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In my experience, people disagree about the "vehicle in the park" game because they try to apply other rules that are not part of the game. Ambulances, for exa

In my experience, people disagree about the "vehicle in the park" game because they try to apply other rules that are not part of the game. Ambulances, for example, are clearly vehicles, and if they're in the park, the rules has been violated. That doesn't mean the ambulance driver is in the wrong, though. There could be other rules that supersede that rule. We aren't told of any, though, and are simply asked about that one rule. The only judgements that we're asked to make are "What is considered a vehicle" and "What is considered to be in the park". That's because these things are not defined for us and are open to interpretation. Interestingly, though, the game said I agreed with 74% of people, which was a lot higher than I expected it to be.

pkasting 3y ago
This may be because some people are assuming this is a rules-driven culture and some are assuming it's a principle-driven culture. (In real world examples we could also have a power-driven culture.) Understanding that a difference exists, what their effects are, and which you're in is important. Given insufficient information to clearly determine, people are not wrong to operate in either regime.
Verdex 3y ago
This line of thinking does make me wonder if the path forward might be a system of authority and variable consequences instead of trying to find consensus. Agreeing is hard but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules in the interest of the common good. Similarly skate boarders and mothers with wagons don't have authority to violate rules but because the consequences (hypothetically imagined here) is based on weight then they can violate the rule with relative impunity because such a minor infraction of the rule only endangers them to passing enforcers to say "shame on you" to them. At this point to me it seems the hard point is objectively applying consequences in a moderation setting. I'm not sure how to make a call that someone is being only a little bit of an asshole in anyway that allows an online community to function in a way that is cohesive.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules But the game isn't about "should the rule be ignored?". That's a different game.
  - Verdex 3y ago
    The game is a meta commentary on how moderation is hard. My commentary is an orthogonal commentary on moderation using the game and previous conversation comment as input. Interestingly enough, I realized that my thoughts is just a vague restating on how the criminal justice system is supposed to work (at least in the US). You have laws and then some people are allowed to ignore them and some people ignore them because the consequences aren't sufficient to be problematic to them. Judges and lawyers facilitate and split hairs.
jprete 3y ago
I tried the game after your comment and got 100% agreement with the majority. My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving itself along with one or more people (not necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold). "In the park" means in the region of space where one could physically interact with people in the park, or alternatively in its legal jurisdiction; the airspace a few thousand feet above the park's topmost solid point is almost never under the jurisdiction of the park itself. I agree with the overall point about moderation, but I find this a bad example because I think someone reasonably rules-oriented would settle on very similar rules.
- true_religion 3y ago
  I went with anything that moves unpowered or not that is not also a living thing is a vehicle so long as it falls within the light cone that could theoretically be projected from the park grounds directly upwards if it were in a vacuum. Not many people agreed with me, but it’s a strict rule that I could imagine something like the military trying to enforce over a top secret area. It blocks everything ambiguous so only the horse was not a vehicle. Overall I think it’s a good experiment as it shows why it’s good to enumerate examples of what is and isn’t part of a rule in order to adjusted it the future.
  - gifvenut 3y ago
    Light cone? But over the park is not in the park.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - wizardwes 3y ago
      What is the vertical limit of the park? If I build a ramp and jump off it in a vehicle, at what point in its arc is the vehicle "in the park?"
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    > so long as it falls within the light cone I look forward to bring my vehicle by navigating through my 4D tessaract to a place where I could not have had the information of the rule.
pixl97 3y ago
Part of the issue here on why people are adding rules to this game is because there is a real life abstraction in what seemingly most people would consider nonsensical rules. If you said "are borbs allowed in the bezzilizx" it would be more interesting on what the gradient of answers would be as we are not making as many presuppositions. For example, if my grandma is dying of a heart attack in the park, one of the most common behavior of those involved will be "fuck your rules, get the ambulance down here". This is that humans are not yes/no rule following computers and we will gladly toss rules to the side over a number of factors encompassing everything from immediacy of need to the depths of our greed.
- moolcool 3y ago
  The presuppositions are what make the question interesting. It's an explicit test of pedantry.
  - j2kun 3y ago
    I think this is the real point: it's not a test of whether people agree on what is allowed, but on how pedantic people are in an abstract setting. I think agreement would be much higher if people were told to evaluate the "spirit" of the rule, and not the "letter" of the rule.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Better yet, have them submit two answers for spirit and letter. Because it seems that people will ignore instructions that say to focus on just one.
    - krisoft 3y ago
      > I think agreement would be much higher if people were told to evaluate the "spirit" of the rule, and not the "letter" of the rule. I think you are right. I think agreement would be even higher if you would be asking people what should happen as a result of the situation as described. There could be options with increasing level of seriousness. Things like “do nothing”, “send a park officer to ask them to leave, they get a fine if they persist”, “send a cop who asks them to leave and arrest them if they perist”, “send a cop to arrest them without warning”, “order a snipper to headshot them without any warning”. I think asking if something is a violation is too abstract, and people are bad at abstract things. On the other hand when we make it concrete people will be better at expressing what they think should happen and you are more likely to see agreement.
hodgesrm 3y ago
> Ambulances, for example, are clearly vehicles, and if they're in the park, the rules has been violated. The game would be more interesting if the rule were "Threatening speech is not allowed."
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  Many years ago I witnessed an interesting interaction on a gaming forum. Player A was trying to recruit players for their group. Player B posted about some bad experiences they had with Player A being hard to work with in the past, which prompted Player A to reply with some vicious personal attacks. Player B then quoted Player A’s post in full with commentary to the effect of “Thanks for illustrating my point.” When the moderator came in, they deleted Player A’s post attacking Player B, but left Player B’s post quoting it alone.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    A quite common approach, yes. As a moderator you often know know that somebody should be removed, but for the sake of PR it's often unwise to just have an internal talk, reach an agreement that "yup, this person is an ass", and then ban them seemingly out of the blue, even if there's a bunch of excellent reasons. It's easy for drama to erupt, especially when that person has been around for a long time and is a regular. An easy solution is to watch out like a hawk for the right incident and do it then, and sometimes to even try to intentionally push things along so that it's especially obvious to all bystanders. And leaving some evidence to show everyone why you did it also helps.
    - hodgesrm 3y ago
      What you describe gets far closer to why moderation is tricky. The interesting question--to me at least--is whether some subset of people can apply such reasoning consistently. Danluu is arguing that because a set of randomly chosen people cannot agree how to apply a simple statement like "No vehicles in the park" that moderation is impossible. If so, the same would no doubt be true of the following language in an NDA: > Each Receiving Party shall: (a) maintain all Confidential Information in confidence; and (b) exercise at least the same degree of care to safeguard the Confidential Information that it uses to safeguard its own Confidential Information (but no less than reasonable care). Yet, US courts would not have a lot of problems interpreting this language consistently because terms like "reasonable care" have definitions that anyone trained in the law would understand. [0] The fact that uninitiated people may not be able to do so is not relevant. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_care https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_care
dazamarquez 3y ago
The game does not ask whether the vehicle should be allowed in the park. It only asks whether the thing is a "vehicle" and whether it "is in" the park.
arp242 3y ago
> The only judgements that we're asked to make are "What is considered a vehicle" and "What is considered to be in the park". Which is a pointless question to ask because that's not how parks operate. This entire test is flawed, and any conclusions derived from it are worthless.
moolcool 3y ago
"No vehicles in the park" is a rule explicitly written for humans, and rules written for humans have reasonable and obvious exceptions which don't have to be explicitly stated. If a convenience store says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service", no reasonable worker would refuse service to someone wearing a dress.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > If a convenience store says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service", no reasonable worker would refuse service to someone wearing a dress. Odds are good they will if they disapprove of the dress, or if they disapprove of the someone’s wearing of a dress. Because the rule is not actually about shirts or shoes, it’s about throwing out people considered undesirable. Those signs were invented to throw out hippies. Similarly “please wait to be seated”, used to be only in high-end restaurants, lower end ones introduced them so they could ignore / refuse to seat hippies. It’s much easier to make a patron leave when they’ve been standing at the entrance for half an hour than when they’ve seated themselves.
  - moolcool 3y ago
    What about when they say “long haired freaky people need not apply”?
- cmaggiulli 3y ago
  I would argue that “no shirt, no shoes, no service” is not rule but rather a concise and simplistic phrase that communicates the spirit of the rule to a broad audience. The rule is that a human must have their feet, part of their lower and upper body covered or else they will be denied entry and/or refused service. The phrase is just a way to communicate that rule in a concise way
  - moolcool 3y ago
    That's kind of my point though. Written rules sacrifice specificity for brevity all the time, and it works for most reasonable people most of the time.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
The game explicitly says to ignore everything except the one stated rule: > 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).
- mikewarot 3y ago
  >The game explicitly says to ignore everything except... I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it. I live in the real world, not hypothetical-land. Too much of what's wrong with the world starts with people ignoring the real world, and going hypothetical.
  - hibbelig 3y ago
    > I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it. Fascinating. It’s a game! No Knight moves one square to the right and two up, but it seems chess players have no problem with it.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Because chess has a throughout specification (at least now, not sure if it was always that way). A knight is only a night and cannot fall under any other category. Can you think of a rule in chess that is not well defined?
      - rileymat2 3y ago
        I think which player gets white is ill defined by the game proper, and selected by the various organizers/players. Edit: I think in tournament chess there is some ill defined rules around play behavior/distractions.
        pixl97 3y ago
kryogen1c 3y ago
> That's because these things are not defined for us and are open to interpretation. This is actually a deep philosophical and practical issue called the frame problem. It is not tractable to define all the axioms and presuppositions for any given set of rules. That's why the American system has a legislature and separate interpretive body in the judiciary.
- card_zero 3y ago
  It's often useful to invoke the fictional "reasonable person".
  - pixl97 3y ago
    And yet this falls strongly on cultural norms and leads to a great number of issues where cultures mix.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
My take is that most people cant resist the urge to assert what they think they rule should be, complicating the test. ambulances aren't allowed, but they shuld be. Drones are allowed, but they shouldnt be. I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair. I was surprised to see I got 100% agreement with the majority on each question. But I guess that means i would still disagree with most everyone on at least one question
- cmaggiulli 3y ago
  My 0.02 but the airspace above the park is not the park or else you could take that to a logical extreme. A park is the land/waterways within a geographical bounds with a specific designation. It does not include the air above the park which is why planes flying over your house are not trespassing
  - ziml77 3y ago
    Planes flying over your house are not trespassing because they are far enough up that they are considered to be on public highway. If you hover a helicopter over my house and hang via a rope outside my bedroom window, you are absolutely trespassing even if you have not touched the building or the ground at any point. And going to logical extremes is always going to lead to absurdity. Let's go in the other direction. A hovercraft doesn't touch the ground, so would a reasonable person also consider that to not be on their property when it's powered on in their front yard?
  - nradov 3y ago
    How about a hovercraft, which rides on an air cushion without actually touching the ground?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair. And/or discomfort and/or lack of understanding that real-life rules aren't exhaustive - they're meant to encircle a range of situations, but their borders are necessarily fuzzy, and borderline cases are, by design, to be judged on by humans on a case-by-case basis.
jstummbillig 3y ago
> because they try to apply other rules that are not part of the game. And I suspect that most would disagree they do that (because most people would have a hard time thinking of themselves as rule violators) which would then lead to something like "the rule is stupid" or "this is pedantic". No Vehicles In The Park is super interesting.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thomastjeffery 3y ago
The struggle here is ambiguity. That's a hard problem for computing, but not a hard problem for people. An ambulance can simply break the rule, because human rule-makers are able to make exceptions. A lot of people are very excited about LLMs, because they can encounter ambiguity without halting. Unfortunately, what they can't do is resolve that ambiguity. We are still only able to compute context-free rules.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
Is a modern shoe a vehicle? It provides a spring bounce assist to motion. If it is not a vehicle, then why would a pair of roller skates or even a bicycle be one? I answered that the roller skates were not a vehicle, and though it took some longer thought answered the same about the bicycle and wheelchair. Mine was 70%.
- brewdad 3y ago
  My state has unambiguously defined bicycles as vehicles, perhaps to avoid exactly this question. It also avoids the need to rewrite the vehicle code to specifically include bicycles. There have been exceptions added to the vehicle code to allow bikes to do things or go places where other vehicles are forbidden but there was no need to rewrite the vehicle code to specifically require them to stop at red lights. They are vehicles, so must stop. In this game, in my state, bicycles would not be allowed unless the sign mentioned the law that allows them.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
> That doesn't mean the ambulance driver is in the wrong, though. There could be other rules that supersede that rule. We aren't told of any, though, and are simply asked about that one rule. Yeah, this was my thought exactly. Anyone who says an ambulance is allowed is not following the rules of the game, which say to only consider the "no vehicles in the park" rule. In a real scenario, there would of course be other rules (the WW2 tank would be there by permission of the park management, for example). But if you only consider the one rule (as you were told to) then the answers are imo quite straightforward. I agreed with 93% of people when I played the game, so it sure seems to me like there's broad agreement on this.
lr4444lr 3y ago
The game is a bait and switch. I followed the directions faithfully, and said that the ambulance was breaking the rule. But then it seemed to lower my score. Turns out I wasn't supposed to follow the rule, I was supposed to guess how others would follow the rule. That should have been clear from the instructions.
- Feathercrown 3y ago
  1. The majority said the ambulance was a vehicle, so agreeing with that wouldn't lower your score 2. It's an agreement score, not an achievement score. All it does is measure how many questions you agreed with the majority on. The score does not convey a value or judge your actions, it's just there to inform you how closely you align to others' answers.
- grfhtsdfvv 3y ago
  You did what you were supposed to do and demonstrated what you were supposed to demonstrate. The fact that you feel you did it wrong is just a bonus for the author (and spectators like me!)
danielscrubs 3y ago
”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. ” Is in the first screen. I got 100% because I assumed it was not written by a lawyer. Context matters.
mike_hock 3y ago
Played through it twice. Once judging whether the actions violated the letter of the rule, and once whether they violated the spirit of the rule. The first time every decision was hard and I felt like some contradicted my earlier decisions. The second time was considerably easier and I got a higher agreement score. I would have expected it to be easier to strictly apply a simple rule, but it turned out that interpreting the intent of the rule was less contentious and easier to apply. Ambulances in the park are not a violation, not on the grounds that some other rule overrides the no-vehicles rule, but that they don't violate the spirit of the rule.
andybak 3y ago
The article carefully analyzed the way in which people on HN oversimplified or misunderstood the challenge of "vehicle in the park". Whilst you can disagree with their counter arguments - at least engage with the counter arguments. This reads more like a response to the original post rather than a response to the this actual essay.
goodpoint 3y ago
Yes, the question is phrased poorly and people easily confuse "is an ambulance a vehicle" with "do you agree with banning emergency vehicles in parks". However if you look at the statistics you'll see a lot of people consider a boats, skateboards, sleds and even RC cars as vehicles.

pkasting 3y ago

This may be because some people are assuming this is a rules-driven culture and some are assuming it's a principle-driven culture. (In real world examples we could also have a power-driven culture.) Understanding that a difference exists, what their effects are, and which you're in is important. Given insufficient information to clearly determine, people are not wrong to operate in either regime.

Verdex 3y ago

This line of thinking does make me wonder if the path forward might be a system of authority and variable consequences instead of trying to find consensus. Agreeing is hard but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules in the interest of the common good. Similarly skate boarders and mothers with wagons don't have authority to violate rules but because the consequences (hypothetically imagined here) is based on weight then they can violate the rule with relative impunity because such a minor infraction of the rule only endangers them to passing enforcers to say "shame on you" to them. At this point to me it seems the hard point is objectively applying consequences in a moderation setting. I'm not sure how to make a call that someone is being only a little bit of an asshole in anyway that allows an online community to function in a way that is cohesive.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules But the game isn't about "should the rule be ignored?". That's a different game.
- Verdex 3y ago
  The game is a meta commentary on how moderation is hard. My commentary is an orthogonal commentary on moderation using the game and previous conversation comment as input. Interestingly enough, I realized that my thoughts is just a vague restating on how the criminal justice system is supposed to work (at least in the US). You have laws and then some people are allowed to ignore them and some people ignore them because the consequences aren't sufficient to be problematic to them. Judges and lawyers facilitate and split hairs.

jprete 3y ago

I tried the game after your comment and got 100% agreement with the majority. My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object capable of moving itself along with one or more people (not necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold). "In the park" means in the region of space where one could physically interact with people in the park, or alternatively in its legal jurisdiction; the airspace a few thousand feet above the park's topmost solid point is almost never under the jurisdiction of the park itself. I agree with the overall point about moderation, but I find this a bad example because I think someone reasonably rules-oriented would settle on very similar rules.

true_religion 3y ago
I went with anything that moves unpowered or not that is not also a living thing is a vehicle so long as it falls within the light cone that could theoretically be projected from the park grounds directly upwards if it were in a vacuum. Not many people agreed with me, but it’s a strict rule that I could imagine something like the military trying to enforce over a top secret area. It blocks everything ambiguous so only the horse was not a vehicle. Overall I think it’s a good experiment as it shows why it’s good to enumerate examples of what is and isn’t part of a rule in order to adjusted it the future.
- gifvenut 3y ago
  Light cone? But over the park is not in the park.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - wizardwes 3y ago
    What is the vertical limit of the park? If I build a ramp and jump off it in a vehicle, at what point in its arc is the vehicle "in the park?"
- saagarjha 3y ago
  > so long as it falls within the light cone I look forward to bring my vehicle by navigating through my 4D tessaract to a place where I could not have had the information of the rule.

pixl97 3y ago

Part of the issue here on why people are adding rules to this game is because there is a real life abstraction in what seemingly most people would consider nonsensical rules. If you said "are borbs allowed in the bezzilizx" it would be more interesting on what the gradient of answers would be as we are not making as many presuppositions. For example, if my grandma is dying of a heart attack in the park, one of the most common behavior of those involved will be "fuck your rules, get the ambulance down here". This is that humans are not yes/no rule following computers and we will gladly toss rules to the side over a number of factors encompassing everything from immediacy of need to the depths of our greed.

moolcool 3y ago
The presuppositions are what make the question interesting. It's an explicit test of pedantry.
- j2kun 3y ago
  I think this is the real point: it's not a test of whether people agree on what is allowed, but on how pedantic people are in an abstract setting. I think agreement would be much higher if people were told to evaluate the "spirit" of the rule, and not the "letter" of the rule.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Better yet, have them submit two answers for spirit and letter. Because it seems that people will ignore instructions that say to focus on just one.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > I think agreement would be much higher if people were told to evaluate the "spirit" of the rule, and not the "letter" of the rule. I think you are right. I think agreement would be even higher if you would be asking people what should happen as a result of the situation as described. There could be options with increasing level of seriousness. Things like “do nothing”, “send a park officer to ask them to leave, they get a fine if they persist”, “send a cop who asks them to leave and arrest them if they perist”, “send a cop to arrest them without warning”, “order a snipper to headshot them without any warning”. I think asking if something is a violation is too abstract, and people are bad at abstract things. On the other hand when we make it concrete people will be better at expressing what they think should happen and you are more likely to see agreement.

hodgesrm 3y ago

> Ambulances, for example, are clearly vehicles, and if they're in the park, the rules has been violated. The game would be more interesting if the rule were "Threatening speech is not allowed."

CrazyStat 3y ago
Many years ago I witnessed an interesting interaction on a gaming forum. Player A was trying to recruit players for their group. Player B posted about some bad experiences they had with Player A being hard to work with in the past, which prompted Player A to reply with some vicious personal attacks. Player B then quoted Player A’s post in full with commentary to the effect of “Thanks for illustrating my point.” When the moderator came in, they deleted Player A’s post attacking Player B, but left Player B’s post quoting it alone.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  A quite common approach, yes. As a moderator you often know know that somebody should be removed, but for the sake of PR it's often unwise to just have an internal talk, reach an agreement that "yup, this person is an ass", and then ban them seemingly out of the blue, even if there's a bunch of excellent reasons. It's easy for drama to erupt, especially when that person has been around for a long time and is a regular. An easy solution is to watch out like a hawk for the right incident and do it then, and sometimes to even try to intentionally push things along so that it's especially obvious to all bystanders. And leaving some evidence to show everyone why you did it also helps.
  - hodgesrm 3y ago
    What you describe gets far closer to why moderation is tricky. The interesting question--to me at least--is whether some subset of people can apply such reasoning consistently. Danluu is arguing that because a set of randomly chosen people cannot agree how to apply a simple statement like "No vehicles in the park" that moderation is impossible. If so, the same would no doubt be true of the following language in an NDA: > Each Receiving Party shall: (a) maintain all Confidential Information in confidence; and (b) exercise at least the same degree of care to safeguard the Confidential Information that it uses to safeguard its own Confidential Information (but no less than reasonable care). Yet, US courts would not have a lot of problems interpreting this language consistently because terms like "reasonable care" have definitions that anyone trained in the law would understand. [0] The fact that uninitiated people may not be able to do so is not relevant. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_care https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_care

dazamarquez 3y ago

The game does not ask whether the vehicle should be allowed in the park. It only asks whether the thing is a "vehicle" and whether it "is in" the park.

arp242 3y ago

> The only judgements that we're asked to make are "What is considered a vehicle" and "What is considered to be in the park". Which is a pointless question to ask because that's not how parks operate. This entire test is flawed, and any conclusions derived from it are worthless.

moolcool 3y ago

"No vehicles in the park" is a rule explicitly written for humans, and rules written for humans have reasonable and obvious exceptions which don't have to be explicitly stated. If a convenience store says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service", no reasonable worker would refuse service to someone wearing a dress.

masklinn 3y ago
> If a convenience store says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service", no reasonable worker would refuse service to someone wearing a dress. Odds are good they will if they disapprove of the dress, or if they disapprove of the someone’s wearing of a dress. Because the rule is not actually about shirts or shoes, it’s about throwing out people considered undesirable. Those signs were invented to throw out hippies. Similarly “please wait to be seated”, used to be only in high-end restaurants, lower end ones introduced them so they could ignore / refuse to seat hippies. It’s much easier to make a patron leave when they’ve been standing at the entrance for half an hour than when they’ve seated themselves.
- moolcool 3y ago
  What about when they say “long haired freaky people need not apply”?
cmaggiulli 3y ago
I would argue that “no shirt, no shoes, no service” is not rule but rather a concise and simplistic phrase that communicates the spirit of the rule to a broad audience. The rule is that a human must have their feet, part of their lower and upper body covered or else they will be denied entry and/or refused service. The phrase is just a way to communicate that rule in a concise way
- moolcool 3y ago
  That's kind of my point though. Written rules sacrifice specificity for brevity all the time, and it works for most reasonable people most of the time.

pavel_lishin 3y ago

The game explicitly says to ignore everything except the one stated rule: > 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).

mikewarot 3y ago
>The game explicitly says to ignore everything except... I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it. I live in the real world, not hypothetical-land. Too much of what's wrong with the world starts with people ignoring the real world, and going hypothetical.
- hibbelig 3y ago
  > I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it. Fascinating. It’s a game! No Knight moves one square to the right and two up, but it seems chess players have no problem with it.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Because chess has a throughout specification (at least now, not sure if it was always that way). A knight is only a night and cannot fall under any other category. Can you think of a rule in chess that is not well defined?
    - rileymat2 3y ago
      I think which player gets white is ill defined by the game proper, and selected by the various organizers/players. Edit: I think in tournament chess there is some ill defined rules around play behavior/distractions.
      - pixl97 3y ago

kryogen1c 3y ago

> That's because these things are not defined for us and are open to interpretation. This is actually a deep philosophical and practical issue called the frame problem. It is not tractable to define all the axioms and presuppositions for any given set of rules. That's why the American system has a legislature and separate interpretive body in the judiciary.

card_zero 3y ago
It's often useful to invoke the fictional "reasonable person".
- pixl97 3y ago
  And yet this falls strongly on cultural norms and leads to a great number of issues where cultures mix.

s1artibartfast 3y ago

My take is that most people cant resist the urge to assert what they think they rule should be, complicating the test. ambulances aren't allowed, but they shuld be. Drones are allowed, but they shouldnt be. I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair. I was surprised to see I got 100% agreement with the majority on each question. But I guess that means i would still disagree with most everyone on at least one question

cmaggiulli 3y ago
My 0.02 but the airspace above the park is not the park or else you could take that to a logical extreme. A park is the land/waterways within a geographical bounds with a specific designation. It does not include the air above the park which is why planes flying over your house are not trespassing
- ziml77 3y ago
  Planes flying over your house are not trespassing because they are far enough up that they are considered to be on public highway. If you hover a helicopter over my house and hang via a rope outside my bedroom window, you are absolutely trespassing even if you have not touched the building or the ground at any point. And going to logical extremes is always going to lead to absurdity. Let's go in the other direction. A hovercraft doesn't touch the ground, so would a reasonable person also consider that to not be on their property when it's powered on in their front yard?
- nradov 3y ago
  How about a hovercraft, which rides on an air cushion without actually touching the ground?
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair. And/or discomfort and/or lack of understanding that real-life rules aren't exhaustive - they're meant to encircle a range of situations, but their borders are necessarily fuzzy, and borderline cases are, by design, to be judged on by humans on a case-by-case basis.

jstummbillig 3y ago

> because they try to apply other rules that are not part of the game. And I suspect that most would disagree they do that (because most people would have a hard time thinking of themselves as rule violators) which would then lead to something like "the rule is stupid" or "this is pedantic". No Vehicles In The Park is super interesting.

deleted 3y ago

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thomastjeffery 3y ago

The struggle here is ambiguity. That's a hard problem for computing, but not a hard problem for people. An ambulance can simply break the rule, because human rule-makers are able to make exceptions. A lot of people are very excited about LLMs, because they can encounter ambiguity without halting. Unfortunately, what they can't do is resolve that ambiguity. We are still only able to compute context-free rules.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

Is a modern shoe a vehicle? It provides a spring bounce assist to motion. If it is not a vehicle, then why would a pair of roller skates or even a bicycle be one? I answered that the roller skates were not a vehicle, and though it took some longer thought answered the same about the bicycle and wheelchair. Mine was 70%.

brewdad 3y ago
My state has unambiguously defined bicycles as vehicles, perhaps to avoid exactly this question. It also avoids the need to rewrite the vehicle code to specifically include bicycles. There have been exceptions added to the vehicle code to allow bikes to do things or go places where other vehicles are forbidden but there was no need to rewrite the vehicle code to specifically require them to stop at red lights. They are vehicles, so must stop. In this game, in my state, bicycles would not be allowed unless the sign mentioned the law that allows them.

bigstrat2003 3y ago

> That doesn't mean the ambulance driver is in the wrong, though. There could be other rules that supersede that rule. We aren't told of any, though, and are simply asked about that one rule. Yeah, this was my thought exactly. Anyone who says an ambulance is allowed is not following the rules of the game, which say to only consider the "no vehicles in the park" rule. In a real scenario, there would of course be other rules (the WW2 tank would be there by permission of the park management, for example). But if you only consider the one rule (as you were told to) then the answers are imo quite straightforward. I agreed with 93% of people when I played the game, so it sure seems to me like there's broad agreement on this.

lr4444lr 3y ago

The game is a bait and switch. I followed the directions faithfully, and said that the ambulance was breaking the rule. But then it seemed to lower my score. Turns out I wasn't supposed to follow the rule, I was supposed to guess how others would follow the rule. That should have been clear from the instructions.

Feathercrown 3y ago
1. The majority said the ambulance was a vehicle, so agreeing with that wouldn't lower your score 2. It's an agreement score, not an achievement score. All it does is measure how many questions you agreed with the majority on. The score does not convey a value or judge your actions, it's just there to inform you how closely you align to others' answers.
grfhtsdfvv 3y ago
You did what you were supposed to do and demonstrated what you were supposed to demonstrate. The fact that you feel you did it wrong is just a bonus for the author (and spectators like me!)

danielscrubs 3y ago

”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. ” Is in the first screen. I got 100% because I assumed it was not written by a lawyer. Context matters.

mike_hock 3y ago

Played through it twice. Once judging whether the actions violated the letter of the rule, and once whether they violated the spirit of the rule. The first time every decision was hard and I felt like some contradicted my earlier decisions. The second time was considerably easier and I got a higher agreement score. I would have expected it to be easier to strictly apply a simple rule, but it turned out that interpreting the intent of the rule was less contentious and easier to apply. Ambulances in the park are not a violation, not on the grounds that some other rule overrides the no-vehicles rule, but that they don't violate the spirit of the rule.

andybak 3y ago

The article carefully analyzed the way in which people on HN oversimplified or misunderstood the challenge of "vehicle in the park". Whilst you can disagree with their counter arguments - at least engage with the counter arguments. This reads more like a response to the original post rather than a response to the this actual essay.

goodpoint 3y ago

Yes, the question is phrased poorly and people easily confuse "is an ambulance a vehicle" with "do you agree with banning emergency vehicles in parks". However if you look at the statistics you'll see a lot of people consider a boats, skateboards, sleds and even RC cars as vehicles.