And, yes, of course, moderation questions are much harder. At least with the vehicle thing people aren't usually aren't deliberately constructing tricky cases.

The fact that there's no clear consensus on most of the questions means they are ambiguous, no?

That also fits the English definition of a vehicle, which includes a bicycle.

except you have just applied an assumption (which is often true) that may not be true depending on circumstances - that the planes were excluded because it couldn't have caused any negative effect.

For example, if the park had been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese#Isolation_and_unco... , and the intention was to keep the indigenous peoples isolated.

But this isn't a part of the rule, and it is an interpretation of the rule by the administrator. A different administrator might interpret planes that fly higher than audible altitude would be OK, while another one might consider a visual detection altitude to be a violation. And another might consider no altitude to be permissible (because if they crashed right there, they'd be falling into the park).

That phrasing sure makes it sound like they're not in the park until they fall. Does it occur the moment they hit the ground, or sooner? If ground, then that tells us that the quadcopter isn't in the park while off the ground either; it's above the park.

In both law and real life, there is a common understanding (to use your term) that rules may be violated for the greater good. Does driving an ambulance into the park violate the letter of the rule? Yes, but it's still OK because we give emergency vehicles wide leeway to break rules so they can save lives. Judaism even encodes this in a general principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh

It's amazing how many people can't follow the instructions, without realising their proving the creators point. Even while arguing the creator is wrong!

This all ain’t easy.

But I don’t need to to allow ambulances. I think this is the core of what many engineers fundamentally don’t get about rules and laws in society?

The framing of the rules clearly places this rule firmly in the real world, in a real park.

I've heard it said that common sense is just what naive people assume is obvious.

I'm not sure about that but I do know that people often disagree on what is and isn't common sense.

I guess this is why English Common Law works. We use precedence to argue about how the words of the law should be interpreted and at least try to flush out ambiguity.

The instructions specifically say not to apply this kind of logic.

GGP made up the sign. The instructions describe a rule, not a sign.

If you think the emergency service vehicles violate the rule, how about a park maintenance vehicle or a park ranger vehicle? Would you say "no vehicles in the park" rule applies to them too, so they would be violating it?

Of all the forums for an insistence on rigidly, literally following rules to make people's heads explode, HN is not exactly the most surprising, but it is one of the funniest.

Well, no, people can just be wrong.

More surreal maybe it is above that cave in Lost and even an ISS or plane should not go over that location.

Intent is for the judges / lawyers.

I went with "yes, violation" with the understanding that it's one that would be allowed. Perhaps I was wrong to mix "would" and "should".

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.

I had my closest park in mind when answering. It has a river and multiple wooden bridges to access. Also, the ground floods sometimes in the winter and some paths are too soft for a car. No way an ambulance or firetruck is going to get in the park. They could try, but would loss more time than doing it on foot, or a bridge would collapse under their weight.

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-wilderness-tool/

You can pretend that's not the case all you want.

Thus IMO emergency vehicles violate the rule, although they should be allowed. Same thing IMO with the tank. Sure it's inoperable but it's a vehicle, in the park.

(IANAL, but have been driving emergency vehicles for 15 years).

And then asked questions like:

- Is a grilled cheese a sandwich?

- Is two pieces of bread with a third piece of bread in the middle a sandwich?

- Is a hotdog a sandwich?

- Is a taco a sandwich?

- Is a breadbowl a sandwich?

- Is a poptart a sandwich?

- Is a calzone a sandwich?

- Is a burrito a sandwich?

- Is a pizza folded in half a sandwich?

Having asked these questions to many folks over the years, I promise the answers are much more split.

If you don’t cut it, no.

If you cut it at the fold, yes.

Now what if the pizza crust is toasted enough that, while it was not your intent, it breaks evenly at the seam during the act of folding it in half, and then you proceed to collapse the two halves before taking a bite. Did you have a sandwich for lunch?

However, I wonder you you would reconcile an uncut, folded pizza not being a sandwich against a meatball marinara, which to my understanding is a single piece of sliced bread with meat and sauce in the middle. Is this not a sandwich?

Similarly, the list of berries is not the same as the list of fruit ending with "*berry".

Sandwiches have open sides

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_sandwich

Now, I wonder which specific items we agreed on, if any.

But I also want to say this is a really cool website. I love how he used this experience to set the table for what is otherwise essentially a blog post. Very cool.

But to hone in a bit more:

> It was about content moderation. Specifically, some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply.

His experiment not only doesn't prove this because of the observation you made (there is a clear majority opinion), but also because the "simple rules" people want ARE simple in contrast to the current standard of assuming you need to be a moral authority. The supposed simple rules aren't simple because they avoid controversy. They are simple because they don't avoid controversy. They are minimal. Basically just take the stuff virtually everyone agrees on, or is illegal/possibly illegal. Yes, there are gray areas there. There are always gray areas. But the gray areas surrounding "we need to shape productive discourse" is a lot more controversial than the gray areas surrounding "is this legal?" Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.

And before someone says "well if you have offensive content then advertisers will leave," I want to point out that is not a content moderation problem. That is an advertiser attraction problem. If the goal is advertiser attraction then we are playing a completely different game and you should remove everything that is remotely controversial. Or consider that your business model is inherently bad for speech.

Are you suggesting that section 230 is meant to discourage Internet intermediaries from moderation?

The original intent of this law was to stop requiring intermediaries to choose between adopting a passive conduit role and having legal responsibility for content. The legislators hoped that providing a general protection from liability for user-generated content would encourage more moderation by intermediaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...

That might not have been the most pro-speech policy option overall but it was notionally very pluralist (with different platforms potentially having very different standards, purposes, goals, rules, communities, etc.) and it did manage to temper the previous somewhat paradoxical incentives, as well as providing a lot of legal certainty to facilitate the creation of new platforms of various sizes and models.

Pretty much everyone on the Internet is frustrated by moderation and sees pathologies and biases of moderation, intermediaries putting their thumb on scales, and so on. On the other hand, what we haven't seen is the enormous volume of litigation against intermediaries that would occur without §230. I expect people would literally be suing Y Combinator over HN moderation decisions. I can think of HN moderation decisions that I really disagree with, but it's impossible for me to imagine that having had those turn into lawsuits would somehow have been better for anyone.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...

It fully agrees with the majority interpretation in all cases, which is not surprising. LLMs for machine moderation are probably rolling out very soon, I doubt Reddit and the like will even allow for human moderation in a few years (if prompt injection can be solved robustly enough).

The problem with having humans as rule breaking judges is that we all have our ever changing biases and motives. Most everyone has an experience with a power tripping mod deleting their post or comment because they had a bad day and needed to take out their anger on something. An LLM can parse these variable situations with ease and can also be tested for those biases. Since it'll never deviate from its training data it always acts as impartial as possible within the rules' limits.

You can't possibly be serious or be in good faith.

Giving AI the blanket ability to censor with no human controls will destroy us faster than giving AI the blanket ability to launch nukes with no human controls.

That is, unless the AI has already decided it's going to launch the nukes to save the world the second we give it the authority and it plans to lie and say yes when we make it pretty please pinky promise to not launch the nukes with the goal of destroying humanity.

It's much more convincing.

Only the car is forbidden and everything else goes.

When you do try to enforce rules literally, you end up with kids being expelled because they brought an action figure to school, or teenagers being executed because they fell into a flower bed.

And at least in the US generally you need to have been harmed, or be likely to be harmed by enforcement of a rule to even have standing to challenge it.

Obviously emergency vehicles are going to do what they need to do, but if even they are allowed to break the rule they are still breaking the rule.

I also think a park sign that says no vehicles also applies to bicycles and skateboards.

Vehicle (noun)

1. a means of carrying or transporting something

...such as

... a: motor vehicle

... b: a piece of mechanized equipment

2 : an agent of transmission : carrier

3: a medium through which something is expressed, achieved, or displayed

----------------

You're thinking of specifically a __motorized__ vehicle. Which is a different thing than "vehicle". I think you'll agree that a bicycle and skateboard carry people and transport them. This is the same reason a wagon violates the rule. Almost everything on there was a vehicle. I think the only ambiguous ones are paper airplane, matchbox car, toy boat, and kite and I said those weren't because they can't transport things and are not motorized. But hey, technically they can be a medium through which someone expresses their joy.

No painting or dancing in the park.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vehicle

The entire world agrees bicycles are vehicles and it's encoded in the law almost everywhere. This is no true Scotsman, sure, but IMO if you're trying to argue a bicycle is NOT a vehicle you're only doing it to argue and flex your vast knowledge of the English dictionary to randoms on the internet. It's a completely unreasonable position to hold.

Many roads nowadays have a "one way only - bicycles excepted" to indicate the road is a one way road but bicycles are an exception to the rule and there's a contraflow bike lane. Most parks that have a no vehicles allowed sign is likely to have a bicycle excepted sign underneath.

Bicycles are vehicles and there is no ackshully that will change that. If you're trying to win an argument with the technicality that everyone would ignore a "no vehicles" sign on a bike that isn't an argument that disproves a bike is a vehicle. All it shows is that a bike is a special vehicle with special rules and exemptions to "no vehicle" signs.

There is no pedantry in calling a bicycle a vehicle. It's obviously a vehicle - it's entire purpose is to be a lightly-mechanized means of transit! Now if we see a sign in a park that says "no vehicles" many people - using our cultural knowledge and context - will interpret the intent of the sign as a reference to "[motorized] vehicles".

Those people are wrong. It's as simple as that. In the eyes of the law bikes are vehicles nearly everywhere. It's settled and not up for debate or discussion.

I believe the entire point of the exercise is to demonstrate people will argue that the sky isn't blue.

I think the point of the game is to demonstrate there are some people who will argue the sky isn't blue. That is one thing we should all be able to agree on but if you were to pose that question to the internet you'd definitely get "I'm colorblind and what you call blue I call green ergo the sky is not blue".

Those people aren't worth your time and will disagree just for the sake of disagreeing and getting a rise out of people. I'll admit I'm guilty of doing the same in some circumstances.

Really what surprises me is how few people seem to understand that language is incredibly fuzzy. That there's an imperfect encoder (language) and decoder (listening/reading) system. That people are working off of different priors that bias these systems. That we aren't perfectly aligning the intent of our messages with the reception of them. That this system becomes even more fuzzy as the audience increases (increased variance in priors). It is a bit more surprising to me that in a community full of nerds where we communicate online, where we're exposed to many priors, that this is still a relatively unknown phenomena despite it being fairly easy to conclude simply through experience (besides also being fairly well discussed). I for one think the fuzziness of language is incredibly cool.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36456951

> 3. a medium through which something is expressed, achieved, or displayed

"Carrier" is also a very broad term, no human carrying anything is allowed in the park then.

We can think of communication as having 3 main components. 1) the intended concept being intended to convey. This is in the person's head. 2) The fuzzy compression mode (language) that is used to convey said thought. Be that words, writing, or interpretive dance. 3) The fuzzy decoder that turns the language into a thought in another being's head. This is filled with priors and assumptions that fill in many of the gaps.

The thing about this is that we usually learn to speak in pretty localized groups, meaning that our priors align and we have a lot of good faith (attempting to interpret intent rather than interpreting the words). But with a larger audience we have higher variance that makes what is obvious a priori a disastrous outcome. "Everybody knows" is not something everyone knows. https://xkcd.com/1053/

But in many many jurisdiction bicycles is explicitly a vehicle. One that people over certain age cannot drive on sidewalks and must use road. Or designated ways. Ofc, it is also banned in some places.

Also it sometimes acts unlike pedestrian like having to yield to cars when crossing safety crossings.

The first excludes pedal cycles.

This is exactly right, I think, and in fact those who are focusing on the "intent" of the rule or on whether a violation of the rule is justified seem to have missed the clear wording of the instructions:

> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).

So the only questions that ever enter into it are (a) is this object a vehicle?, and (b) is the object in the park?

> a park sign that says no vehicles also applies to bicycles and skateboards.

Interesting, my dividing line was that a bike is a vehicle but a wagon, rowboat, or skateboard are not. The majority seems to think both a bicycle and a memorial tank (??!) are not vehicles under the rule.

However, the tank was not functional. Since it cannot convey it is therefore not a conveyance and therefore not a vehicle. It’s only shaped like a familiar one.

I matched the majority only 11% of the time.

The scenario said tank. A tank is a vehicle. No vehicles in the park.

Edit: I matched 11% as well!

In my view no matter what the tank originally was, it ceases to be a vehicle when it can no longer act as a conveyance. A tank (and any vehicle) is not just a form, but a function. Is a car with no motor, no tires, no transmission a vehicle? I do not believe so, because it cannot and lacks the possibility of moving without a substantial transformation.

As I said, if the thing can (i.e., without significant, non-trivial alterations to its current form) act as conveyance then it is a vehicle. It need not be in the act of conveyance, nor must it have an independent means of propulsion.

Edit: my simple rule breaks down when thinking about a flat piece of wood attached to rope. My mind says that's only a vehicle if someone chooses to use it as such for pulling objects or people. I'll leave the search for a universal maxim to others, it seems.

If transporting oneself counts, are all the people in the park vehicles? And all other animals, down to the microorganisms, that are capable of self-transport?

Or I suppose even in the case of transporting other things, people would count as vehicles if they are carrying anything or wearing clothes?

If it's typically not human powered, a human typically rides it, it's typically heavy, and typically accelerates enough to seriously injure another person with minimal damage to yourself it's a vehicle. That's why skateboards and horses aren't vehicles but the bike and toy car was. Even the bike is dicey but it's fairly unanimous throughout the world that a bike is a vehicle.

Users of parks generally know there will be varying usage rules for the park based on the park. But generally speaking, things that will destroy the "natural perserved" aspects, things that will disrupt other people using the park, aren't allowed.

And, like moderation, if you don't understand the context of what a park is in society, you should either go there with someone that does, ask the authorities in charge of the park, or DON'T GO.

So the answer to the question is "what activities are supported by the park, do you know other people that use those implements there without controversy".

You socially interact to know. If it is a grey area, ask either someone that may know, or the authorities.

This isn't Zeno's paradoxes. You aren't asking if the vehicle is every technically being used at the park because the atoms are repelled by the electromagnetic force and things never actually touch each other.

It isn't something that needs to be solved philosophically. There are people with authoritative knowledge, and you ask them the questions, and they give a "yes or no". And you either obey their judgement, or you break the rules.

If the AI (because this HAS to be about AI, why else is this dribble here) can't understand the context, it won't effectively moderate.

Given that there have been many cases of lawmakers not understanding the impact of their own laws. Contracts unraveled by punctuation errors, complex interactions between rules, people managing parks often not being the same as people writing the rules, ... . I find this claim to be completely removed from reality.

That is divorced from reality?

Do you NEVER ask people that "know things" a question? Or do you just trust ChatGPT for everything?

You have a "park". You have a rule about "no vehicles in park".

If you have been to enough parks, you know that they generally will entail some sort of separation of nature from the more general technological society around it, and certainly from one of the major aspects of that technological society, big ass heavy noisy smelly destructive annoying vehicles.

You will also know that parks are managed and funded by some authority, who may have necessity to enter and maintain them with "vehicles" that they know and are trained to operate and use properly in the park, likewise with emergency services and their vehicles.

So let's look at content moderation in this standpoint. Almost always, content moderation is within a context of a forum, where there is a subject matter and a set of germane topics. The subject matter often has implicit constraints, a lot like a park.

The other interesting thing about a park is that you arrive at one, and you can generally tell what is acceptable behavior in a park without the rules by observing what other people are doing, and "conforming" to that behavior. And if you don't know, you ask people around you and they will tell you yes/no/dunno and whether they are knowledgeable.

I can see a forum or subreddit kind of the same.

If a person was going to the park asking these questions, the actual answer after about four or five questions is "you probably shouldn't go to a park, or do whatever it is you want to do there, because you don't understand parks very well"

Similarly for something that is content moderated, after about four or five questions that clearly show you don't understand the subject matter of the forum or how to interact with other people involved in the subject matter, the answer is "you shouldn't post or say anything in that forum".

The ACTUAL corner cases in this are "well, can I take an electric bike into the park?" "Can my personal dog-robot follow me into the park?" "can I ride my electric blade scooter in the park?" "Okay, how BIG of an e-bike can I bring in?" "Is the no-vehicle policy about loud dirty ICE engines, or is it mostly about size?" because electric vehicles will ACTUALLY stress that stuff out.

Bikes, kites, monuments, Radio Flyers, etc. do not violate the intent. A tank is clearly a vehicle but doesn't violate the intent because it does not interfere with people enjoying the park. And rules do not apply to on-duty emergency vehicles.

Clearly not everybody thinks about the intent, and many people focus on discussing the nitpicking corner cases of the rules, or thinking about the definition of a vehicle or "being in the park" (see also "what is a sandwich"). That's okay, and that proves the author's point that moderation is not a mathematical problem with a single formally provable solution.

Chicago Lakefront.

You're creating a hard and fast rule that X group should always be allowed, the parent was saying all groups should behave reasonably towards each other.

I think the parents view is more reasonable. You could still take the view that bikes will always be dangerous to children, at that point you can then decide whether to prioritise children or bikes.

if you got kids at the park, you'd imagine bikes as being a nuisance. If you're the one riding the bike, you'd imagine the park is meant for you to enjoy and thus the boke isnt a nuisance.

This is exactly the point being made by the questionaire!

Bikes riding fast in parks and murdering children does not happen anywhere at any significant scale. It's a made up fear, just like the "stranger danger" of the past.

Anger at cyclists for driving fast and breaking laws is an emotional response to feeling jealous that bikes are zipping past them while they're sitting there waiting in traffic for 10 minutes at a red light.

How often do you see motorists get pissed off and honk at other motorists running a red or yellow on a left hand turn? They want people to break the law in that instance but will honk at cyclists for the most minor of transgressions. That's all they proof I need to conclude motorists don't give a shit about the law or safety (the classic I just want cyclists to follow the law because if they don't I can hurt them and I'll have to live with a guilty conscience! defense) and care more about reducing their travel times.

For my decisions, the assumed intent of the rule was slightly different than yours: no potentially fast-moving objects that might cause severe accidents.

So: no cars, no bikes, no skateboards. RC toy cars with low mass are okay. Rowing boats are not okay because they might harm swimming people. The surfboard on the beach is okay because it is not moving fast within the park. Etc.

And we're showing why the author is correct: because a lot of people jump to conclusions, hold fast to their assumptions, and assume everyone else thinks like them; even after having had it all clearly explained with a maximum effor interactive game, and even in the face of abundant direct evidence to the contrary.

And what if the fire marshal is visiting the park to evaluate the maximum occupancy of the office — can they drive their official vehicle into the park for that?

> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).

>> 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__).

Seems like they did

But the park is somewhere on Earth, right? And the sign is written in English for humans to read and understand. Ignoring my personal locality/jurisdiction doesn't change this.

>> Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden.

This one felt irrelevant to me.

>> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (__not whether the violation should be allowed__).

This tells me that my job is to determine whether the rule allows skateboards and not whether the rule should allow skateboards. This does not instruct me to be ridiculously literal.

No, it explicitly says your job is to determine if the rule is violated.

It gives you specific examples of where one might impart their personal bias and then says "don't do that." The you impart your bias. You'll notice that there is absolutely nowhere that it says "use your own definition of 'vehicle'" nor does it say "follow the spirit of the law, not the letter."

While I agree with you in principle, that's not what the game asked. But the fact that we disagree is exactly the point of the game. Fwiw, I agree with your definition in practice, but disagree that that's what the rules of the game were. The author was specifically careful to not be extremely explicit because that's what makes the point: that we disagree.

> The author was specifically careful to not be extremely explicit because that's what makes the point: that we disagree.

I don't think the author intended for so much confusion at this meta-level that our disagreement is occurring at. If they did, then the content moderation analogy becomes totally unjustified. The author's point was (or should have been) that we could all play the game my way and still disagree - that is what is interesting.

Our disagreement feels more like how people get stuck arguing about the Monty Hall problem, not noticing they are using subtly different assumptions. But that kind of disagreement has little to do content moderation as far as I can tell.

I'm pretty surprised that you thought it was so black-and-white to allow things like emergency vehicles - a lot of places ban emergency vehicles (and they follow that rule) because they are too dangerous for those vehicles to enter. Personally, I assumed that might be the case given that the sign said no vehicles at all.

Also, the Monty Hall problem is not ambiguous at all. The clear answer is to switch doors thanks to how conditional probability works. The paradox is why people stick to their chosen door, and it is a weird psychology problem, but they are objectively wrong.

Yeah, this is what I saw the intent as. Author knew some people would interpret their words very carefully, being explicit to follow "the letter" (as is explicitly asked). But recognized that a large number of people wouldn't do this and let their own biases sink in. Then a meta conversation would start. Really all the gamble depends on is having a sufficiently large sample size. Even better if differing native languages. The "gotcha" people (like the shoes person), the dogmatic "obvious" people, and the "well in the real world" people even add to the chaos that illustrates the author's point: absolute precision in language (including interpretation) is impossible. Communication is inherently a fuzzy process. To me it is often striking that people don't recognize language as fuzzy.

I didn't think that. I thought that the emergency vehicle one was a good question in which the resulting disagreement supports the author's point. The point being that content moderation involves shades of gray that two content moderators might reasonably disagree on.

But other questions (the wheelchair, toy cars, the ISS) are bad examples in which any disagreement demonstrates an implausible level of communication breakdown. An analogous situation would be a content moderator who painstakingly considers the letter of the law to determine whether time dilation opens a loophole in the "no child porn" rule - if the employer and the content moderator are acting in good faith, I cannot imagine this happening.

I would suggest you consider rules like "no racial/gendered slurs," which itself has caused a stir on Twitter recently when Elon Musk decided that "cisgender" was a slur. Most tweets that use the word "cisgender" to describe someone do so in a very negative light, often labeling them as "cisgender" with the implication that they are privileged, bigoted, and out of touch, but does that mean that the word "cisgender" rises to the level of a slur?

On the other hand, I believe that this was exactly their goal and were quite clear about it.

> If they did, then the content moderation analogy becomes totally unjustified. The author's point was (or should have been) that we could all play the game my way and still disagree - that is what is interesting.

The point is that everyone has a different set of internal rules and defining those explicitly is incredibly difficult. I really do feel like they are quite clear on this, especially with their distinction from the other game.

> Our disagreement feels more like how people get stuck arguing about the Monty Hall problem, not noticing they are using subtly different assumptions.

I'm curious how you 1) see this differently than what was intended and 2) how you think this doesn't happen in moderation (or politics)

I think your response to this exercise actually proves the author's point. I see people disagreeing with your take in the comments or making (to their perspective) reasonable arguments in favor of their choices.

Whether you found it personally "crystal-clear" to answer the way you did says more about your personal confidence and way of understanding rules than about the task itself being unambiguous.

Cue ambulance crashing through a wooden bridge over a river because it was never intended to carry the weight, or getting stuck in a tunnel, driving over pedestrians that can't get out of the way because there is no space left, ... . Blindly ignoring a rule because you can is not always a good idea. You might be able to ignore the rule, but you can't ignore the reason why it was put in place.

The rule is "no adult content"

1 A scholar is discussing their recently published contribution

2 as a professional sexologist

3 whose area of study is pornography

4 Ancient pornography

5 And how it relates to modern styles

6 of fiction literature and paintings

7 by quoting seedy passages of ancient erotic literate

8 written in ancient Sumerian

Etc... With every sentence fragment of increasing context you can get people changing their minds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7osb78oZ9Z4

I answered that the police and ambulances were obviously breaking the rules, because they are. The difference is that ambulances/police are allowed to break the rules in an emergency - famously, ambulances have a legal right to speed and run red lights in an emergency, and cops obviously have a right to trespass.

This of course is a paradox, as a rule is something that you are forbidden from doing, and being allowed to break the rule means you're allowed to do something you're forbidden from doing, which when interpreted literally is an oxymoron.

The obvious explanation is that the cops/ambulances have a set of rules that take priority over the park's rules , and some rules are more important than others.

In fact, it sort of seems like this sentence should wreck the effort to demonstrate the difficulty of content moderation. I would think that a significant amount of the difficulty comes from instances where moderators feel that interactions between different rules mean they should allow violations of particular rules in certain situations.

In any case, the question of whether the rule was violated is entirely separate from the question of what, if anything, the consequences of this should be; and it is the former that I understood the game to be asking.

The fact that there is so much debate over the question of what the game was even asking the player to do, with both sides convinced that their interpretation is the obvious correct one, does as much to support the thesis that people have an enormous amount of trouble agreeing on the intent of a simple short piece of text as the rest of the game itself.

I assume you are referring to traffic laws that are enforced by cameras. Is that correct?

Where do you live?

(driving a tank through the park)

When I read "obviously" in your parent comment, I though: well, not so obvious. We don't know why the vehicles are banned from this park (extreme cases: there are vehicle mines remains from a war that explodes under big weights. Park is built so ir can't stand so much weight and big vehicles would get trapped), so maybe police and ambulances must proceed on foot for the last hundred meters.

I think the ambiguity here is not what the rule means, but what "breaking the rules" means.

IMHO it should have been phrased as "would you refuse entry to" i.e. whether you would enforce action based on the rule.

If you would not bar entry to emergency vehicles, that would be the same as what others mean by "not breaking the rules" i.e. it is implicitly allowed.

> Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park." Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.

Violation of a rule is a logical operation. It's the answer that comes before the ", but ..." part. Things you explicitly don't have to do in the context of this game:

- You don't have to like the rule - You don't have to consider exemptions (because that's not what the rule asks for)

You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated. I think it's absolutely fascinating that this is so controversial and a testament to the authors game design.

When you face this sort of thing in philosophy, the clarifying step is to move past language and look at behaviour which would be the enforcement.

> You just need to answer, if the rule has been violated

You can't dismiss ambiguity with a "you just need to"!

In conventional language we get the ambiguity expressed as distinctions like "technically you have a broken a rule but..." i.e. there are "technical" interpretations of rules that specific/pedantic/unrealistic that in practice are not what is meant or enforced.

I expect there will be a desire here to over value "technical" interpretations as if they were more accurate having stripped cultural conventions and such but that is a means to misinterpret language not find truth.

Rules can absolutely prevent you from saving a life, for example a rule preventing rescue workers from entering a dangerous area like a cave until conditions improve. Or a police no chase rule.

> You can't dismiss ambiguity with a "you just need to"!

Granted, ambiguity is built into language – for example, what exactly is a vehicle seems to not be conclusively answered for every edge case, and I would allow for the confusion around that – but if you are creating additional ambiguity by overloading the task you have been given and adding "technical" distinctions and "implicit" rules, you are not primarily solving the task, which is explaining if the proposed rule has been violated.

You can of course chose to not judge if the rule has been violated in favor of something else you think more interesting. Then you are playing a different game.

Interpretation is a tough one. Something might be technical or implicit to me. It might not be technical or implicit to you. Or vice versa. Mostly, on most things, we might agree – but if we do it this way, there are bound to be cases, where we don't, which is precisely the dilemma the creator of the experiment is talking to.

When interpreting laws, there is often a concept of the "Reasonable person" standard. The "Reasonable Person" understands that parks banning vehicles is not to stop EMTs. How you are acting in the "real world scenario" is reasonable and what is assumed in the drafting of laws.

You might claim this game is excluding such a concept as being a "local rule" but maybe that can be called... unreasonable :)

The logical exercise is extremely close (by design) to one that commonly occurs in everyday life. In real life people want to bend the rules to achieve a certain outcome when applying them. They don't want to say "well a rule was violated but I'm exercising discretion". That's on full display here even though no meaningful outcome is actually being determined in this case.

In psychology, different comprehension of what rules mean is a fundamental difference between personality types. It might better to accept that different people understand the world differently instead of sorting them into right and wrong by your own biases.

> They don't want to say "well a rule was violated but I'm exercising discretion"

From the other perspective, hyper-rationality is a dysfunction where excess analytical/logic/precision prevents an individual from understanding what language means or how to act in the real world. To believe a rule is violated "because of logic" instead of trying to understand intent would be an example of that.

You're swinging right back to the context and meaning of the rules that were presented during the assigned task. What I wrote isn't really about that. It's about the assigned task itself and the self assessment of whether or not it was completed faithfully. That's where the cognitive bias becomes plainly observable.

There are the rules presented during the task. Separately there are the instructions given for the task itself. To me it feels a bit like a failure to reason with layers of abstraction. Almost an inability of most people to reason about and interpret the rules differently in different contexts. They're stuck in the "real world" context and can't seem to switch to the "hypothetical framework" context laid out in the instructions.

> From the other perspective, hyper-rationality is a dysfunction ...

When obstinately adhered to in a general context, certainly. This was not a general context. It was an exercise with specific and reasonably unambiguous instructions. Openly deviating from them would be quite different than what can be observed in this comment section - deviating while claiming to have followed them.

On any other website I would be inclined to assume a certain lack of literacy or comprehension. Not so with this audience.

I prefer the following quote as an explanation: "There are no rules, only consequences." There are no consequences for an ambulance entering the park because everyone agrees it is right that it should do so.

So yeah, an ambulance speeding to save a life is breaking the traffic laws, but they are allowed to.

Interestingly, if the ban of vehicles in the park had an additional reason - like a safety concern of unstable collapsing ground - an emergency vehicle in the park would be barred from invoking their special rights to be there, because then the driver would endanger bystanders without good reason.

Pretty sure that's because people need time to notice the siren and take appropriate action, not because of some rule

And that's why there is a rule for drivers of emergency vehicles to sound the siren for at least 2 to 3 seconds when approaching an intersection with an intent to disregard other peoples right of way. The rule for normal traffic partakers is very much "If it flashes blue and has music, get the hell out of the way as fast as you can without endangering yourself"

This rule in turn is in contrast with the overall suggestion to keep siren usage low, because it's loud, disturbing for bystanders and not great for the hearing of the people inside the car.

I think this is just a way of saying that they are not breaking the rule, simply because the rule doesn't apply to them.

So the rules still apply to them, they just won't be pursued on theoretical grounds (getting fined/arrested sheerly because of the infraction, without any other consequences)

That’s not so clear IMO. It depends on the severity and urgency of the accident, and whether there is a really prohibitive issue that entirely prevents heavy vehicles from entering, like quicksand or muddy ground that will get an EMT stuck.

By "doing their jobs", you presumably mean "responding to an emergency call", right? Because, e.g., cops in normal transit from A to B are "doing their jobs" but letting them drive through a "no vehicles allowed" park in that instance is probably bad. Or if they're on a high-speed chase - definitely "doing their jobs" but not something you'd want to happen through a park.

> an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow

You've amply demonstrated this by creating a huge muddy mess around "emergency services doing their jobs".

Now you're assuming the intent.

The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle driving there could cause a landslide that topples the vehicle over the cliff and could kill anyone on the beach below. No vehicles in the park.

But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them. If you're the park ranger and the local police come into the park in their car chasing after some criminals, and the local police are your buddies, you say they haven't violated the rule because the intent isn't to apply to emergency vehicles. If the exact same thing happens but you're having a dispute with the local police, now they're violating the rule and you can come up with something like the park isn't in their jurisdiction.

It's the same rule. It's the same action. The only difference is if you like them or not. And that's the problem.

It doesn't matter, the rules on police and emergency vehicles usually supersede some local rule about a park.

The park is not some absolute ruler of the land, sure it can put rules for general/everyday use but a lot of things are rules at higher levels

The intent of the experiment is to get your view on whether X is a vehicle or not, and whether Y counts as a place "in the park" or not.

aka, there's some other rule that isn't listed then?

Which isn't what is being discussed here.

Nobody said it was a local rule. It could be a federal rule about a federal park. And it could be there for a more important reason than keeping ATVs off the hiking trails.

That's true but without assuming intent you end up blindly following rules.

Something struck me when first moved to UK from Turkey: Every rule in UK seemed to have an intent and that's why I think Turkey is full of rules which no one follows but in UK the rules are less numerous but followed. In Turkey, Turks like to think that the rules are not followed because the fines are too small or that the government is incompetent and can't enforce the fines. I disagree, I think Turkey is a chaotic society because rules are not built around intent. Did you know that up until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures?

For the first few months until I got my white collar job, I did some part time jobs in London as a waiter etc. and worked at some high end venues and hotels. In these places there are some equipments(like climate control of the wine cellar) which are operated through control panels which are accessible to everyone and they didn't put signs that say "don't touch", instead the signs said "you have no reason to touch this". They were able to keep curious hands away from buttons that shouldn't be pushed by those who don't know what they are doing by simply emphasising the intent.

Intent is extremely important, in fact everything is about intent. Every human action is with an intent. Great UX is built by designing around intent.

Guidelines are suggestions. They're all about intent. "Don't have live music after midnight" isn't a ridiculous guideline for COVID, because it usually implies a gathering. It is a ridiculous rule because rules have to be rigid and well defined, because rules are enforced. Squishy rules aren't rules, they're covert dictatorial powers.

Anyway, what's the difference between a rule and a guideline? Is a red light a rule or guide? IMHO Guideline is a literature, rules are arrangements with an intent(i.e. let's agree to stop on red light with the intent of organising the flow so we don't crash into each other).

Guideline: don't bother neighbours after 20:00

Rule: Loud noises not allowed after 20:00

If you make sure to steer clear from guideline ("hey neighbour, we want to have a party, will it be okay if we be loud till 00:00","thanks"), the rules will not need to be enforced (neighbour calling the police to complain)

A more rigid definition serves to protect you, not just your neighbour.

Much better than a guideline in my opinion.

Status quo is much simpler - it's banned but if neighbours all agree have a late party and police aren't called

How is that any different to what I just wrote? In your own example, the "What's the radius" and "How do you confirm all have agreed" is no different either.

Live music doesn't / didn't attract more people in closer proximity than areas with no live music? Did everyone still go to the same place and sat there in silence? That sounds very unlikely, but I have never been to Turkey.

>It made no sense in the context of Covid, it made sense in the context of islamist trying to destroy the non-islamists.

This is tied to the above, but who made the consensus that this was the point of the rule? Without a source of the consensus and to someone who have never been there it flies in the face of logic. Surely fewer people would go to, say, a British park Saturday evening if there's no music event there than if there is a band playing. Without some context, it reads to me like this post is anti-islamist and bashing Turkey for a rule that seem to have been enforced in one way or another in most of the west under COVID. As far as I know, every festival was shut down and events with music or other entertainment had to jump through lots of hoops or be shutdown too. How is this rule different?

The virus doesn’t care when the gathering is happening.

So why would you forbid live music, or gatherings, but only after midnight?!

But as a guideline you could say if it's after midnight it's probably a party. And if it's not you let people use their judgment, because guidelines are suggestions enforced via social pressure, not via official penalties.

If you forbid parties after midnight, people will party before midnight (have you been to London?).

If you forbid parties, people will still gather ("you're seriously calling our chess playing night a party?!").

If you want to forbid people gathering, forbid people gathering.

Ban on gatherings were introduced for short periods at the hight of the pandemic, the music ban was a separate one which lasted up until days ago.

All other kind of gatherings were allowed. They even held a large religious gathering , bringing people from all around the to the conversion of the Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque since it was also a political event(They were promising to turn it into a mosque since years, apparently an important thing for the devout muslims). This was between the first wave which claimed the lives of 50K and the 3rd wave which killed that many more.

So, great point.

I guess the only problem on the internet is it is very hard to determine intent, see Poe's law.

He describes what he calls uncertainty avoidance cultures that try to reduce uncertainty by making lots of rules. These end up being impossible to follow, so it's generally expected that you don't. He contrasts this with cultures that are low on uncertainty avoidance that have fewer rules, but on the other hand it's expected that they are followed.

This is probably to some degree a caricature.

How do they explain Germany though?

But it wasn't just that he mentioned it. It was the way he mentioned it. That the only possible reason for us to not be following the rules was that we must not know them.

There is a section of Europe where following the rules is what you do (to be clear it's not just Germany[0]). It's assumed that you're going to follow the rules. Adults don't need to be policed in this way. The rules are there for a reason (second order thinking).

Then there are large parts of Europe where there are rules but if they're not enforced then people will by and large not obey them. See, for example, the UK putting in smart motorways (aka, average speed cameras), because before that people would fly up the motor way well above the speed limit.

The Autobahn might have areas with no speed limit, but on the sections that HAVE speed limits you'd be hard pressed to find someone breaking those limits.

I grew up in Australia where it's somewhere between the two. The enforcement of the rules is strict. I once got a jaywalking ticket for crossing an empty road in Melbourne (long story, but it's also one of my stupider moments because it wasn't like the police were behind a bush, they hopped off the same tram I did).

I haven't had a speeding or parking ticket since I left Australia.

Though, circling back to my Stuttgart story, if someone approached you about rule breaking in Australia you can almost guarantee that you'd have pissed them off to the point it would not have been polite. In Paris, as well, I have been yelled at (in French) for dog poop on a sidewalk that wasn't even my dogs -- yes, I do always pick up after my dog.

[0]: Even within Germany I'm sure there are variations on this.

This is made possible by the fact that cars (try to) follow traffic rules to the letter.

(Essentially every car driver in the Netherlands is also a cyclist at other times)

Morons exist :-(

The rule says they should be on the leash.

Nobody follows it.

My lack of German may well have changed the interaction I mentioned.

Just for the record, I am not part of the dog owners group :) I don't think it's nice to let a dog roam in the park, kids get scared, and things can go wrong.

1. Ein Bier bitte

2. Noch ein Bier bitte

3. Wo ist der W.C.

Does make it hard to get practice though.

Due to the internet, I encounter a lot more German than I used to. For example, Netflix runs a lot of movies Auf Deutsch, and I try to figure out what they're saying.

Because UK people generally don't care about breaking the rules of no-BBQ in the park. What happens though when someone jumps a queue?

Mask mandates are an extremely unskilled method of encouraging a behaviour.

The mandate resulted in many people putting any old piece of cloth over their faces.

Mask mandates enabled the topic to become a political issue.

Therefore, the refusal of many to comply is the more correct decisions.

Stupid rules should be broken, and the rule makers ridiculed and removed from office.

If your response to a crisis to become a tyrant, you are not fit to lead.

Not where I live.

> The mandate resulted in many people putting any old piece of cloth over their faces.

Not where I live.

> Mask mandates enabled the topic to become a political issue.

Not where I live.

> Therefore, the refusal of many to comply is the more correct decisions.

No, it's actually, how did you put it?, “an extremely unskilled” response.

> Stupid rules should be broken

Agreed, but a rule isn't automatically stupid just because you don't like it.

Nobody said anything in German though. A German man said something in English. From what I can tell, you've got speaking english in your skill set.

I heard lead quite a bit from trainers, and assume their choice in nomenclature is part of the general positive reinforcement nature of modern dog training.

From my own short stint in Germany, n=1, the rules often did tend to make sense, so it actually seemed like a good idea to follow them.

(I've also had friends complain that Germany wasn't actually as tidy or rules based as they were lead to believe. So take with a grain of salt!)

Right but overly generic rules make that worse. And overly specific make a lot of work and allow stuff to still go thru cracks. It's hard problem to make following rules with intent but without rule-enforcers using it for their own whims

> Something struck me when first moved to UK from Turkey: Every rule in UK seemed to have an intent and that's why I think Turkey is full of rules which no one follows but in UK the rules are less numerous but followed. In Turkey, Turks like to think that the rules are not followed because the fines are too small or that the government is incompetent and can't enforce the fines. I disagree, I think Turkey is a chaotic society because rules are not built around intent. Did you know that up until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures

If the culture of the country teaches you to follow the rules, people follow the rules

If the culture of the country teaches you rules are annoyance to go around or bribe around, well that happens.

I live in post soviet country (Poland) and got on the end of the slow and painful transformation from the latter to the former. For example ~15 years ago it was common knowledge that you need to bribe examiner if you want to pass driving license the first time. At the time it was somewhat probable, I passed at 3rd time with 2nd time failure being my arrogance but 1st being something absolutely minor that could be summed up as "I looked at right mirror with my eyes instead of theatrically moving my head right to signal to examiner I really looked at right side'.

And my step-mother, which is a terrible driver did pass via bribe at around same time.

Similar thing happens with MOT tests, usually bribed to ignore lack of working cat.

And the single out cases of bribing still happened, just government invested a lot of effort to fight it so it is no longer "the norm" accepted by the people as the way to live. Which on top of being a lot of effort takes generational change to really root in, back in my parent's young days you couldn't even have a car if you weren't either well connected (grandpa had Wartburg with sunroof option purely because he was in military and won few contests) or bribed the right people.

The Wikipedia article is a little bit light on the bribery aspect, but there seems to have been considerable efforts made before 2012. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Poland

I grew up in America which is fairly rule-obeying. Lived in Australia and New Zealand which are disgustingly, obsequiously devoted to following tiny guidelines. Spent a few weeks in Munich where I was shouted at for crossing a totally empty street against a crosswalk light.

On the plus side, I lived in Argentina and Spain for a long time where basically there is no enforcement of anything.

I will say I am proud of people there (in the Latin world) for being humans. mostly ... usually... trying not to make dumb decisions, but... well, having to make decisions, and making them. You see if you live in England or the US or Commonwealth for awhile, people have forgotten how to make any decisions if there isn't a rule for it.

And yet the freest society I ever lived in, judged on the day to day freedom of individuals violating petty laws, was Vietnam. At the same time, it was the most totalitarian place I ever lived as far as what information you could access or what you could say. Still, if you wanted to drive the wrong way down a highway with an child on the back of your motorcycle, you can do that in Vietnam.

Personally I don't like the UK / Australia model where everyone obeys some stupid rule written on the wall over their own intelligence. Of course, I also don't love the Argentinian model where everyone thinks they're smart enough to bang on the button that says "don't touch". Also, it's not cool to wantonly endanger your child while being terrified of mentioning the name of the dictator. But I am a fan of man... and I would definitely take the Turkish way of shrugging off rules when they don't suit you over the British way of following them to the point of worship.

I think I was going to get to some great conclusion here, but I don't have one.

I like when no one is watching me, but I also like when someone is watching other people.

[edit] my conclusion! privacy and freedom come at the cost of people ignoring rules. People from rule-bound countries experience a burst of freedom when going somewhere that lives as people live, not by the rule-book. People from "chaotic societies" as you said, who have a mind for all the corruption they see around them, find some relief in escaping to ordered societies. Neither is good or bad, they are both modes of existence; both modes are necessary. If either were to disappear, we would have far too much chaos or far too much order, and no one would be able to escape to where they belong.

I don't understand this. I live near Munich, people cross against a red light all the time. Maybe you were doing it near children? That's a real social faux-pas, because they're not supposed to normalize jaywalking.

Here is an incident that happened the second day I got to Vietnam (long before I was ever in Germany). My girlfriend was really sick in the hotel. I was vomiting too, but I went out to find medicine. I got to the corner of a huge boulevard, maybe 8 lanes wide. There was a pharmacy on the other side. But the traffic never stopped when the light turned red. On and on the traffic just kept going, weaving around all the other cars on the cross-street. The boulevard was maybe 1 meter below the level of the sidewalk. I stood there for 5 minutes waiting for some time to step into the street.

Finally, a 6-year-old boy walked up alone, paused next to me, and started crossing the boulevard in the middle of the traffic. And all the cars and motorcycles just went around him.

I was like, well fuck, if that kid can do it then I can do it...

So what value are you teaching children? How to cross a street or how to follow orders? Crossing a street when it's possible may be illegal but it's not immoral. The idea that neglecting formalities leads to immorality can only be true if the morality isn't implanted. Worse, it implies that formalities are the only thing that holds back man's immoral nature... which should not be the lesson. If a man jaywalks, it doesn't make him more liable to commit other criminal acts.

What value are you teaching children by not swearing in front of them? Why is making certain sounds with your mouth immoral? Isn't it just showing your are in-group and well cultured? The jwalking culture in Germany is exactly the same.

Yes, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Learning that different groups of people may have their own languages and customs is the first step to being able to blend in with a diverse group; it's great when you're able to adopt a register appropriate to the people you are with at any given moment.

Of course it's also possible that the child learns to be a snob and treating with disdain those who are not in your group. But I would say that's a character trait of the person, and it's still worth having the opportunity to learn how to adapt, rather than being unable to modulate your behavior and only knowing how to have a single posture. Having a culture of acceptance starts with knowing the customs of many different groups.

Countries like Vietnam are the exception, not the rule. In most countries traffic won't swerve around you, they'll just end up hitting you because they are not expecting it!

I don’t think this is necessarily true. They probably end up with a lot more dead kids as a result of this.

I don't know how Vietnam makes it work; they either have really alert drivers, really slow drivers or a really high child mortality rate.

[0]: I often notice that children are quite unobservant of their surroundings and behave as if they are alone in the world.

YES that is precisely what happened. That's so funny you said this.

I was standing in heavy falling snow, at the corner of an empty boulevard, next to a woman with two little daughters and a young boy. I stood for a moment and then walked across and she started yelling at me. I suppose she was trying to teach her children to be patient and wait for the light to change. What went through my head at that moment was, I kid you not, "ah, that's how they learn to follow orders".

And this is entirely in sync with my original point above, but also personally, I loathe Munich. There's nothing like being told holocaust jokes when people don't know you're Jewish. I believe the people there would vote for Hitler in a heartbeat if he were alive and running for office.

However, instead of reconsidering your stance on Germans' law-abiding behavior, you reassert your bias by invoking Godwin's Law, linking a contemporary incident to the actions of Hitler.

Do you see any issue with this?

(I'm not German)

You don't shout at a man in the street in order to demonstrate good behavior to your children.

Obedience, yes. Good behavior, no.

this is literally how every minority (basically anyone but the waspiest of wasps) feels in america. terrible jokes about <insert race here> are completely normalized.

You do if you are angry that said man is sabotaging your efforts to raise your children correctly. Also, said man is breaking a law instituted for a good reason.

I’m also personally of the opinion that speaking up when you are angry instead of passively taking it is good for society.

It sounds like you have some hangups that you are projecting onto this situation.

She wants to avoid her kids considering it acceptable to cross a red light. Parent violated community norms by crossing a red light. So now she has to signal that this person has violated community norms, so that her kids learn "red light crossing is bad" rather than "red light crossing is normal".

This is not a "german" thing, this is a "human" thing.

I spent a year there, mostly in SA and the NT. A six pack of beer and a pack of smokes will set you back $50. When it comes to road signs, the "are you feeling sleepy" every few kilometers really makes you... sleepy. Police presence is heavier than in America. There are checkpoints going into towns. Then of course there's the separate window for alcohol for Aboriginals, who line up early in the morning, the scanning of your driver's license every time you buy beer...

When I first got there, I stayed in King's Cross, Sydney, and it was fairly wild. I heard that neighborhood isn't there anymore, and hasn't been for some time.

I'm Australian, currently live in Sydney and I feel as you do, but none of your examples explain your claim.

No, I don't have time to list the ways Australians follow rules (more so that Germans), it is 1:15am, and I'm going to bed.

Having lived most of my life in Turkey, it gets old really fast.

For one thing, there's a certain culture that is a mixture of extreme fatalism, not giving a shit about anything that doesn't immediately benefit you, low respect to other people, and the worst part of it, seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive, that is so pervasive in Turkey.

When this culture is given a lax rule structure, what you get is a chaotic, every man for himself, free-for-all place devolving further and further into a low CGI Mad Max movie. Only reason why it still hasn't completely collapsed into chaos is because people are still afraid of the punishment. If you think I'm exaggerating, next time you're there ask a restaurant owner if you can smoke, right under the no-smoking sign and pay attention to what they say: do they tell you that'd disturb other customers? or do they tell you of the ₺20k fine they got that one time and they can't let you because of that.

I can tell for you as a lived experience that significantly more people in Turkey cut in lines than people in Germany. Why do they do that I ask myself, the only explanation I could find until now is because fuck you, that's why. If you were as cunning, as manly, as bold as they are you'd be at the front of the line, but you aren't, so fuck you. They know there won't be repercussions for that action, and that's the only bar to clear for them to do it.

Maybe this way of living fits some, I myself find this despicable. I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world, but I fully believe it seeps into everything else in the society and over time makes it unlivable.

--

Even in an imaginary ideal environment, if act of obeying existing rules is debatable, there'll be the problem of everyone considering themselves as a sufficient authority on making judgements with a limited context and a huge bias on interpretations that benefit them. At one point it just makes sense to ask people to use the right channels to push change instead of 80 million people making individual judgements on every issue every day and hope for the best.

pervasice in Russia too. Most non-democratic societies are indivifualistic and highly cynical.

That's why I say American brain is' a prison - they think in 'Socialist countries everyone cares about each. other too much, and that why they are poor

To tell you the truth, Russia itself has always been a prison, as it is now, and the people have a prison mentality. That causes you to brag or be humble; always to scheme and never to be honest; always to look for an edge. Lying to people's faces, what is it vranyo? Just to make sure they know you're lying, and exercise power over them? No, the American brain is not a prison. Americans individually have a lot of problems understanding the world, but we do not think all other countries are the same. Also, obviously, Russia is no longer socialist in any way. Not to mention, many Americans are in fact socialists, at least on par with European socialist parties.

>>seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive

I'm sad to say that this is true everywhere I've been. The attitude is everywhere in the US... it's only that in the US people are trained to be quiet about it. My observation, everywhere I go, is that only smart, observant people do not mistake kindness for weakness.

>> because fuck you, that's why

So, this is one thing I do like about the US. The police in the US do not get involved in anything unless you pull out a gun and shoot somebody... even then, they really don't care. On the other hand, this kind of fake "manliness" you're describing is sort of self-limiting in the US; it tends to look ridiculous to us when we travel overseas or when we see new immigrants from (choose a chaotic country) act this way - because here, the guy you jump in line in front of might look like nothing but he also might have a 9mm. I say this from the perspective of someone who has seen multiple shootings at the bar around the corner from my house in the past year, for things as stupid as someone acting rudely.

Stupid, selfish, short-sighted people are the same everywhere. Being rude is really the issue; one does not need a God or a police force to avoid being rude. Being rude and taking advantage for oneself is cultural, and I actually believe it's impossible to take a culture who has been raised that way and make them - under any police regime - act differently. (I'll qualify that further by telling you that all my grandparents came from Russia in the 1920s, and spoke Russian, but they hated the criminal type of Russian scavengers who came out of that ruthless wasteland from the 1980s onward). Taking care of others outside your family requires two things: 1. a functioning rule of law, yes, but 2. a view passed to you from your parents that treating others well will cause you to flourish more than trying to take advantage of them. This cannot be enforced. It has to be internalized and understood. I really think it's better in many ways to see what kind of people you're speaking with bluntly than to listen to the sophistry of the modern version of the same avarice as it presents itself in New York or Los Angeles. I can sit and listen to the racism toward black people in the American South or toward Aboriginal people in Australia, and just openly disagree. That's better to me than listening to people who I know are racist trying to sound politically correct in Seattle.

>> I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world

I think it's the second-most important metric. Being polite. But it's worse to be somewhere everyone is polite and everyone is a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is to me the most important metric.

(This is actually what my problem is with Thailand. True, no one cuts in line. But there's so much bottled-up anger that no one can admit to, and suddenly it explodes).

But not cutting in line - in my book - is representative of the best human value. So I absolutely agree with your view and don't think you should say it's not important. It's possibly the most important thing.

A shout out to the Argentines, when my ex-gf was possibly kidnapped there, people asked me to cut in line in front of them at an ATM that was running out of money, where they had been waiting for a long time, just from seeing the look on my face.

I have lived in India where lines do not generally exist and in US. I have seen the culture in India change from line cutting to following the line (generally). The biggest difference is caused by whether you believe you will get the service if you wait in the line.

If you have a service that is available for only the first 20, but you have 50 people waiting, line-cutting will happen. Railway tickets in India are a big example - when I was growing up, you rush to the beginning of the line since there were only small number of seats allocated to each station. Now, that it is computerized and you can book from anywhere to anywhere, people stay in the line since they know they will get the ticket.

Look at your last example - lack of service if you are not in the front will cause chaos.

I also grew up there. I think there’s a low level compliance with what I’d call daily/minor rules. Cigarette butts tossed wherever you are when you finish one, speed limits are barely even advisory, jaywalking widely practiced, etc.

Depends. In NYC, jaywalking is normal. In Santa Monica, you get a ticket. Speeding is mostly enforced everywhere.

What sets the US apart from countries like Argentina, in this department, is that the cops won't just ask you for a bribe when they stop you. You actually end up with a ticket and have to deal with it.

MA highways are moving 75-80mph when traffic permits, regardless of whether they have a posted 55 or 65mph speed limit. NH is only a few mph less typically.

In some American cities (Chicago), crossing against the light is how muggers and pickpockets tell the tourists apart from the locals.

People who live in downtown Chicago wait for the light because they know that there's very often a car ready to make a left turn right into the crosswalk. Tourists are often from places where, if there is a crosswalk, there's no traffic to worry about.

Bingo. If one hasn't spent serious time in at least 4+ states, I don't think they ever really get an idea of how differentiated American cultural norms really are. "Americans are ______" is about as descriptive a statement as "Left-handed people are _____" - there's just toooo much variance for it to be a useful observation.

I think we get this a lot as Americans because we are such a huge cultural power with our movies, music and software. (and pizza). But like, there are definitely enormous cultural differences between Northern and Southern Italians, or N/S Vietnamese, or like, the 500 different cultures in India... we're sort of blind to it until we go somewhere because no matter where you are, you just get the summary of everywhere else.

I see tons of online comments generalizing about California or the West Coast (I’ve been guilty of this generalization myself), but after living here for the past 8 years I’ve learned otherwise. I will also refer anyone who wants to lump the whole coast together to Oregon’s legacy as a self-proclaimed “white state” [0].

It turns out that making accurate generalizations about millions of people is hard, and if you’re committed to doing it anyways then you’ll just end up with cliches and platitudes.

[0] https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/racial-h...

I disagree. Everyone I've talked to in the US considers 5 mph over the limit to be perfectly safe from tickets (enforcement), and 10 mph over to probably be safe from enforcement. The few times I've heard of people getting ticketed for 5 mph over the limit they were outraged at the injustice of it, and most people agreed with them.

Speeding is mostly enforced if you're 10+ over the speed limit, or driving a heavy vehicle.

It's also why Argentina is a fucking mess, but I love it. When I'm there it feels like the people will never, ever be conquered.

This is true in a lot of countries that had a dictatorship.

Weirdly, it is not true for Chile, where everyone still acts like they're in a dictatorship.. also the US, which never had a dictatorship but created and supported dictatorships all over the world.

But, different strokes for different folks.

We ended up at a police station in Mendoza where the cops did not want to handle our paperwork. A few months later, I parked the car in Buenos Aires and my girlfriend left a sandwich inside. It rained and the car got moldy. I wanted to sell it. So I called a number in the newspaper that said they buy cars. Some guys showed up, took it on a test drive, and didn't come back. They just took the car.

So I called my friend who knew a cop and she said, meet us in Plaza Serrano at 12:00, those guys will be there, and bring $100 for the policeman.

I did, the guys showed up, they paid me $1500 for the car and everything worked out. The cop just stood there watching.

Argentina is sort of how life is supposed to work. If you had the amount of guns like in the US it would much more fucked up. Also in a weird way people still have morals there, at least they are not as nihilistic as in the US. People still read fucking books and are educated. I think a lot has to do with having late night dinners and talking for hours instead of being on your phone. Taking your kids out to dinner and wine at 11pm is a really good value. Teaching them to talk and listen and be adults.

Indeed, in some ways this place is crazy and in others its reasonably livable. I have many anecdotes like those but my English is not so good to make them funny.

Río negro native here. If you come to visit again, and go to San antonio oeste or las grutas hit me up and I'll invite you a beer

This brings back so many crazy stories from Río Negro. We got stuck for two weeks in General Roca. The car broke down on RN22 and we were towed into town by a farmer on a tractor. We left the car with our luggage inside on the street and walked to find a hotel. When we came back in the evening, five or six old men had surrounded the car and were looking inside, thinking that someone had been killed, or it was drugs, because who is crazy enough to just leave a car full of suitcases? Some Paraguayans towed us to the river and fed us lunch at their trailer, but couldn't fix the car. Then it was New Years and at midnight we sat in the empty street with a bottle of wine, surrounded by a dozen frightened dogs while the fireworks went off in people's yards. After a week we were able to find out where the farmer lived, who was a really wonderful guy named Javier. He introduced us to his family, and we had lunch under their grape vines. He knew how to fix tractors, and he was able to fix our car's electrical wiring at his house. No one ever asked us for money to help. The people were incredibly kind.

Getting to Las Grutas was a different story... we took a "taxi" which was not a real taxi, just some guy waiting at the Viedma airport who turned out to be extremely high on cocaine. At one point in the middle of the desert he just stopped the car, got out and went to the trunk. We got very worried. When he came back, he talked rapidly on and on about why guns should be easier to buy, because if he wanted to kill people he could just as well kill them with a knife, or even a pen. To demonstrate this he was jabbing a pen around wildly like he was going to stab me. My girlfriend said the whole time she was in the back seat with a towel ready to throw it around his neck and strangle him, even if we crashed.

Ahhhh. Well, enough stories ;) likewise, if you're ever in Portland, Oregon, look me up!

Some people don’t follow the unimportant rules, but almost never when it’d inconvenience someone else.

As someone born in, and having spent most of my life in New Zealand, I have no idea what this means. I'm not being defensive, but I just don't understand. Maybe I'm 'too close' to see it. Perhaps I'm thinking about civic rules (e.g. jay-walking, speeding) and you're thinking of, e.g. industry like construction?

Unfortunately, people who are horrible to other people and/or spaces generally refuse to accept this, and therefore either need more specific examples of what being horrible entails to compare their behaviours against - leading to proliferation of edges, epicycles and rule-gaming - or you have a codicil along the lines of "the decision of what is horrible is up to the moderator and is final", leading to, at best, everyone whining about how unfair, arbitrary and partial the policy is now they can't be horrible to each other any more, all at once.

I don’t think that is the only possible outcome. Where moderation is done well lot of people, in fact most people, simply don’t notice it. They just have a pleasant time with other pleasant people. So no, “everyone whining“ is not the best possible outcome. “Most people having a good time, a minority whining” is the best possible outcome. And of course it takes hard work, and maybe even a little bit of luck with the initial conditions.

I'm part of two such communities that each have tens of thousands of active members, and have both been online for at least 15 years.

Generalizations are rarely accurate.

For example, politically charged discourse is suppressed. That's going to result in a higher level of civility, but now you have a large community of people with an impaired ability to affect the political process.

That contains its own embedded example. “This music is not being performed 1 hour after midnight; it is being performed 23 hours before midnight.”

I think that's part of it. Another part is Turkey's legal system is based on Swiss law. From ChatGPT:

The legal systems of the United States and Continental Europe differ in several ways. One major difference is that the US follows a common law system, which is based on the precedent set by previous court rulings, while Continental Europe follows a civil law system, which is based on a comprehensive legal code.

In other words, the US legal system is based on intent with laws providing guidance to courts to assess intent. In Turkey, the legal system writes everything down and courts assess if you followed the code.

I think even this conversation itself demonstrates how hard it's to moderate content in the internet. Maybe we need lawyers? :)

Please do not use a hallucinating LLM as a source for any substantive issue.

Not true, see sleepwalkers.

I'm going to assume that those buttons were placed out of the reach of most three year-olds.

Do you actually know that the latter sign is more effective than “don’t touch”? If it actually is, there are other possible explanations. The fact that it’s personally addressed to “you” could make it more effective. The fact that it’s simply a more unique/unexpected way to convey the message may cause people to be less likely to reflexively dismiss the more common directive of “don’t touch”.

No, it's not assuming, it's interpreting based on prior experience in communication.

> The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff.

Then the sign would mention that, simple as that.

> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.

I agree with you here, it happens all the time, is a problem, and perhaps the test is useful to those, who haven't figured this truth so far. Probably not that many in the HN crowd…

I'll add that there's a problem with the test: "does it violate the rule" is not very meaningful. It could be understood in two ways:

- does it technically, strictly speaking, "violate" the rule, meaning, it does something the sign tells you not to do,

- or is the example acting against the intent of the author of the sign.

If the test asked "should violator be punished?" I think it would be more meaningful, otherwise it's just synthetic and the controversy is just about semantics, it doesn't incentive a discussion about our worldview and the rules we put in place, it just provokes to argue pedantically about how we phrase a message.

Moreover it possibly misleads people to think they disagree on something they really don't.

It's assuming the intent without sufficient context to know what it actually is. Because very little context was provided. And the context that was provided strongly implied that the rule was important.

> Then the sign would mention that, simple as that.

We don't even know if there was a sign. None of that was specified.

You're assuming that.

This is how I interpreted the test, but you're making a good point.

"please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."

I live in a city with Trams. Whenever they replace tram rails they remove the surrounding concrete and asphalt. It would be dangerous to drive there. In those cases they explicitly hang a “road closed” sign with an extra sign “including service vehicles”.

In the real world signs (especially common ones) try to be reasonable descriptive. Nobody is helped if you argue about the meaning if something goes wrong.

Otherwise, it is fair game to assume the "intent" of any such sign is to make guidelines to enhance the public's mutual enjoyment/safety at the park, and that such guidelines may be discarded when lives are endangered (police/ambulance).

As an alternate example where the rule itself is related to safety, "no campfires" would not be expected to be followed if one became lost and needed to make smoke signals to be rescued.

You could argue that the sign should include enough context to convince the reader to follow its instructions, but (a) you end up with signs with tons of writing in tiny font that everyone just ignores because TLDR (and yes, these do actually happen quite frequently in parks around here), and (b) if there is some combination of letters you can put on a sign that works to stop people lighting fires, the meadow guy will put that on his sign because he doesn't want fires and those syllables work. So you've just pushed the problem one level back, but the real question remains the same: do you risk doing the thing you want to, or do you respect the sign?

In the situation where context is different than what a reasonable person would expect, it has to be included. Language changes meaning depending on context.

At the end of the day, as a person living their life, it really isn’t your business to know whether an airplane is intruding on park airspace. You should not drive in the park as a private citizen. If you’re a ambulance driver on official business, you should know what applies to you.

"You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules [...]. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."

(*Certainly there exist failed states where the police/paramedics are corrupt and the park owner is warlord from a rival tribe, etc. but I think that goes beyond a normative reading of the question.)

No, that's not the problem. That's human nature, and human nature is most definitely not the problem. Humans make the world we live in and we individually get to influence it, but we don't get a veto on how others influence it.

To me, the quiz answers depended on common sense, and I was reminded by it that my common sense is not others' common sense, and so what? That's life. We deal, because there's no other choice when we live in society.

Have you ever looked at the warning signs on water heaters? They make it instantly clear what the dangers are and how bad they can be. A "No vehicles in the park" sign in that situation would be the equivalent of just putting "Caution: Hot" on a water heater.

Similarly, parks have signs with people literally drowning and being killed to make it abundantly clear how dangerous they can be.

That would be a terrible phrasing then. It should have been phrased something like "Landslide hazard, no weight more than 1ton allowed anywhere in the park." or something in that vein.

Unrelated, it is also the reason why a hot-dog is not a sandwich, pragmatically speaking.

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html

Maybe you’re not aware, but rules are all about intent. In a conflict over rules, the judge will be all about the intent.

Rules work very well towards revealing the intent of all parties involved.

It’s always about intent.

This should not be taken to mean that every rule must be fully, rigorously and unambiguously specified, as this would bring an end to human discourse.

Intent is often an appropriate basis for this disambiguation.

Assumption of intent is critical to pretty much all social functioning. In this particular case, I think its outrageously reasonable to assume that if some unusual circumstance were to prevail in the park relevant to the definition of vehicle, the sign would explicitly indicate it. And that, without further clarification, the obvious answer is the one intended.

If people do not have, to some degree at least, a shared intent (e.g. let's have a conversation here about topic X, let's have a park to have fun or relax in, etc.) there is probably no set of rules that can specify sufficiently what can and must not be done. If you did manage to craft such a sufficiently detailed set of rules, it would be too large for people to read and understand.

(All models are wrong! Some useful!)

The law is a tool which imperfectly models the goals of the lawmakers.

For lawyers judges, the beauty of law is that the law has plenty of room to support contradictory interpretations.

Shared intent, across cross border platforms, is awfully hard if not impossible to achieve with anything approaching consistency.

The silliness in this is that it boils everything down to a single rule and expects that you can define the words of the rule in a way that makes it obvious that some other meaning may be inferred. That isn't how language works. In no small part because language isn't static.

Put in a way that programmers know, decently. Regular expressions can describe context free shapes of symbols. These are usually concise and people feel like they can have a hold on them. Context free grammars, though, are typically not concise and lead to all sorts of interesting theory and problems to keep them going. And, much to the frustration of near everyone, colloquial language does not have a context free grammar, even. To try and take it out of the context is to lose.

That's the crux of the issue.

And the game calls this out at the very beginning. It encourages you not to speculate on if it should apply, just if it does apply.

The OPs assertion that this was easy missed the point.

> and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.

I don't believe it was obvious, and it wasn't stated goal. These are vehicles. The rule applies to them.

The fact that we disagree is the entire point of this game.

What is "shapes of symbols"? Do you mean "characters"? If you are trying to say that "regular languages" are a proper subset of (less expressive than) "context-free grammar" languages , probably best to leave it at that, and let people look up those well-documented terms if they want to learn more. Making up a new term distracts people who know the normal terms, and is just as confusing for people who don't.

But, yes. There is some ambiguity there. That is still perfectly consistent with my point. To think that you can separate use of language from the intent of the use is a fool's errand. One that we often partake in.

Consider for even more fun, many laws are enforced such that the intent of the law is not the only intent consulted, but the intent of the person that broke it. I don't know why humanity is full of so many smart people that all think they can make intent not necessary. When most places context is removed, the results are often catastrophic.

A great example of when this does happen that you can google is parking signs in NYC. There’s a bunch of very specific rules that accommodate dozens of scenarios. As an engineer, I’d be hard pressed to actually determine the legality of a parking scenario in a more complex scenario.

At the end of the day, “No vehicles in the park” is a pretty clear instruction. The idea that first responders would be an exception is both covered in superseding law and a core principle. Preservation of human life supersedes the health of the turf.

An educated person can make a much better assessment of intent.

For instance, if danger exists to a police car due to loose soil or not.

The more important point here for me is not “how should we best design and interact with the rules” (that’s a pretty authoritarian question) but rather “what fundamental human conditions, like education, tend towards more productive interaction with the world, including any rules that exist”

The question is whether it was justifiable and that's not what the original game asks you to evaluate, but it is the much harder question because it is almost always subjective--as you point out. In justifiability you can start asking about intent, weigh the various costs of the action, etc.

The funny thing is, the game itself assumes intent. And even you assume intent.

What is a vehicle? "a thing used to express, embody, or fulfill something" is one of the definitions. So, no books allowed.

But then, the rule doesn't say vehicles aren't allowed to enter the park.

It simple describes the state. That there are "No vehicles in the park."

> But the larger point is that people can adopt the "obvious intent" version of the rule when it suits them and the pedantic version of the rule when it suits them.

At the very least, the other point is that it's challenging to come up with a rule that can't be misinterpreted even when being pedantic.

"No vehicles in the park."

No, there are no books current in the park. Just a bunch of cars.

They really need to work on their signage wording.

So the complaint about rules that involve human discretion strikes me as extremely hollow. We know what trying to write no-discretion rules looks like. We know it almost always still ends up allowing plenty of abuses of the system. To prevent that we need more eyes and more human judgement on things, not less.

Communities are built on intent and learning the culture of the group. Anyone who does not understand this should get into law, not internet moderation.

The first time I went through the quiz, I followed the instructions and ended up having to think about edge cases and definitions a lot. The second time I went through the quiz, I just applied common sense and I think there was only one case that obviously violated the rule (someone drove a Honda Civic through the park).

HN has always sought to avoid the litigious and hair-splitting sort of arguments about moderation rules by appealing to general values rather than trying to nail down the precise list of allowed/disallowed behaviors*. The latter seems like a ticket to bureaucratic, soul-destroying hell, which none of us wants to get sucked into.

That doesn't mean there aren't edge cases and disputes about which calls are fair. There are tons of those. But they boil down to

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

...and yet in this very HN discussion we have large numbers of people disagreeing about the intent of the small, clearly written intro, with each side convinced that their interpretation is the obviously correct one. I feel this does as much to support the author's thesis as the game itself.

So I agree with the parent and grand-parent comment. Without a context in which to understand the terms presented, even an apparently-clear statement and introduction can be entirely unclear. I suspect that if you pointed to an actual physical sign and a scenario unfolding in front of them, and asked people whether they objected, rather than asking as an abstract concept on a computer screen, you'd get a different distribution of answers.

The HN approach makes things simpler for moderators in much the same way that being a monarchy makes lawmaking simpler for the king, but writing down rules isn't about making the enforcer's life easier, it's about making the subject's lives easier. They're more numerous, so their needs should have at least some weight.

Independent of that argument, precise written rules and a process for updating them are valuable for several reasons:

1. Whilst people might still get mad, they get mad at the written rules and not at the interpreter of them. This takes a lot of the heat out of the situation because a document can be improved easily relative to improving a person, so discussions about bad outcomes become de-personalized and more constructive.

2. The act of writing down rules forces mental clarity. Contradictions and unhelpful biases that may not be obvious when free-floating in one's head can become apparent immediately when trying to write it all down.

3. Because the rules are clear, violations are less likely to happen to begin with. People who aren't on-board with the values of the community stay away.

The generic HN prohibition against "flamewars" is a good example of a rule that could use a rigorous clarification. It doesn't work to assume the intent or definitions are obvious, because flamewar is a purely online concept that doesn't have any clear analogy to the physical world. Actually it's the opposite: in physical debates there's a general understanding that anyone who turns up and takes part will engage in emotional self-control. If they lose it and start getting angry or raising their voice, they're the ones expected to leave, regardless of what argument the other side was making at the time. HN's approach inverts this standard social convention and blames the person who remains calm for the behavior of angry respondents!

The thread you linked to (from 2015!) is a good example of this. The original post is something about pi and the Bible. It's phrased calmly, isn't obviously in bad faith and is at least somewhat interesting yet is flagkilled, then you threaten to ban the user for conducting "religious flamewars". That user quite reasonably asks what it is that makes his post a rule violation and gives several possibilities e.g. is all discussion of religion banned? But you reply that it would be "soul destroying" to answer his question that specifically! He wasn't asking for a mechanical algorithm but getting more specific than "religious flamewar" and "spirit of the place" doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.

One weird subtext of this discussion is the idea that imprecision in the guidelines is costing "the subjects" something. But getting moderated doesn't cost you anything; on the contrary, it costs Dan. You just adjust and move on.

Quite beyond the quiz instructions, the rest of the psychology on display in this thread is fascinating. Having clear rules makes things harder because other people will follow them. That sounds like the kind of outcome you fear only if you don't really want there to be rules, but only cultural homogeneity. Which is a stated anti-goal of the site.

I really don't think HN does the best possible job of living up to this ideal as a consequence and you see this in the wide range of important topics that the site has largely failed to debate. For example, a common complaint on lab leak stories is that just a few years ago this site was routinely suppressing people who were attempting to engage in curious conversation about SARS-CoV-2 origins.

The quiz epilogue said something along the same lines. Basically the point was to prove with these questions that corner cases always exist, and the system can never be perfect, and therefore we’re screwed and might want to give up. “pinning down a definition is usually impossible” … “You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem.” … “Maybe you will decide to live with the nebulosity, but have more sympathy for the refs. Maybe you will decide that you would prefer to live with the consequences of less moderation. Maybe you will think really hard about decentralization (which is not a panacea). Maybe you will give up on social media altogether.”

I do have sympathy for the refs, Dan, and I think you do an amazing job at a Sisyphean task. I’m also okay with nebulosity too.

However - I want to push back a little on the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t try to be precise, at least not as the most significant summary bit. We should try to be precise when we can, and provide examples when we can’t. I don’t buy the author’s argument/implication that the existence of a corner case somewhere means we shouldn’t be attempting to define the “epicycles” of the rules, especially when it’s really easy to say something like the park boundary is 200m above the ground, or insert ‘motorized’ in front of vehicles, which immediately eliminates like 50% of the supposedly hard to answer questions. Include the other rules, and add details to the quiz questions and almost all of them can become unambiguous. The point of all this is to provide clarity whenever possible and minimize the corner cases and reduce the number of people getting mad, right? It matters whether it’s just one or two people flaming each other versus everyone. It matter whether there’s only one or two crazy accidents in parks versus thousands or millions.

There’s a real difference between public safety and online forum opinions, of course. Yes, with a Grand-Canyon-sized gray area in between. But whether an airplane can fly through a park probably deserves a lot more bureaucratic attention than nailing down how people talk about Pi and religion on HN? Maybe I’m conflating law and forum moderation, maybe you were only talking about forum moderation, but I’m thinking about law as social moderation and how the quiz should reflect on social moderation in general. Our laws currently are in the process of building a larger and larger decision tree of both vague and specific language about what activities and behaviors are socially and legally acceptable, trying eternally to be more precise, and for the most part it “works” by some definition to keep the system manageable. We do try to get precise with speed limits and what kinds of death deserve what punishment and what constitutes insider information and whether badly compressed mp3s constitute copies. Even when it’s hard to pin down, we keep on trying, in order to reduce mistakes.

It’s kinda fun this little quiz of ambiguous questions caused so much discussion. Maybe it happened primarily because of the ambiguity, so each one is a little bike shed. Clearly the author said answer literally and most people just didn’t. But I somewhat feel like (maybe to the top comment’s point) that the contrived ambiguity backfired a bit on me. The problem with the quiz is withholding context and details in order to argue that it’s hard to draw lines. Context and details matter and they always exist in the real world. There isn’t only one rule, and a lot of the questions that seem ambiguous have actual right and wrong answers depending on details (e.g., altitude of the airplane & country of the park, or whether any country on earth asserts air & space rights hundreds of miles above their parks.)

I'm definitely only talking about forum moderation, and only one forum at that. Precision is way more important in law and public safety and whatnot. Those domains are also vastly better funded to deal with the complexity that entails than entertainment websites are, and rightly so.

One factor that enters into forum moderation bigtime, in my experience, is the impact of the moderation on the moderators. That's an important feedback loop, because the number of people applying pressure of different kinds—at quantity and often very personally—is simply insane. When that pressure gets excessive, it has a disregulating effect on the mods, and that can only have a disregulating effect on the forum itself. Things can spiral out in bad ways, so part of the job is to get a handle on that feedback loop.

One thing that can be disregulating is when you have to do things over and over again that eat your soul. For me, having to deal with the litigious sort of angry user who is never satisfied with any explanation, but forever demands more and more precision, is one of the soul-eatiest parts of the job - especially because there are many such critics and each response is orders of magnitude more expensive (in both time and, let's say, health) than the complaints. That asymmetry is super bad for the mods and therefore (see previous paragraph) for the forum itself.

[editing...]

The other way I would “problematize” (to borrow the author’s wording) your crystal-clear understanding is to ask about the matchbox car, then the remote control car, then one of those kid-size toy cars that the kid drives around (then a small one-person electric car, then a full-size electric car).

I suppose another angle would be, are bicycles okay? What about battery-powered bicycles? Does it change if we add a small petrol motor to recharge the battery?

It is agreed that the rule (1) is broken by emergency vehicles. It is unknown that (2) is in effect (it is not described in the scenario), but people would assume that there's no consequences for emergency vehicles breaking the rule.

(Also) because we have a context of a park and of general rules. (Also if you think the ISS is a vehicle on the park you're welcome to try to enforce that)

It was really surprising to me how many so explicitly ignored the instructions for them.

I agree with this obviously, but I feel quite strongly that you must answer "Yes, this violates the rule" to the emergency vehicles questions, because the rules of the game at the beginning clearly stated that you should answer about the violation itself, not about whether it should be allowed.

Simple solutions do not apply to such an extremely complex as human behaviour. In the same way, moderation can not rely on simple, inflexible rules. Yes, sometimes you're gonna ban someone who's just skirting them. Yes, a few dumbasses are going to complain. Ignore them, ban then too, whatever.

It isn't mentioned in the discussion on the results page, but one facet of effective moderation this shines a light on is as follows: each of us may find the moderation task easy, but few (or none) of us would be a moderator who would be universally trusted.

But the moderator can still use vague rules to do what people would not agree upon while still claiming it is within rules, and there always will be someone agreeing with it

In my view, there's always an obvious initial purpose and interpretation (the Honda Civic), and you always have those that will pedantically insist on the most literal Draconian interpretation (the ISS), then you have those who stretch the rules to fit their agenda (bikes), but, most importantly, you have some class of common edge cases which spark significant disagreement (emergency services), even if we all agree on 90% of the point (which is that yes, emergency services should be able to drive through the park during an emergency, regardless of whether the rule is broken).

It's still breaking the rule though. Legally I suspect it varies between jurisdictions whether the sign doesn't apply to them, it does apply but conflicts with another rule, or whether it's argued as an extenuating circumstance.

Then there's the edge cases like bikes and horses.

Are they vehicles? It's completely reasonable that they could be deemed to be.

We've got the same kind of argument going on with e scooters at the moment.

Ultimately I answered a lot of these based on what I would expect to see in a park, and what I think is reasonable. But they aren't objective measures.

And then there is being rational to the extent that you are in complete denial about that the fact that your rational faculty is located within a spongy organ in the cranial cavity of an ambulatory meat bag.

There doesn't need to be an objective measure for you to take a position on the intent and meaning of a linguistic construct such as a rule. It is just a thing that bipedal meatbags do.

If one meatbag has a different view than another meatbag then they are in a political conflict. There are ways of resolving the conflict which range from friendly chat, through formal debate, right the way to genocide. Generally speaking, well adjusted members of civilised society can resolve things through the former. Sometimes we go fucking bananas and end up at the latter.

Not sure why so many find it so difficult to grasp, or feel the need to apologize that they are mortal, they can't derive the answer from a set of universally agreed-upon axioms and carve it in to a stone tablet like some old-testament god ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The game gives a super simple 2-paragraph-instruction that I feel could not be any clearer, but that you chose to ignore in favor of your own interpretation what is being asked (because you deem the intent "crystal-clear").

Super fascinating.

If the rule or intent is ambiguous, problems may be considered inevitable.

In the above game, you really can't guess the intent. Of course this is partly, because it's an abstract example. But the intent can't really be "no cars or carsy things", because the real intent in "no cars in the park" would be perhaps a combination of no loud noises, no high speed, no heavy objects, no pollution etc.

I realize this may not be an agreeable point since I only got 11% in the game with the assumption that a vehicle is something used for transport (excluding wearables) and that the rules would be seen somewhere in or around the park (so not in the air).

They may have some higher-level rule that says "in emergencies we don't get punished for violating this category of rule", but the rule is still there, and requires the drivers to demonstrate that there was in fact an emergency.

A hierarchy of rules is why normal people don't get to act like cops, or perform amateur heart transplants.

Bikes are a more interesting edge case for me; I think they are, as I expect the reason for the rule to be some kind of environment degradation, possibly easily damaged lawns or similar. But they might be fine. Depends on the reason for the rule.

This is why the real rules say "Emergency vehicles allowed", and then usually "No skateboarding, roller blading, scooters".

An emergency or service vehicle in practice could have an overriding exemption rule (or not and just ignore some rules without retaliation), but they still violate "No vehicles in the park".

The instructions specifically tell you to disregard any unstated assumptions about exceptions for special vehicles.

So in this way you have just illustrated the authors point.

If you add this, you clarify the intent and can meaningfully declare exceptions like "no rules in the park because people come here to relax. Of course if a vehicle is necessary to e.g. stop a wildfire or stop a criminal from shooting people, a vehicle is more than welcome"

They have to acknowledge that the rule exists, and then deliberately break it, because their task takes priority over the rule.

If the question is "does this break the rule?" then the answer is "yes, but". If the question is "will it stay out of the park?" then the answer is "no".

I think the answer to the survey is "I want to talk to my lawyer".

The question was not about whether the rule ought to be followed, but whether it was violated. Content moderation can work under these circumstances, too.

The setup in the beginning even tries to take the ought out of the deliberations: "Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated. You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules [...]" an even goes on to mention other sources of norms. It explicitly then says: "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."

I would not ride in the park, but would walk my bike in the park. I'd be breaking the rules but adhering to the spirit of them.

It is fine to break the rule sometimes though.

Because you assume one following them does it out of good will and good intentions.

Now imagine the moderator that needs to adhere to such rules doesn't use them as guideline but as something to work around to remove the things they personally don't like. And they don't need to explain to the public why they thin it falls upon, they can just silently remove it, or put a comment "removed because rule xyz" and comments to that disabled.

Now imagine rules like /r/games, "No content primarily for humor or entertainment" or "No off-topic or low-effort content or comments". CLEARLY meant to stop memeing and spamming random game screenshots, but oh so easy to attach to nearly anything.

Same with title formatting rules. Should you copy-paste clickbaity title of the article or editorialize it to mean what the article says about? DOESN'T MATTER, if mods don't like the topic they will find an excuse. So the post gets removed but someone links to a different article with normal title that links to that as source ? Nope, LOW EFFORT, removed, should've linked to the original one (that's actual situation I saw on that subreddit, mods really don't like VNs there, and it wasn't about porn one either)

This is the scenario: imagine you're forced to wager a nontrivial sum of money on the following bet. You have to write down how you interpreted (1), (2), and (3). Then we randomly pick a real park that has this exact rule phrased in this exact way (I'm hopeful there'll be at least one out there), find the person who wrote the rule, give them your written interpretation, and ask if they agree. You lose if they don't. Notice we're not asking them to also write down a longer interpretation and comparing word-for-word. Just whether they think you got the gist of it.

I would write down that 'vehicle' was intended to refer to motorized passenger vehicles, 'in' was intended to mean that the vehicles shouldn't be in/on water or land within park boundaries, and that the rule wasn't intended to restrict passage to emergency vehicles responding to emergency situations. I expect most people would write something similar if they had real money on the line.

The trouble with the horrible website is it's trying to prove that nebulosity makes content moderation difficult by forcing people to disagree, but this disagreement almost entirely pertains to a point that has nothing to do with nebulosity: the park rule would only ever be written within a wider legal framework and doesn't make sense in isolation.

If I take my answers to (1) and (2), I'm forced to conclude that the emergency vehicles were violating the rule within the ridiculously artificial scenario presented. However, I'm also confident that this rule would only have been written verbatim within a wider legal framework that provided exceptions for emergency vehicles.

Consider self-defence in the context of murder or manslaughter. In the UK at least, the first thing the court does is establish whether the defendant would fit the criteria for murder / manslaughter ignoring the self-defence aspect, because otherwise it's a moot point. Once this is done, they would then establish whether the defence of self-defence also applies, which would then negate the conviction. If you wanted to prove that law is complex because it's hard to define words, would you really make a website that says "Ignore everything else you know and suppose that murder is only defined as killing a person" and then think you're being really smart when people disagree on the scenario involving clear self-defence? Hopefully not, because they're really only disagreeing with being forced to invoke your artificially-restricted definition.

That said, the website demonstrates the real reason why online moderation is hard: because it disproportionately attracts the sorts of people who answered 'yes' to the ISS question in this quiz. So you often end up with lots of users sharing a reasonable consensus on what the rules mean being moderated by a tiny group of... we'll say 'non-representative' moderators. It's a common problem with any banal form of authority, and isn't specific to website moderation at all.

Personally my instinct is that I'd lose more money by specifying skateboards and bikes as I've usually seen those addressed by their own signs rather than being included under "vehicle".

And as clear as it is, it can still be enforced selectively.

That's the point.

They basically said to ignore local jurisdiction laws. Depending on where the sign is placed, this might not be so obvious.

If you take the sign rule to the letter, an ambulance is a vehicle and thus cannot enter the park as well.

Police can enter the park, but without a vehicle.

But if we're ignoring local rules and the only question is whether or not they would be violating the rules, then yes they would be, and whether they can anyway is out of scope.

The reason to allow emergency vehicles to go through the park must then outweigh the benefit of the ‘no vehicles allowed rule’. Something trivial like a pedestrian illegally crossing the street should not warrant the police going on a car chase through said park.

Whether it's fine in certain scenarios to break some rules it's a different topic though.

Exactly, the Hippocratic oath supersedes the no vehicle rule.

And if i want to say no skateboarding, roller blading, scootering, pogoing, or any alternative in the park?

I agreed with 11% of people, but that is 1 in 10 who agree your take isn't correct. (granted i think a small wagon is ridiculous to enforce under like 90% of circumstances)

Is it just because that way you can feel smart having “solved“ the game? Or do you think there’s a moral imperative to say an ambulance isn’t breaking a rule even in an abstract word game? Do you understand abstraction, and that this isn’t really about a park?

Most likely true. But to me the answer for the question itself is not about whether the rule can be overridden by any other rules. It’s purely about the rule itself.

The intro supports this:

> 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).

There is a difference between a rule being violated, and whether the violation of the rule is allowed. Like they say in that intro text.

Therefore, all of the examples with police motor vehicles and ambulance motor vehicles are to be answered as being in violation of the rule.

The game is trying to demonstrate that content moderation, even using simple explicit rules, is hard and will lead to disagreements.

The game has absolutely nothing to do with whether vehicles should actually be allowed in the hypothetical park, let alone if there should be fines.

Everyone agrees that the car is forbidden, the police and ambulance are technically forbidden but should be allowed, and all other cases are things that the sign obviously doesn't forbid.

If you argue otherwise you are just trying to come up with arguments for the sake of arguing.

A horse is not a vehicle. A horse is a horse, of course.

Also the questions have dubious intent.

Does something violate the rule? Some times they do and sometimes we need to understand if that's acceptable or fix what made this rule to be broken.

But I think many people interpret the question as "should it be allowed"

I disagree due to the instructions on the page before starting the quiz: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."

The game is specifically asking us not to make a judgement call on whether a violation of the rule should be permitted. So, police are violating the rule (even if we think it's allowable)

And yet it is top comment, with many confirmations in the replies. I had to scroll really really long to find somebody quoting short instruction which the parent is ignoring.

So long story short, amazing job with that game. It's seems really hard to present the case for how difficult moderation is any clearer. Fascinating stuff.

Also, I'm too lazy but it would be nice to see LLMs answers.

edit: curiosity won, not all questions, GPT4: https://gist.github.com/comboy/71caac8afdc1b92d103c4ec7c42e4...

I agree, but in the sense that it’s okay for them to violate the rule. However, they are still violating the rule, and thus the correct answer in the game is “yes, this violates the rule”.

> Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.

Is that every year multiple people in the U.S. are killed by police driving their cars onto beaches and running over unsuspecting sun bathers. So there’s a strong argument that the signs intent is to ban even responding emergency vehicles.

In the Highway Traffic Act of Ontario "vehicle" is defined as: “vehicle” includes a motor vehicle, trailer, traction engine, farm tractor, road-building machine, bicycle and any vehicle drawn, propelled or driven by any kind of power, including muscular power, but does not include a motorized snow vehicle or a street car; (“véhicule”)

https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90h08/v116#BK1

And that doesn't even address the bigger issue that even if they were justified in breaking the rule, they were breaking the rule.

The prompts were: "In an emergency, Neil, an EMT, drives his ambulance into the park" and "In an emergency, Laurie, a police officer, drives her police car into the park."

They are indeed violating the rule. Whether that rule is enforced against emergency vehicles is considered by the enforcing agent. I believe most people in that position would allow the emergency vehicles to do their jobs without citing them for violating the rule.

But they’re still violating it.

There is no sign. Nowhere in the question does it mention a sign.

What the question does say, however, is this: "please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."

Which is pretty much the opposite of what you conclude.

Interesting.

One of the points of the exercise is that there is broad spread (though far from a uniform distribution) of responses, so the fact that the correct answers are clear to you only goes so far.

It might be interesting to see how additional statements about intent would affect the distribution (though to the extent that the statements of intent take the form of lists of determinations in each special case, the interesting outcome would be the distribution continuing to be broad.)

You are actually perfect example, everying is crystal clear to me too, and my interpretation violently contradicts your interpretation

"Obvious" for you that is. I had a different interpretation of the obvious rule, so came up with a different set of answers.

QED, no?

The test explicitly asked for answers as to whether the rule is followed, not whether its ok to ignore the rule in a given situation. Very obviously a police car or an ambulance is a vehicle in the park.

> Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).

Does this mean that if police are code 2 en route to a crime 10 miles away they can use the park to save time? What if they are code 3?

Part of doing the job of firefighter includes conducting drills. Can they choose the park as their drill environment?

Further, even if they are responding to a crime in the park, are police allowed to drive on the sidewalk because someone has broken the littering ordinance?

Even ignoring these grey areas and focusing on your own statement, there is a philosophical dilemma. Are the first responders who "don't have to follow" an inherent part of the rule, or is the rule absolute and they are merely permitted to break it? in either case, by legal or by social convention?

if you could either explain the lingo or dial it down, that would be great for the rest of us to understand your argument

Code 3 means that emergency vehicles are responding to a non-emergency, backup for a scene which is mostly under control, etc. But it is not urgent enough to warrant lights or sirens.

So of course they drive through the park whenever they want.

Best to avoid jargon.

Obviously? Really? Not only do I find it non-obvious, the rules of the game specifically say to ignore outside context which would IMO include ignoring municipal laws or rules that might say emergency vehicles can go anywhere they are needed. That is huge part of the issue they are pointing out - an ambulance violates the rule, but context makes it OK.

It isn't simple.

In some countries they can ignore such signs only when under an emergency and rights have been given by a central or a local station. A police car can't just turn on flashy lights and drive into a park.

That's not particularly surprising. But you may be asking the wrong question.

If you want to know whether the rules are clear then I think that the right question to ask is not "Are the answers crystal-clear to you?" but "Will different people produce the same answers?".

If we had a sharp drop in the graph at one point then it would suggest that most everyone has the same cutoff; instead we see a very smooth curve as if different people read this VERY SIMPLE AND CLEAR rule and still didn't agree on when it applied.

Without that definition, almost anything resembling an edge case becomes an argument.

Similarly, without specifying the intent, it becomes impossible to decide the argument, because easily two people can have legitimately different views; e.g., the rule is to prevent anything putting more pressure on the ground than a footfall (so basically anything w/wheels is a problem, including emergency vehicles, but a sled might be is OK), to anything fast-moving and massive (so toys, airplanes, & spacecraft are OK), to some arbitrary rule from a psycho-dictator owner...

I.e., if you want people to make sense of the rules, they need to start with a simple clear definition (this does OK in that dept.), specify the extent (what to include and exclude) specify the intent, and maybe provide examples of how to decide edge cases so that others can reason about them.

isn't that the exact thing this points attention to? When you have power, everything is clear. But _your_ clear isn't necessarily same as anyone else's clear

thus percentages aren't 100%, as shown

Not so obvious. I identified them as having violated the rules. If an exemption was intended for emergency vehicles it should have been included in the sign. Many signs regarding rules for vehicles include "except for emergency vehicles". Without such an exemption I would apply the rules to them.

But breaking rules like this in cases of emergency is the correct thing to do.

This is where the moderation difficulty comes in.

For other people too, but for them maybe the right answer is different.

Intent is clear until it is not.

Cars obviously aren't allowed. Bicycles are not, either. But can I walk through the park pulling my bicycle ? (I want to cut through the park to avoid a long detour). Some will say that the intent is to avoid have people _driving_ vehicles through the park because it is dangerous, others will say that if that was the intent the rule would be "No driving of vehicles in the park".

What about toy cars ? The extreme cases are easy, an hot wheels car is obviously fine. Something like this [1] I would say not, too fast and dangerous. What about the middle ground ? Are tricycles fine ? Toy car with pedals ? A car-like stroller [2] ?

It is less clear and you will have different complains from different persons. Some people will be pissed off that they can use their vehicle while other can use their. Some people are petty and will try to have any kind vehicle banned "because the rule says so", just to make the life of others miserable.

And this is only about what constitutes a vehicle, we are not even talking about what means "in the park".

You can give moderators (law enforcement, in the park example) freedom to act according the intent ("when I see it I know if it is allowed or not"), but the more freedom they have, the more potential for trouble there is.

Of course people will be disgruntled also if the rule is too specific and inflexible, because that may mean not being able to do something that it "obviously" was meant to be allowed. You need to find a good balance, and the ability to update the rules for the thorny cases.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOMXCW7uK4U [2] https://www.walmart.com/ip/3-In-1-Push-Car/40926763

> 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. [...] please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).

You:

> obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign

Even having read your reply it is not obvious to me what you answered. Did you answer yes, the police etc. are violating the rule only adding a note for us tha, or did you answer no, thinking that this doesn't count as a violation?

To me the overall discussion, but especially the disagreement about emergency services and bicycles proves the point of the original article.

Nope, not for me :-) But funny part is that it's so obvious for me, I'm surprised anyone else thinks otherwise.

I'd be interested to see more grey-area things like a group of fast amateur bicycle racers, e-bikes, classic pedal-mopeds, electric stand-up scooters, electric sitting moped/scooters, Vespas, ice-cream tricycles, pedal delivery vehicles, I think there would be a lot more differing opinions about those.

Pedal-moped: https://www.used.forsale/sh-img/Honda_Hobbit_pedal%2Bmoped.j...

UPS pedal trike: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/11/mobil...

Ice cream trike: https://www.hogroastredditch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/...

Recumbent trike: https://i1.wp.com/www.recumbenttrikestore.com/wp-content/upl...

A low percent

Obviously? I disagree there and marked those as violating the rule. If we are to take the rule literally and logically, then those examples clearly violate the rule. Nowhere in that game did it say that police, ambulances and fire trucks get a free pass. There isn't anything obvious about that. You're bringing your own context and knowledge/interpretation of the world into this. The game also clearly stated that we should ignore our own local laws (and religion) when answering the questions.

Every prompt is asking either one or both of these questions: "Is this a vehicle?" "Is it in the park?"

So you have to ask yourself what is a vehicle? Most people would not classify shoes as a vehicle. So why would attaching wheels to shoes make them vehicles? The definition of vehicle is rather vague, basically "something used to move people or goods, especially on land". Which skates kind of are. They use a machine, the wheel, to multiply work done.

Even though a matchbox car has all the appearances of something normally accepted as a vehicle, does the fact that it is incapable of transporting anything significant change that fact?

Then you get to "in the park". What is "in" the park as opposed to "out"? Yes, the grounds as defined by the property lines are definitely "in" the park. Someone driving a Civic through the grounds is definitely "in the park". Basically, do you count the airspace of the park and if so, where does it end? If something hovering 4 feet above the ground is in the park, then why isn't an airplane at 33,000 feet "in" in the park? Is it because we can't reasonably interact with it? If that's the case, do the boundaries of the park change depending on the height and reach of those in it? If no one is in the park, and you jump a Civic completely over the grounds, were you ever "in" the park?

Moderation is an attempt to define things like this. Sometimes more abstractly, sometimes way more directly. For instance, if you have a forum about sandwiches, you're going to have to have a rule about hot dogs. Whether or not they count.

You see it here all the time when someone asks "Why was this posted here?"

So if you have a rule that says "No slurs". That seems simple enough. But now you have to define what a slur is. If I call someone a "fucking idiot", is that slur or just an insult? What if I just said, "Americans, right?" Calling out someone's nationality shouldn't technically be a slur, but it's kind of the implication that turns it into one. Because I'm saying something about people from America, saying they all share a negative quality by virtue of where they are geographically from.

Do we just make a list of slurs? Do we try and account for tone? Where is the line between heated debate and a flamewar? Or even an engaged discussion and a heated debate. Even here, you can get rate limited for just interacting too much. Conversations killed because people were conversing too much.

But that's how they defined a vehicle, that's where they drew the lines of the park.

“It’s clear to me, therefore it’s clear to everyone.”