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.
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.
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.