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)
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.