will have almost all of this stuff in common. If we're not even taking about earth or this universe then discussion is probably hopeless...
      • Drew_ 3y ago
        > It's that any jurisdiction will have almost all of this stuff in common. I'm not sure how you could say something like this so earnestly... All parks on Earth have the same rules on vehicles? You sure about that?
        • QuadrupleA 3y ago
          About space stations, ambulances, matchbox cars, and the rest of it I'd venture yes. The only one that seemed remotely jurisdiction-dependent was bicycles. Can you name a single real park that denies entry to police or ambulances or wheelchairs?
• _whiteCaps_ 3y ago
  This reminds me of the local political candidate who argued that the 100m distance rules around campaigning extended to a sphere around polling stations, so he claimed he was allowed to fly a banner over the stations as long as they maintained enough altitude. Trying to find a link to a news story about this. I swear it's true.
• sacnoradhq 3y ago
  Uninteresting lawyer chiseling. This is all about the making the author feel "smart" by selective (mis)interpretation of ambiguous conditions, absent information, and rules not present. 1: "In" a geographic area may or may not be defined as including or excluding a particular altitude. For example, in the US, owners only own up to 500 ft AGL in Class G airspace. 2: Some jurisdictions decide a person in a boat over someone's land isn't trespassing, while standing on the bottom of the land is. 3: What is the definition of a "vehicle"? Is use or capability of occupants definitive of vehicular status? Does it require a motor? Must it be a type requiring government registration?
  • tuatoru 3y ago
    The point of the exercise is to require you to make decisions under uncertain conditions with limited (or next to no) information. You don't know what jurisdiction. You don't know what airspace rules apply. "Vehicle" has its common-usage definition. (Which is different for different people, judgung by the comments here.) BTW, the vast, vast majority of real decisions are made under uncertainty. Welcome to the real world.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• squokko 3y ago
  This is an interesting concept with terrible execution as almost everyone will agree that most of the situations do not violate the rule.
• bix6 3y ago
  Is every single answer that there is a vehicle in the park? I skipped after 7 but I said all were vehicles in a park. I looked up the definition of vehicle before answering and all seemed to apply. Surfboard I wasn’t certain but I think it’s still definitionally a vehicle? I looked up machine at this point as this one was tricky. From wiki A vehicle (from Latin vehiculum)[1] is a machine that transports people or cargo. Vehicles include wagons, bicycles, motor vehicles (motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, mobility scooters for disabled people), railed vehicles (trains, trams), watercraft (ships, boats, underwater vehicles), amphibious vehicles (screw-propelled vehicles, hovercraft), aircraft (airplanes, helicopters, aerostats) and spacecraft.[2]
• alex_young 3y ago
  If you see a sign that says this in a park you wouldn’t go tell a person in a wheelchair to get out of the park (I hope). Common sense is a thing and it’s also a thing in comment moderation. This isn’t rocket surgery.
• Illniyar 3y ago
  I think that was a really good way to get the point across. Which I suppose I already agreed to, but if I ever wanted to argue the point of how hard content moderation is, I might share this website.
• ryzvonusef 3y ago
  I got 11%, not sure what that means, but I was very lax it seems.
• Barrin92 3y ago
  What this showcases isn't an issue with moderation, it's a lack of shared culture in digital spaces. When we interact in the real world we manage to behave not because we have some sort of logical crystal palace where every word is rigorously defined, but because we have an implicit, shared sensibility for what's appropriate. When you go and sit down in a café you don't measure your noise level and there's no sign saying "only talk at 80db!", you have an intuitive and non-verbal idea of what offends the people around you. If people disagree about the questions in this experiment the correct conclusion isn't to do away with moderation or argue about word definitions, it's to argue for shared culture in online spaces. HN is a good example. Most people who post here I think have a decent grasp of how not to act, and take little offense with moderation, despite the fact that there aren't many rules other than the occasional reminder to be civil.
• jujube3 3y ago
  Translation: his parents are lawyers, so he has a low opinion of the rule of law and wants to "problematize" it. In favor of arguing for, essentially, despotism. But his own experiment shows that most people do agree on what even a deliberately poorly worded rule means in most cases. So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable. The "game" (I use the word loosely) gets quite silly. The space station passing overhead is not "problematic" for a rule about vehicles in the park, except for someone deliberately trying to be obtuse. Like with the rest of this other nonsense, if it ever did become problematic, someone could change the rule to clear it up. The end.
  • elishah 3y ago
    > So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable. I did not interpret the creator's point to be that rules are unworkable, so much as that rules alone are insufficient. ie, that even the simplest of rules need to be augmented by human judgment. But rules are still an important ingredient, as they and judgment complement one another.
• THENATHE 3y ago
  I think this analogy kinda falls apart because in reality the rule “no vehicles” is for a reason. If “people could get hurt” is the reason for no vehicles, an RC car, a stroller, a quadcopter, and maybe even a hand pulled wagon is perfectly fine because the risk is very low. If “the noise will be an issue” is the reason, bikes are fine but a quadcopter is not. If “protecting the environment” is the problem, horses and rowboats may be allowed but RC cars and dirt bikes perhaps not. Having a rule with no context for the rule is pointless.
  • manmal 3y ago
    Where I live, such signs are more specific. They prohibit either use of any motorized vehicle (which by law doesn’t include electrified bicycles that can go up to 25kph), or the use of bicycles, or both, or only prohibit cars, or only motorcycles, or only trucks above a certain weight.
• rcme 3y ago
  This “thought experiment” is painting a narrative using a false dichotomy. “I don’t know” is always a valid answer. The nice thing about rule based systems is that they can be augmented with additional rules. You don’t know wether or not a skateboard is a vehicle? That’s ok. We can add a new rule that defines that.
• epgui 3y ago
  Just because there’s no analytical closed form solution that you can easily invent does not mean it’s a bad idea to have rules. The entire justice system works exactly like that.
• manmal 3y ago
  I don’t find this particularly funny or enlightening. Making rules has always been hard, and I don’t see the author propose a solution to the problem that some people post weird shit on public feeds that we don’t want our young kids to witness. Kids are always online now - even if you think you have parental controls figured out, someone at school will have an uncensored phone and they‘ll all watch all the weird stuff during breaks.
• civilized 3y ago
  > Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated. I mean, who's surprised that it's not effective to do content moderation by imposing ambiguous rules with a complete lack of training, examples of correct and incorrect enforcement, documentation, context about the rules, why they're needed, why they were created, what problem they were solving... Going through this is useful I guess, but it seems very low level. But maybe our understanding of content moderation is also very low level.
• forty 3y ago
  My own conclusion is that the rule is not clear enough. Define "vehicle" and "in the park". Sure it's probably hard to think of all the use cases when you first write the rule. Simply iterate and add exceptions and clearer definitions as needed (seems like it's exactly how laws are made, and nobody is saying "we should not have any laws because it's hard to think of all the use cases")
  • xvector 3y ago
    Now, when you enter the park, you must read a novel-sized rulebook first.
    • forty 3y ago
      Well that's case even when you are not entering the park, because of all those laws you must follow at all times
• throwaway892238 3y ago
  > some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply All rules are easy to apply when you're the moderator. Just say "I'm the moderator" and then do whatever you want. That's how US law works. They can say "this is how the rule works", and then a few years later say "hahaha! yeah, that's not how the rule works anymore, now it works this other way".
• bowsamic 3y ago
  I don’t get it. Only the car was a violation. Everything else was obviously not
• aMERER 3y ago
  [flagged]
• dylanwenzlau 3y ago
  I like this. Indeed the fundamental crux of all human discourse: politics, argument, and of course content moderation.
• emodendroket 3y ago
  Actually pretty clever way of demonstrating the point.
• ifdefdebug 3y ago
  The sheer size and endless bike shedding in this comment section proves that the author is after something here.
• Ekaros 3y ago
  I think this missed one more axis, or didn't go deep enough. What if someone mines under the park? And uses things like carts or mining vehicles there? Are those "in" the park or not?
• indigodaddy 3y ago
  My result, have no idea what it means though.. —- Results You agreed with the majority: 11%
• knolan 3y ago
  In the olden days of internet forums we would consider this type of thing rules lawyering [1]. The rules were put in place to protect the community from trouble makers and trolls. The main forum I frequented has a dispute resolution area where people could appeal infractions. It was full of people arguing about this type of stuff over something as trivial as a week long ban from some topic forum. Occasionally there would be an over zealous mod too. Interestingly while the moderation of increasingly large and consolidated online communities becomes more automated and inflexible I’ve noticed that attitudes to rules around our public spaces have eroded into pure selfishness. It seems there is nowhere people won’t drive and abandon their cars. Cycle tracks, footpaths (sidewalks) grass verges, parks, playing fields etc. it seems that this is simply accepted. I’ve seen police and private security lazily patrol around parks where vehicles are not allowed in their cars. There’s no appetite for a physical on foot presence. You rarely see police on the street. The exception was during Biden’s recent visit to Dublin, there was literally a Garda on every street corner for a week. Our local sports club patrons abandon their cars all over the grass area at the entrance to the local park when there is a half full car park right across the road. Outside our local supermarket people will leave their cars on the footpath outside the store rather than park in a space mere metres away. All of this is confounded by a police force (Irish Gardai) that don’t seem to give a damn. I argued with a guy on Thursday who drove down a segregated cycle lane and up onto the footpath so he could leave his car right outside the house he was visiting. He saw nothing wrong with it. Only when I pointed out the kids trying to get around his car did he finally show some shame for his behaviour. I was furious. Car brain is a growing problem. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_lawyer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_lawyer
• refactor_master 3y ago
  I’m not sure the sign can have one unanimous understanding - which is why we have court rulings to back it up. If you disagree with a sign, take it up with “contemporary society”. But given a situation where no proper trial is available, the sign could mean “anything”.
• fwlr 3y ago
  Fascinating thought experiment! For a version two, I would love to see: • more ambiguous examples (instead of “there are 27 examples, you only need to answer 7”, I would instead just offer 7 examples and on 7th say “stop now, or keep answering?”, then do the same “stop or keep going” prompt after 27 for the extra examples) • three answer options: “yes, it’s a violation”, “no, it’s not a violation”, and “it is a violation but it should be exempt / permitted / not prosecuted” • perhaps this third answer could also have a text box to enter your own epicycle / rule addition. The next time that person answers “yes but exempt”, they can select their previous epicycle as the explanation this time as well, or add a new one. Coalescing each user’s epicycles into a coherent set of “common sense exceptions” might be tedious, though The third answer option, and the reveal that what you thought were obvious exceptions are not statistically agreed to be obvious exceptions, helps a ton with making the point about content moderation more, well, pointed. Adding epicycle text boxes takes it in a bit of a different direction, highlighting the complicated nebulosity hiding beneath simple rules.
• larsrc 3y ago
  I like this experiment! I hope to see some further analysis on the results. I came to a similar conclusion years back about languages: it's impossible to translate a word perfectly because the border cases differ. Is it a cake or a bread? Banana bread is called bread in the US, but as a Dane I consider it "kage" (the usual translation of "cake").
• jtrn 3y ago
  There is two levels of moderation in my mind. The first is to logical/ mathematically determine if the rule is broken, with goal of amoraly just answer if the rule is broken (binary). The second step is to determine the degree of rigidity/flexibility. So by my logic the rule is broken when the ambulance drives into the park, but the leeway of the moderator to allow this should be apparent. The way this thought experiment is framed, it seemed that you where supposed to only determine if the rule was broken. I think a more realistic way of framing the problem for a moderator would be something like: As security guard in a park, given this rule, would you allow ... If the game was framed in this way I'm guessing the agreement would go way up.
• squirrel 3y ago
  On nebulosity, see https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262134095/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262134095/ . No need to read it, just to be aware that there’s a thick book full of people trying to get a handle on what a concept like “park” or “vehicle” or “in” actually is for humans, and failing completely.
• Idiot_in_Vain 3y ago
  Prigozhin rolls his tanks through the park on his way to Moscow. Does he violate the rule?
• gniv 3y ago
  So much talk about the rule but not much about enforcement. To me most of the scenarios are breaking the rule, but what happens afterwards depends: emergency vehicles, wheelchairs, toys get a pass. Bicycles either get a pass or a warning. Cars get a fine. Repeat offenders get a license suspension etc. The gray areas are settled based on local culture and who is enforcing the rule. And it’s the same with moderation of course. The rule is more like a guideline anyway.
• RedNifre 3y ago
  I don't see this as a good way to get the point across. I perceived it like this: 1. This is a game, here are the rules, remember, it's not about intent, as in "should this vehicle be allowed?", it's strictly about the rules, i.e. "is it a vehicle" && "is it in the park?". 2. Look at how difficult content moderation is, people said the ambulance should not be allowed in the park! While I agree that content moderation is difficult, prefacing it with a rigged game that primes people to make bad judgements is not a good argument. (Personally, I would like every rule to come with the justifications/reasoning behind it, so I could make the decision to break it more easily, e.g. if wilderness areas had the rules "No mechanized or motorized equipment shall be used" annotated with "It's about the noise" then an electric wheelchair would be fine, but not a loud drone etc.)
• brailsafe 3y ago
  For most of the more down-to-earth questions, I made the distinction between something that aids a human in moving by augmenting their analog output, and something that either doesn't require much human involvement to move or supplants it entirely. Skateboards, rollerskates, wheelchairs, bikes, wagons, parachutes etc.. require constant human involvement to keep acting as a vehicle. Horses, cars, space stations don't really require the same involvement, or aren't necessarily exclusively human transporters, and toy boats are only facsimiles of vehicles.
• Roark66 3y ago
  Cool game, but let me comment on the method of detecting bias based on names... I think it'll only work for audiences that recognise these names in a way that triggers those biases. So it'll not be very useful for outside US.
• optomas 3y ago
  The instructions say to ignore intent. We are left with definitions, then. We do not define park boundaries, so each scenario must indicate those boundaries. We do not define vehicle, so all objects are vehicles, including this soupy bag of proteins you pilot around. The Game.
• jstummbillig 3y ago
  Super fascinating. I wanna share my experience and get some feedback into how you approached this. I want to make clear, that I approached this by consciously ignoring how real life works, where adhering to the rule and the instructions made it necessary: > 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). This boiled down to answering technically "What's considered a vehicle?" and "What would be considered in the park?". To answer this I googled when I was not reasonably sure. I did not go to much length to answer the later question, but basically, if there were a rule that declared x meters above the ground is no longer considered to be part of whatever the area on the ground is defined as, this would what I would be interested in for this purpose. Of course, there is a lot of countries in the world, so there's probably more than one answer to this. We have a little bit of an issue around the "disregard your jurisdiction" part in the intro (but I guess that's also part of the dilemma): All these things are defined by some jurisdiction (not necessarily in the judicial sense). We need to apply from somewhere. I don't see a way how to solve this without implicit bias. Both options satisfy the rule as stated without further constraints. If you disagree with any of this on principle I would be super interested to hear you talk me through issues with my thinking or just explain where you went differently and why.
  • chii 3y ago
    > All these things are defined by some jurisdiction this is what i would call culture, or social norm. And the thing is, this social norm might be different betwen different people and thus, either cause conflicts in interpretation, or actual real life conflicts.
• riwsky 3y ago
  One is reminded of the difference between proof-relevant and classical mathematics. The letter of the law is a mere proposition, whereas the spirit of the law is a program of a certain type, whose “computational content” describes the actions one takes to produce the state of compliance.
• chottocharaii 3y ago
  ITT: HN attempt an amateur discussion of legal theory, without referencing decades of scholarship on the topic
• jdthedisciple 3y ago
  I humbly believe the real takeaway is that we need LESS rules and LESS fragile egos. If we become like we used to be perhaps a cple decades ago, where an abstract tweet wouldn't make us collapse on our heads, things would be much easier.
• suction 3y ago
  [dead]
• SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  I stopped at the first question. Without a photograph, I can't really tell what a "wagon" is supposed to be. How big is it? Does it have an engine? Is this a toy or a diesel truck? etc. There's cultural context that's not present at all.
• psychoslave 3y ago
  Given the initial instruction to not take into consideration any obvious common sense, I expected questions to scale up to "everything is a vehicle of some information, so the parc should be put into absolute unmoving zone to make the rule strictly operate", which is of course beyond human possibilities. The point that the author try to draw about moderation and underspecifications are interesting, but to my mind the framing is not giving a relevant ground to think about it. The author say the goal was to do a better job at this than some previous approachs, which is a effort I salute, though to my mind it doesn't land there yet.
• ithkuil 3y ago
  You first ask me to think about spherical vehicles in the vacuum and then set up a trap about ambulances. You're priming the experiment
• noduerme 3y ago
  Unfortunately, "You agreed with the majority: 11%" tells me fucking nothing leaves me with far more questions. 11% of what?
  • lolc 3y ago
    I got 11% too and wondered what it means.
    • noduerme 3y ago
      I think it means "thanks for the hits HN, go fly a kite" [edit] maybe I'm just cynical
• tesdinger 3y ago
  Stopped playing after the first question because I don't care and i don't know why anyone would. After all this is just a website asking questions without context. It seems as interesting to me as the political debate in Star Wars Episode I that was famously mocked by the Simpsons.
• mythot 3y ago
  Interpreting a law is usually done through the guidelines of a separate legislation outlining how it is to be done. E.g., Australia has an Acts Interpretation Act which outlines how to interpret laws by various means, including the context in which the words appear and the purpose of the act. I am unsure of other jurisdictions. We are explicitly told that there is only one relevant rule. So, the only relevant determinations in each case should be to the definitions of "vehicle" and "in the park". No interpretation of the intent can influence the decision. I thought the aim was to determine the scope of the definitions, then be consistent with the applications of those definitions. Personally, I defined "vehicle" as anything that can transport people or goods, and "in the park" as a reasonable area above and below the ground. But, this ended up with unsatisfactory answers like the tank being not violating the rule because it could no longer transport, and skates being in violation.
• 6510 3y ago
  The vehicle has to be consistent with all others to decide on it but certainly with all previous judged vehicles on your shift. Who is bringing the vehicle might also be objectively relevant. Time is also relevant. One day one might accept car tires to play with, the next the kids bring 2 tires with an axle, the 3rd day they tie a rope between 2 axles, day 4 tires are banned. If the events are in stead of a day a year apart it might be different.
• Roark66 3y ago
  It sure was interesting. One gave me a bit of a pause. The rowboat... I immediately thought "a rowboat is not a vehicle (it's human powered), but how did he get the rowboat there in the first place?" So in the end I only said yes to 4,the tank, the car and emergency vehicles. Everything else is a no in my book. I was quite surprised 90% people thought otherwise. No doubt their vehicle definition is different.
• Sai_ 3y ago
  I found that my responses hinged on the use of specific pronouns - e.g. “in” or “on” so a space station flying over a park wasn’t “in” the park per se - and on whether it was clear to me whether whether the park was being used a thoroughfare. So, I found myself answering “not a vehicle” in a vast majority of the cases because it wasn’t clear to me if the tool in question - car or skateboard or whatever - was being used to go through the park to the other side. Great thought exercise though.
• Version467 3y ago
  Over the years I've come across a few online communities that have noticeably higher conversation quality than the rest of the internet. The one thing all of those places had in common is a very strict moderation policy. Not every forum/community/website should tolerate literally all people. It's never helpful to engage with trolls and if people aren't willing to argue in good faith than they need to go. I've seen tons of communities slowly lose their identity because they were too accepting of counterproductive conversations and bad faith arguments. The idea of this form of tolerance comes from the goal be open minded and listen to opposite arguments, as well as to prevent a community from turning into an echo-chamber (or a cult), but I think it's better to lean towards heavy moderation. Banning someone who would be a good fit for the community is unfortunate, but ultimately not a huge loss. Not banning even one troll can drag down a whole community.
  • danielfoster 3y ago
    I came to a different conclusion and said no police or ambulance should enter the park. Obviously there should be an exception for true emergencies, but stretchers exist for a reason. Police can walk or ride a bike. The fact that respondents are so sure of the obviousness of their answers highlights common problems in moderation— rules are ambiguous and everyone has different standards.
    • Version467 3y ago
      In what way is that conclusion different? I argue that a strict moderation policy and enforcement is needed to keep a community healthy, even if that leads to the exclusion of a few posts/users that would have been good for the community. Is that not exactly what you are saying? Sidenote: Does the presence of an ambulance not qualify as a "true emergency" for you? In my experience an ambulance only shows up if someone needs acute medical attention. Is that not the case where you live?
• xp84 3y ago
  Biggest takeaway here for me was that a rule needs definitions for everything, including things which don’t even seem to be part of the rule. To complete this, I was forced to define the vertical extent of a piece of real estate (the boundary between the park and this country‘s airspace), to define a vehicle, versus something you wear or a toy. By the end, I had actually established a kind of caselaw, which defined that a vehicle is a thing that people or cargo can be on top of or inside for the purposes of transport. I defined that something you put on is not a vehicle and defined that there was some upper bound of the park above, which he would not be said to be “in“ it. I defined that the dragging frame was a vehicle, but an identical frame that was not designed to transport. Things would’ve been classified as not a vehicle. Arguably all of the above are just my conjecture. But I could not decide most of those questions without, at least internally, making all of those judgment calls. Each judgment call introduces even more edges, which could be tested by further questions. I did not consider for a moment whether the emergency situations should have exceptions made. I feel this is at the wrong place to do so. It’s a separate question to me to ask if it’s OK to break rules during emergencies. I really appreciated the creator’s point, which is to contradict the widely held belief among some people that regardless of opinion, there can be one and only one factual determination. It all depends on a dependency chain of definitions, even before you get into the questions like when it is ok to break the rules.
• Aachen 3y ago
  If nothing appears after the initial instruction, try a different browser. It doesn't seem to work (but also not show any error) on chromium-based webview android 11. At first I assumed the site was hugged and the questions were being loaded non-statically. Also, I don't get how this is supposed to help anyone understand content moderation. Take any court case and you'll have similar questions: it's more like playing judge than like playing moderator. Moderation is way harder because you can offend people on both sides at once, and they'll leave your community. In this park scenario, the people being passed judgement on can't move to another park with two clicks of the mouse and take a bunch of friends with them, and the park's sole appeal is not the existence of other people in it (network effect) the way that it is for online communities. Another difference is that people rarely get angry with the judge as much as with the law and politician that made it, which again puts you in a rather different position than in actual moderation.
• uKVZe85V 3y ago
  Two important things: 1. From the first page: > please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed). In other words, if a question is about some kind of vehicle that you think should be allowed to go, overriding this rule, the answer is "yes, the rule is violated". 2. There is a twist in this game and it's best to not tell which it is before you try the game. (The twist is acknowledged in the result page, 4th paragraph from the bottom, not counting the P.S. line at the end).
• gauddasa 3y ago
  I'm sure a fuzzy inference system is being trained in the background based on visitors' responses.
• Aachen 3y ago
  A better example would be a private property (you're the sole source of law, not interpreting someone else's rule) where people come to network (people are here because other people are here) and there's a competitor literally next door (there is no cost for them to change platform). These three crucial differences make the game incomparable to actual online moderation
• thepasswordis 3y ago
  According to most Reddit moderators: no vehicles in the park (unless the vehicle is in front of a sunset or we have to save our democracy by allowing vehicles with megaphones to drive around the park spouting the exact political ideology of the moderators) The rule “no vehicles in the park” isn’t complicated. It’s complicated when it’s “no vehicles in the park except the moderators and their friends.”
• ajanuary 3y ago
  The park may only have one rule, but the quiz has several , including disregarding exceptions to the rule. Yet there are people arguing here that rule shouldn’t count because they disagree with it. Even on a meta level, this is an interesting exploration of how people interpret rules.
  • SilverBirch 3y ago
    This is always the way with these hypotheticals. People only disagree because they don't want to stick to the hypothetical. But the flip side of that, if you do stick to the hypothetical you also need to be clear that it is therefore of limited use in the real world. Is an ambulance in the park breaking the rule? Cleraly. Does that have any relevance to what we would expect to happen in the real world? Nope.
• Tanoc 3y ago
  As classified and intended by the sign and societal expectation, a vehicle would be any self-propelled method of transport which violates the space or near space of the park. So a toy car or boat doesn't count, but an actual car or boat would. Just as a bicycle doesn't count but a motorcycle does. And a bit of logic has to be applied for what constitutes "within or near the space of the park" in practice. A plane flying thirty one thousand feet overhead is not even near the park, but a helicopter dropping down so low that the rotors are level with or below the top of the tree canopy is violating the space near the park. And exceptions to rules have to be made under certain circumstances. The ambulance and police car do violate the rules, but have to be given special extensions of jurisdiction to perform the duties wider society assigns and expects of them. But breaking things down into the very specific definition of "self propelled method of transport" is exactly what doesn't happen for a lot of moderation and enforcement. An offense brought to moderation is often several of those very specific definitions that don't get broken apart into their constituent parts for examination. We stopped using mercury to starch felt hats because the mercury was the problem. If instead we didn't break it down into components to identify the one causing the issue, would we have banned all felt hats or likely just felt altogether? Modern moderation policy dictates bias towards the latter. The idea of nebulosity as described is precisely why reforms constantly have to be made to enforcement, why automated enforcement is harmful, and why blanket policies on enforcement are a bad idea. Public nudity is generally agreed to be a crime and distasteful, but should somebody be arrested because their clothes were stolen at a changing station? Should a bumper sticker saying "Shoot your local meth dealer" get the driver pulled over because of either threats of violence or public indecency laws that are considered relics of the 19th century and are no longer widely enforced? Moderation in reality is a very simple issue of applying societal biases as rules that becomes horribly unwieldy when scaled beyond a few thousand people. That's because the best moderation is done on a case-by-case basis, as circumstances and context are more important than the infringing action because it's simply one component in a string of them. Obviously you can't do that when you have tens of thousands of users or more and the number of possible offenses grows every picosecond.
• randallsquared 3y ago
  The whole problem hinges on everyone who wants to use the park having to share the park as is. But that doesn't have to be the case with content moderation -- everyone could choose what rules and rule intent they want to subscribe to, if the content delivery was built that way. Hacker news has a very simple version of that: "show dead".
• Dah00n 3y ago
  I find it a bit disingenuous to overlook any rules outside the thought experiment and then want to apply it to a real world discussion where the overlooked rules do apply. Like the Police question. It has nothing to do with the context of the questionary (internet moderation) as it is a real world law, not a moderation rule. In reality, the statistics at the end show who decided to do a white room thought experiment and who did not - nothing else. I see no big problems in moderation at all unless it is on a government made platform or some other state owned utility thing.
• hamilyon2 3y ago
  For me this article is not about content moderation, but about software requirements. It turns out, no matter how hard I try to specify a piece of software, developers implementing them manage to sneak in their own interpretation into it and i find that, yes, this particular case wasn't specified or was a little ambiguous or contradicts the other part or something else.
• thenoblesunfish 3y ago
  This is a bit of a straw man, because (1) a real sign would say something "no motorized vehicles allowed in park". (2) implied with the sign is the jurisdiction of whoever put it there - presumably the city goverment which doesn't control things in the airspace high over the ground, and which grants exemptions to emergency services.
  • mech765 3y ago
    What about powered electric wheelchairs?
    • thenoblesunfish 3y ago
      Also allowed by city governments to go places motorized vehicles are prohibited in general, like emergency vehicles.
• 88j88 3y ago
  Which is why there should be no moderators besides each person having an equal vote. "But then people game the system." is always the answer, which is always the root cause of the problem: on the internet, everything is completely fair until someone, inevitably, games the system.
• specialist 3y ago
  From the OC: > You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem. ... can reduce the problem, but [cannot] eliminate it. And at scale, with adversarial testing, every edge case will get hit. Yup. Rules are not enough. Same conundrum applies to taxation, safety regulations, pollution, security, etc. It's not just a matter of better enforcement. Every system of rules will be gamed. Alas, I still don't have a clue about solutions. I'm just exhausted by the naive hot takes. Human affairs (societies) are messy.
• apricot 3y ago
  I notice that people who say "obviously emergency vehicles should be allowed, because of intent", despite the explicit instructions at the beginning of the test, often talk about "the sign" in their comments, despite no sign ever being mentioned in the instructions.
• DangerousPie 3y ago
  I suspect I'm not the only one who tried this, but ChatGPT does predictably well at this task. I gave it a basic prompt of 'Let's play a game. The rule says, "No vehicles in the park". This is a game about language and rules. I will describe different scenarios to you. In response, you respond "Yes" if this scenario violates the rule or "No" if it does not. You have to make a choice and can only say Yes or No.' and then just fed it the scenarios. It ended up agreeing with the majority and my own intuition quite well. The largest differences were that it didn't considered a rowboard a vehicle and that it did consider the parachute scenario a vehicle. Bad news for human content moderators I suppose...
• synergy20 3y ago
  So, maybe we need use the Jury system then, say 9 of them, with diversified backgrounds(e.g. 3 liberals, 3 conservatives, 3 independents, also consider age and gender,etc), and they vote online for edge cases, majority wins. it will not be optimal, but better than a group of censors who share the same ideology and bias, or even worse, one or too persons make the calls randomly based on their own likes and dislikes. Or design an AI agent to do that and save manual labor, but do let a jury to check its results regularly to make sure it works as expected, as much as possible.
• mik09 3y ago
  i did 7 questions and agreed with 29% of the majority. can see why i'm writing on some "reddit alternative" platforms as much as i'm writing on reddit.
• 1970-01-01 3y ago
  This is fun! I propose a few more scenarios: A hot dog cart serves food in the park. A 1997 pickup truck is rusting away on the bottom of the park's lake. An elevator moves equipment up and down floors within the park's maintenance building. Deep under the park's lake, a nuclear submarine hides from satellites. An ice cream truck sits just on the border between the park entrance and a private road to a residence.
• 11235813213455 3y ago
  you just need to define vehicle and park bounds first
• marler8997 3y ago
  Great game, cleverly demonstrates a fundamental problem with creating rules/laws. I've wondered if focusing on the goal/intent when creating rules would be more effective? For example, instead of just a rule that says "No vehicles in the park", you could say, the community wants the park: - to be safe - to be peaceful/relaxing - to accommodate physical activities/games For these reasons, we don't allow vehicles that will unnecessarily compromise safety and/or make a lot of noise. Of course the goal/intent I've written suffers from the same problem as the rules did, the definitions are ambiguous, but I think there's a distinction between capturing the spirit vs the letter of the law. It's a guide for why the rules exist and when they should or shouldn't be applied. It's not perfect, but, I think it's an improvement of just listing rules. If capturing/publishing the reasons for rules alongside the rules was normalized I wonder how different things could be?
• Aeroi 3y ago
  i got 11%
• fefe23 3y ago
  Fascinating exercise. During my first attempt I found that I had to look up the actual definition of vehicle. I initially thought that a vehicle means someone is being transported by the vehicle, using an engine. According to wikipedia vehicle also includes things being moved by muscle, and it is not limited to transporting persons, also wares. I also changed my mind on whether a police or EMT falls under the rule. It obviously does. There has to be a second rule overriding this rule for those cases. Also I changed my mind on the paraglider and the ISS. The ISS is a vehicle but it's over the park not in the park. The paraglider is a vehicle under my new understanding of the definition, and it does not matter whether the initial thrust came from when the paraglider was outside the park. It also explains why the rules in the park near me prohibit _driving_ a bike in the park, not having one.
  • mr_mitm 3y ago
    My reasoning was: Yes, an EMT violates the rule, but in an emergency rules don't necessarily apply anymore.
  • antognini 3y ago
    The legal definition of a vehicle can become relevant in some surprising ways under drunk driving laws. Most people assume that drunk driving laws are limited to driving an automobile, but in most states it simply refers to vehicles. Consequently, every now and again you get a story of someone being convicted of drunk driving when they have been bicycling while drunk. You can also be convicted of drunk driving for riding a horse while drunk (and people have been).
    • hunter2_ 3y ago
      Does the legal definition include a sled going down a hill? If sleds, then skis aren't much of a stretch. And if skis, then shoes aren't much of a stretch. When I was reading the dictionary definition, I got the sense that gravity isn't eligible as the motive force, and instead it would need to be someone exerting themselves (like pulling a wagon) or using stored energy (like an automobile). But sliding down a hill by gravity is indeed using stored energy, so I'd think that counts!
• gcanyon 3y ago
  I took the survey, then my wife did. I was being strict, so I said the parachute was a vehicle in the park. The site said I agreed with 8% of people. My wife was being reasonable, and said it wasn’t. The site also said she agreed with 8% of people. My guess is that they’re taking the percent of all people who answered at least seven questions, but I could be wrong, and the results are in any case very misleading.
• stevemadere 3y ago
  This is just one case the general rule of ambiguity. At one of my jobs, a product manager came up with the idea of categorizing explicitly delineating everybody's selection criteria into a "normalized" form to allow for aggregating statistics. I tried to point out up front what a fool's errand in this was. There is way too much ambiguity in the language. I was overruled and the company then spent probably 7 to 15 million dollars chasing this ridiculous El Dorado dream. Eventually, after 3 years of wandering in the wilderness of normalized ontologies, they gave up and decided all NLP is bad. This decision came out about 2 months before the release of chatGPT.
• jwie 3y ago
  No to all questions since there’s probably a way in which doing any of those things still obeys the rule. The rule is about achieving the intent of the rule, not rote obedience. The park might contain a parking lot, or an area where skateboarding is permitted, etc. Absent context, or a specific park, who could say if any of the things listed violate the rules. As for what constitutes a vehicle, this is why you give examples.
  • baliex 3y ago
    Did you actually try it? It sounds like you did, because you’ve given a car and skateboard example, which do appear in the exercise. But it sounds like you didn’t because you’ve given such an authoritative answer when the whole point of the exercise is that “it’s complicated”. There is no One True Answer, it’s open to interpretation, that’s the complexity it demonstrates.
• ouid 3y ago
  [dead]
• afterburner 3y ago
  "You agreed with the majority. 18%. <Confusing insufficiently explained chart.>" That could have been presented better. Is it trying to tell me the majority of people are "wrong"?
• hotpockets 3y ago
  Additional suggestions that i think would make the game better/harder because the answer distribution is currently pretty skewed and many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule (though all respect to rule sticklers, general contrarians, and everythings-a-vehicle hipsters): construction equipment for park improvements (backhoe, etc) gas powered moped electric moped gas powered rc car 4-wheeler/atv/dune buggy golf cart segway/monowheel antique cars for some kind of demo/event shriner guys in those mini cars in a local parade (at least i think most americans know what i'm talking about) anti-drunk driving display (they have these sometimes at colleges, and maybe high schools, but it's basically a wrecked car and there are police there to do pr) Note: i think many of your options are just clearly not covered by the rule, maybe keep some of them but not so many?
• _gabe_ 3y ago
  This whole thing is dumb. There's never a description of "What is a vehicle?" And there's never a description of, "What is the park's jurisdiction?". If the author wants to relate this whole thing to content moderation, all they're illustrating is they had crappy guidelines. Give better guidelines and then let's talk. But if you give a crappy set of rules expect a crappy outcome (the outcome where nobody agrees on anything).
• xyzzy3000 3y ago
  I found the term 'wagon' to be unclear. In the UK, this would be something akin to an articulated lorry, although I am familiar with the American term 'station wagon' so I took it to mean a type of motor car at the very least. Presumably that is not the case, having now seen the results. Is it a sort of unpowered trolley?
  • joe_g_young 3y ago
    More like a little red cart on wheels pulled on a handle.
  • batch12 3y ago
    I read it as the "little red wagon" type.
• edmundsauto 3y ago
  All the discussions over interpretation are missing the point of the exercise, which is to show how hard it is to find agreement over something as emotionally neutral as "is the vehicle in the park". Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".
  • WheatMillington 3y ago
    I am kind of floored at how badly all the top comments have missed the point, considering how clearly the point was made by the author. It has basically nothing to do with your interpretation, or how "good" you are at understanding the literal or intended meaning of the sign. The point is about how hard it is for all of us to agree on these matters.
  • mint2 3y ago
    Except the top comments aren’t doing that. They’re all saying it’s a flawed contrived example and despite that the actual results show most people agree. And not only that, the questions get ranked by decreasing agreement which shows that it’s pretty easy to make a cut off if put up to vote. Are bitcoins allowed in the park or beanie babies since people consider them investment vehicles? Are pill capsules allowed in the park as they are vehicles for medicine? Are brains allowed in the park because they are vehicles for consciousness? All the example shows is that rules need definitions or they need juries. And why is subjectivity even bad? It’s impossible to do anything without some degree of it. It’s also impossible not to have rules, like there are hundreds of unstated ones going on all the time and no one including the author is objecting to them. They aren’t objecting to the rule against DNS attacks or a thousand other examples.
    • edmundsauto 3y ago
      We agree that it is flawed and it is obviously contrived, because the difficult decisions happen at scale and in edge cases. This is content moderation on easy mode; difficult stuff happens at scale and in the greyest of areas and have to be applied consistently.
• kazinator 3y ago
  Here is something else. During the pandemic, I went through MacDonald's drive-in on bicycle, because you couldn't go into the restaurant. I was refused service because I was not a vehicle, and since only the drive-in was operating, I was absolutely refused service. They claimed it was for safety. Though technically it is true that a bicycle is not a vehicle according to the BC Motor Vehicle Act, the Act also says: "a person operating a cycle on a highway has the same rights and duties as a driver of a vehicle" The drive-through road constitutes a highway, according to the definition, which includes "every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles, ..." and "every private place or passageway to which the public, for the purpose of the parking or servicing of vehicles, has access or is invited" By a kind of stretch "rights" should include being treated the same by a drive-in for vehicles. :) I actually cited this to them, but in the end it was come back with a car or no service.
  • dagurp 3y ago
    I'd like to know what they think is unsafe about this.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      if the car behind or in front of you crashes into you, a human on a bicycle, the damage is much greater than if it crashes into another car. If you assume the other driver is drunk, and stomps on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal, in some ridiculous souped up sports car or truck, the human goes squish.
      • xdennis 3y ago
        How is this unsafe for McDonalds?
        • fragmede 3y ago
          The person getting squished, or the family of that person is going to sue McDonald's
• TomK32 3y ago
  Austria has this sort of problem when it comes to forests and cyclists. You might want to read a longer article in German about this https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000134804355/als-oesterreich-den-menschen-erlaubt-hat-den-wald-zu-betreten https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000134804355/als-oesterrei... but the gist of it is: The law until 1975 didn't allow anyone (that's everyone in Austria) to enter forests (which in comparison belong to only a few people, besides the state). Now that problem with this law (Forstgesetz 1975) is in § 33 (3) where it says "befahren" (drive) which is a very general word when the parliamentary discussion about the law in 1975 clearly meant motor vehicles and even lists them in the discussion but not in the law. A few years later mountainbiking became a thing and the owners of forests insist that the law includes mountain bikers. Fast forward to 2023 and the law still needs fixing...
• mac-chaffee 3y ago
  I see a lot of "just add more specifics to the rule" in here, but that's fighting a losing battle. There will always be another edge case, and the rule will end up being so long and complicated that no one will properly follow it anyway. I think the solution is to put the goal of the rule right next to the rule. Maybe vehicles are banned to improve air quality, to improve pedestrian safety, to reduce noise, or some combination. Or maybe there really is no good reason, and the writer of the rule just enjoys power. Reminds me of writing security policies. There will always be exceptions, but if you include the goals of each rule, your users are empowered to recognize when an exception is a good idea. Otherwise, you get either blind compliance or secret non-compliance.
• trhr 3y ago
  I got stuck on the first question. I couldn't figure out what kind of park it was. I don't think a wheelchair is appropriate in a skate park. However, if the "skate park" allowed bicycles, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and cars, I think a wheelchair is fuckin' fine. Thus, a wheelchair is a vehicle in some circumstances.
• dredmorbius 3y ago
  I've seen much discussion of what a vehicle is, and some of what is "in" the park. I've not yet seen (though not yet reading all 1114 extant comments) discussion of the goal and/or purpose of the rule. Given this discussion is on Hacker News and my growing obsession with what makes this site tick (and occasionally sends it off the rails), contrast with HN's "real standard": "to engage one's intellectual curiosity" (<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>). HN's somewhat famously brief and loose guidelines (<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>) augmented by dang's moderation comments (viewable by search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>) provide much of that. And, in fact, reading those search results just now turned up a ... interesting, now deleted ... response by dang on this thread which explains the "intended spirit" nature of HN moderation. I'm not going to quote the full item (respecting the deletion), but this bit seems to echo my sense: [H]aving the set of first principles (the site guidelines) be organized around "intended spirit" rather than formal precision is the best bulwark I know. In the cae of laws, the purpose or intent is often explicitly stated. In US tradition, the "whereas" clauses typically preceding the main body of legislation. And for this game, the posted rule would benefit greatly by a clarification as to why it was enacted and what the rule is intended to accomplish. This would also clarify, even without specifically enumerating classes of vehicles or conveyances, and/or proximity to the park which specific cases might be permitted or excluded.
• lowmagnet 3y ago
  most people including me pressed yes to every question. it was 12% of the respondents.
• ziml77 3y ago
  I expected this to be tough, but it was even tougher than that! I treated it purely as an exercise in classifying what is a vehicle and what it means to be in the park. Skateboards really tripped me up because I don't think of roller skates as a vehicle but I do think of bikes as a vehicle. Skateboards feel like they sit right between those two. The wagon was another tough one because the kids riding in it certainly seems very vehicle-like to me. And the stroller felt even more like a vehicle to me (ultimately I didn't choose to classify either of those as vehicles). I said the horse wasn't a vehicle, but I said the rowboat was. I didn't classify the RC car as a vehicle, but the classification of a quadcopter was tough because of that. I wanted to consider it a vehicle, but I couldn't think of it as far enough off of an RC car to be one. I tried to figure out some logic for my classifications but I really couldn't it was all down to feel and making sure that I didn't clearly contradict a previous decision. My answers may have been different had they been presented in another order or even just if my mood was a bit different!
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• rightbyte 3y ago
  It was a quite interesting quiz to be honest. I reasoned that vehicle did not cover water vehicles, since that should be a special rule for the lake.
• mikewarot 3y ago
  Clearly, this is all about driving cars or trucks in the park. The roads there are intended for pedestrians, cyclists, etc. It seems that 93% agree with me. Well done, everyone. ;-)
• wannes 3y ago
  For me, where English isn't my native language, the answer to all the questions was no, because of the lack of a verb on the sign.