I think this is the real point: it's not a test of whether people agree on what is allowed, but on how pedantic people are in an abstract setting.

I think agreement would be much higher if people were told to evaluate the "spirit" of the rule, and not the "letter" of the rule.

Better yet, have them submit two answers for spirit and letter. Because it seems that people will ignore instructions that say to focus on just one.

> I think agreement would be much higher if people were told to evaluate the "spirit" of the rule, and not the "letter" of the rule.

I think you are right. I think agreement would be even higher if you would be asking people what should happen as a result of the situation as described. There could be options with increasing level of seriousness. Things like “do nothing”, “send a park officer to ask them to leave, they get a fine if they persist”, “send a cop who asks them to leave and arrest them if they perist”, “send a cop to arrest them without warning”, “order a snipper to headshot them without any warning”.

I think asking if something is a violation is too abstract, and people are bad at abstract things. On the other hand when we make it concrete people will be better at expressing what they think should happen and you are more likely to see agreement.

Which sheds light on why moderation is hard, given moderation hinges on serious, but in practice necessarily subjectively interpreted, abstractions.

I.e. “freedom of speech”, “on topic”, “low quality speech”, “no hate speech”, “no harassment” etc.

Agreement would be much higher if people were asked whether it is okay or not, rather than asking whether it violates the rule or not.

Deciding whether it violates the rule can be done in a fairly objective way. Deciding whether circumstances justify violating the rule is where the subjectivity is, but the test says nothing about that.

That’s what made it not interesting, and a better question would be “for each case do you think the police should spend taxpayer money enforcing the rule?”.

Not “does this pedantically violate the rule” but “would it be good for society if this case was punished?”, “would it be good for the park?”, “would the effort of punishing it be worth the cost?”.

I can’t imagine anyone seriously saying it would be worth the cost of the police trying to move an orbiting space station “out” of the park - the cost would be huge and the return negligible, but peoples views On whether a WWII tank is appropriate for a pedestrianised park are interesting, whereas people saying “yes the tank is a vehicle” are not so interesting.

This line of thinking presumes that you are the legislator, judge, or police officer. But one can easily approach the questions as to likelihood of being hassled as a park-goer.

I'm not following what you mean by likelihood of being hassled?

Other park goers harassing you because they think you violated the rules and they think trying to deride you for it is a good idea.

See most "x while black" incidents.

How does that relate to "one can approach the questions as likelihood of being hassled", I don't understand it in this context.

"Is a WWII tank/pram/scooter a vehicle in the park?" - those original questions? Or my suggested alternative which was "should the police should intervene*"? Is the commenter they saying that people might answer based on whether they think they would expect to be hassled for doing those things? Or answer whether people doing those things should be hassled by passers-by? Or what?

Instead of vehicle, switch to 'listening to music in the park'. Quite often rules around public disturbance, such as loud music are enforced in highly discriminatory fashions. And example could be that listening to loud rock in the US midwest would be ignored, or listening to country in the US south would be ignored, while listening to rap at the same volume would attract ire from park goers and police alike.

Rap music is usually associated with gangs, gang/thug culture, and is 9/10 times filled with profanity, misogyny or blatant anti-white racism.

This has nothing to do with "black people". It's their own fault they decided to let their culture be driven by such hateful and divisive music.

> It's their own fault they decided to let their culture be driven by such hateful and divisive music.

So “they” are all guilty?

> saying that people might answer based on whether they think they would expect to be hassled for doing those things?

Yes.

And for the ISS or tank in the park, the question is whether this would cause a brouhaha over the issue by people with nothing better to do with their time.

Whether or not you're going to be hassled or have to deal with a public hassle is a personally more interesting question than what would you enforce in the situation. Even if you're a police officer.

At this stage in my questions there is nothing to enforce, no rules yet. The original question set is bad because it's nitpicking a rule nobody chose but many people want exclusions to, despite the question saying no exclusions. Then we find "wow lots of disagreement". I think the disagreement is manufactured by the poor question design and not real, and if we had no rules yet, asked about various situations and found whether people approved/disproved of them in a park, we'd have much more agreement. And that there needs to be some skin in the game - to enforce a thing needs your tax dollars spent on police, and police time spent on this instead of something else, so do you still think it's worth making a rule for X situation?

So in the case of 'being hassled' you answer that the things you want to do are acceptable. And we find how many people agree/disagree.

> "Whether or not you're going to be hassled or have to deal with a public hassle is a personally more interesting question than what would you enforce in the situation. Even if you're a police officer"

You can't even know that, that's just inviting speculative fearmongering, and therefore won't be interesting results.

> At this stage in my questions there is nothing to enforce, no rules yet.

You earlier wrote: > a better question would be “for each case do you think the police should spend taxpayer money enforcing the rule?”.

It's this that I've been addressing.

There are very few brand new polities in the world today, and even then I presume the powers that be for most of them accept the previous laws as a baseline. Full law rewrites happen, but they're rare, even on internet forums. So basically everyone is stuck with a system of laws to which they did not agree, and which do not fully address the parameters of today. Thus, "are you going to be hassled?"

You're free to ignore the setup for the game. But that's what you're doing: ignoring it. And by ignoring it you're ignoring the lesson it's trying to teach which the entire blog post is based on.

> I think the disagreement is manufactured by the poor question design and not real, and if we had no rules yet, asked about various situations and found whether people approved/disproved of them in a park, we'd have much more agreement.

And again, in moderating decisions this is not seen. I believe the problem is more the severity of punishments handed down with unelected moderating decision. But recall that even in elected democracies significant chunks of the population feel that their votes do not, or would not, matter.

Without stating my attitudes on the matter, I found it informative that the blog post of the original link mentions feminism and the trans issue.

So here:

> And that there needs to be some skin in the game - to enforce a thing needs your tax dollars spent on police, and police time spent on this instead of something else, so do you still think it's worth making a rule for X situation?

This point of view is assuming the privilege of being heard and rules changing to address the majority concern.

> You can't even know that, that's just inviting speculative fearmongering, and therefore won't be interesting results.

No, you can't know that. Thus calling the police on a child selling bottled water on the street without a permit, and the counter-protests and doxxing against the caller as a response: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/permit-patty-alison-ettel-calls...

Since we were all privileged because this was just a game, I tried to make rules on what a vehicle actually is, instead of asking what are the odds a person would be hassled. But I think I've made my point that asking whether you are likely to be hassled is a legitimate method people use to determine what the laws allow. If I haven't, then just ask when do people disregard the speed limit on roads and when do they drive just below it.

> but peoples views On whether a WWII tank is appropriate for a pedestrianised park are interesting, whereas people saying “yes the tank is a vehicle” are not so interesting.

There was a WWII tank in a park I would spend time in as a child. It was alongside an ancient fire truck and a steam locomotive. There were all totally awesome until they got fenced off for some reason.

I took the doubly pedantic view that the tank was not a vehicle simply on account that I was defining a vehicle to be a vehicle when its function is that of a vehicle (namely a tool for locomotion by means other than walking). Applying the principle that someone has to be able to ride on it or in it to count, I pedantically conclude that the tank is not a vehicle because it explicitly says in the question that it is not capable of functioning as a tank anymore. Therefore in effect the tank is little more than a vehicle-shaped-statue, not a vehicle per se. It is no more a violation of the rule than a painting of a car would be. By this reasoning, I counted the stroller, ice skates, and roller blades as violations yet did not count the toy cars, RC planes, nor the picnic wagon.

Is the pedantic answer really uninteresting if it leads to unintuitive answers?

>That’s what made it not interesting, and a better question would be “for each case do you think the police should spend taxpayer money enforcing the rule?”

See, but that's what makes it interesting. You can't just make the law equal to some ad hoc poll of "do I want my tax dollars used to discourage this" for every possible behavior within the park. At some point, for lack of better expression, the rubber has to meet the road. The gut opinion on what is appropriate in a park has to be translated into a rule for the park, and the question of if the rule was violated or not has to be able to be determined entirely on the basis of hard evidence should a ticket for it ever go to court.

At least part of the point of the exercise is that even for something where there's general agreement on the principle (like "people should use pedestrianized parks appropriately"), the translation into an obvious rule (like "no vehicles in the park") fails to capture that intent and the extent to which there actually is general agreement is inversely proportionally to how fully spelled out things are.

The park is interesting because its boring. Its not a hot button issue where people have disagreements on matters of principle like guns or abortion or javascript frameworks. So why is it so hard to write an objective, enforceable rule codifying the seemingly universally agreed and understood idea of what a park is supposed to be? If we can't even get universal agreement on something non-controversial, such as the rules which make a park a park, such as "no vehicles in the park", how can we expect any system of law to work more generally?

> "Is the pedantic answer really uninteresting if it leads to unintuitive answers?"

Yes, because then we just get to arguing "is my car no longer a vehicle once it runs out of fuel and cannot function as a car?" then "is it no longer a vehicle if the battery is empty?" or "If the alternator is broken?" then, "does the vehicle-status depend on how quick and easy the fix is?" which are all dragging away from the question of "do people want a WWII tank in a park or not?".

And instead of asking "is a WWII tank in a park breaking the rule regardless of whether you object to the tank?" we could directly ask "do you object to the tank?".

> "By this reasoning, I counted the stroller, ice skates, and roller blades as violations yet did not count the toy cars, RC planes, nor the picnic wagon."

And now we're arguing whether RC planes count as vehicles, when people's objection might be noise in the park where RC planes with engines and drones are out, and RC electric planes/gliders are okay. Or people might think about safety - any plane near people is out, any plane away from people is okay.

> "You can't just make the law equal to some ad hoc poll of "do I want my tax dollars used to discourage this" for every possible behavior within the park"

Why not? We can poll people on every behaviour seen in the park in the last year, online, in a few minutes, and make a bylaw listing the OK vs not-OK behaviours, democratically chosen. We don't, but I don't see why you say "we can't just do that" when we could do exactly that. Why does it have to be a single rule?

> "The park is interesting because its boring. Its not a hot button issue where people have disagreements on matters of principle like guns or abortion or javascript frameworks. So why is it so hard to write an objective, enforceable rule codifying the seemingly universally agreed and understood idea of what a park is supposed to be? If we can't even get universal agreement on something non-controversial, such as the rules which make a park a park, such as "no vehicles in the park", how can we expect any system of law to work more generally?"

I'm not accepting that we can't get universal agreement on "no vehicles in the park" by nitpicking on what a vehicle is. On the ambulance it can be that some people answer "it's a vehicle so the rule is broken" because that's what the question tells them to answer even though they want ambulances allowed, other people answer "it's not a vehicle" because they want ambulances allowed and that's the only way to get them allowed, so we have a manufactured disagreement even if everyone wants them allowed. I'm conjecturing that we could get near-universal agreement on whether ambulances are okay (yes) by asking "are ambulances okay?" not "are ambulances vehicles?". Or even asking "is it okay if ambulances break the no-vehicles rule?". Maybe there's agreement on most, or all, of the questions if asked like that instead.

I also suspect bikes would be different depending if they are pedal or ebike, ridden slowly by little old ladies, or ridden by a racing peloton, or ridden as a busy through-commute every day. "bikes: yes/no?" isn't enough to classify those things differently. Bike racing: yes, no? Bike commuting: yes/no? etc.

>"is my car no longer a vehicle once it runs out of fuel and cannot function as a car?

If your car runs out of fuel in the park, it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule, though it is now likely breaking some other rule about littering in the park.

My fundamental disagreement is that if you allow for rules to be enforced in terms of what they were intended to say rather than what they actually say, then there actually isn't a rule at all. There's a pretense of law but in actuality its a dictatorship of whoever gets to judge what was "clearly" intended to be.

> If your car runs out of fuel in the park, it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule

Unless you put some fuel in it. To get it out of the park.

But then that would be violation, so leave it there?

I think all this meta disagreement, and the diverse counterintuitive reasoning arrived at by different attempts at consistency, demonstrate how hard it is to reach convergent agreement.

The hyperlogical pedantic reading makes the most sence from a game rule perspective. But agreement on initial perspective is difficult to obtain, even given “clear” instructions.

> "it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule, though it is now likely breaking some other rule about littering in the park."

Why isn't the WWII tank breaking the littering rule? Again your approach is leading to more and more pedantry instead of clearer rules.

> "My fundamental disagreement is that if you allow for rules to be enforced in terms of what they were intended to say rather than what they actually say..."

So let's make the rule actually say what we collectively intend it to say, then that problem goes away. We're in this stupid situation where the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed" but you haven't given a reason why the rules cannot say that. "Emergency services are exempt from park rules". If there comes a time of an epidemic of off-duty emergency service workers driving WWII era tank shells modified with blue lighs and sirens and electric unicycle propulsion through the park at high speed on their commute to their second jobs, that's a bridge to cross when it becomes the next most pressing issue in the park.

It should be that we can get past the easy cases "ambulances allowed" and we should be struggling with "what counts as loud and annoying music?" or "are flying drones more fun or more noisy and dangerous?". But instead we're falling over at "are ambulances really vehicles?" and "are statues vehicles?" because of ... bad question design.

> We're in this stupid situation where the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed"

No we aren't. At no time is it specified that the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed". Merely it is specified that the current rules of the park "don't" say "ambulances are allowed". The game is explicitly putting you in the position of judge not legislator. The question of if the intent of having a park could be better codified with a different rule is also interesting, but its not the question the game is asking you.

The game could have gone down the rabbit hole of making a more complicated fictitious "Parks Act" and asking you to judge if each example is a violation or not. And sure this pedantic fictional law would probably better approximate what feels like the obvious intention of a park. But even with that, you'd still end up with surprisingly contentious disagreement when you ask people to apply the law. And you would still end up with people legislating from the bench, finding ways to judge the examples to fit their personal opinions of what a park is. And sometimes, even though the opinion of what a park is feels obvious and universal, it may actually be logically inconsistent and contentious in ways that you don't even notice until you sit down and actually attempt to codify the rules. If anything making the park rule itself an accurate-yet-complex piece of mini-legislation would distract from the point. The "no vehicles in the park" rule may be excessively coarse at capturing the intent, but as a rule it intentionally too short and direct for disagreement to stem from the inherent complexity of subsections and exception clauses.

So, I agree, the park rule can and should be codified better. And we could make our own game "park bylaw committee" about coming up with a set of rules for a park that actually match our expectations for a park. And I agree figuring out how to codify the intent of a park into meaningful rules would be its own interesting philosophical statement on the nature of law and systems of law. But its different from the point the game is making.

Yes, but then you run into the problem that some people value taxpayer money a lot more than others. And some people have revulsion to valuing things with money at all!