I find it a bit disingenuous to overlook any rules outside the thought experiment and then want to apply it to a real world discussion where the overlooked rules do apply. Like the Police question. It has nothing to do with the context of the questionary (internet moderation) as it is a real world law, not a moderation rule. In reality, the statistics at the end show who decided to do a white room thought experiment and who did not - nothing else. I see no big problems in moderation at all unless it is on a government made platform or some other state owned utility thing.
The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
721–730 of 1001 posts
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign. 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 ri…
See, even there for me it's rather a "firefighters/police have an exemption to the rules". For you it's "firefighters/police are breaking the rule but it's fine".
Here where I live, the latter is actually precisely how the traffic law enforcement works: emergency services get tickets in the post for traffic violations same as everyone else, and it is up to the officials to check their logs and respond with "the vehicle was responding to an incident", which is a valid defence and gets the violation dismissed; or not, as the case may be, if it turns out the crew ran a red light while on their way home or something.
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.
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#723For me this article is not about content moderation, but about software requirements.
It turns out, no matter how hard I try to specify a piece of software, developers implementing them manage to sneak in their own interpretation into it and i find that, yes, this particular case wasn't specified or was a little ambiguous or contradicts the other part or something else.
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#724I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended. To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) do…
But if the answers were crystal-clear why didn't everyone answer them like you did?
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#725To me, if I see a rule trying to ban "vehicles" without defining "vehicles", I take my concept of "vehicles" by deduction: I think about all the ways that things that I know of as being "vehicle-esque" could be problematic in various different ways such that you'd want to ban them — being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example); property damage (skateboar…
The problem is that it won’t always be enforced that way. For example: in the city of Melbourne, there are sometimes signs instructing cyclists to dismount (e.g. at railway level crossings), or that you aren’t permitted to cycle in such-and-such a place (e.g. railway platform). Their illustrations always depict an upright bicycle. I ride a recumbent tricycle, which the Road Safety Road Rules considers to be a bicycle…
>Common sense says I should ignore such signs and assess each situation individually.
Does it? How is it different from Car A driving the speed limit and Car B driving 20 over because "I have a big SUV/racecar/motorcycle"?
Laws are normally made knowing there are situations where it will not always seem common sense, but if we follow your logic we would have hundred of thousands of rules, like a complete set for each type of car, bike, etc. I see it as common sense that of course the same rules apply to your tricycle, unless it is for a disabled person.
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
The intent of moderation is "don't be horrible to each other and/or the space". 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…
> 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. “Mos…
These communities are lovely when they occur, but they tend to be small and ephemeral; it takes one single persistent troll who is good at gaming community mores and calmly wrapping complaints about any pushback in reasonable-sounding phrases to completely destroy such a space. I've seen this happen entirely too often :(
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#727I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended. To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) do…
Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign. Obviously emergency vehicles are going to do what they need to do, but even if 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.
No "they are allowed to break the rule" is legally speaking nonsense.
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like the railway staff are indeed enforcing the spirit of the law by allowing mobility scooters on the platform. If I had to guess why your tricycle was not allowed it's because the staff perceive your tricycle as a potentially very fast moving obstacle on the platform which the mobility scooter obviously is not. They are probably more concerned about the safety of others than yourself when they apply that rul…
When visibly travelling at the same speed as pedestrians (… even when there are no pedestrians around!), and still insisting when you explain why dismounting is worse for everyone? No, it’s simply applying the rule because it’s a rule. The Protective Services Officers (cut-rate policemen) that are enforcing these sorts of rules are seldom interested in nuance. On another occasion I was fined by PSOs for walking along…
>No, it’s simply applying the rule because it’s a rule.
Thought experiment: A: Put your head down on the pavement and close your eyes or B: let your toddler stand on the pavement. Who you'd rather have approaching you or the toddler at the same exact speed: Someone walking, someone on a tricycle, someone walking with a tricycle - all three with their nose in their phone or whatever people do when they are not 100% there.
There's a clear difference that you for some reason seem to be angry at and want to ignore.
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#729I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended. To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) do…
Good point. The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion. I wonder how much consensus there would be if the intro asked you to go by the intent of the rule as you understand it, rather than what it literally says. The first time I went through the quiz, I followed the instructions and had to think about definitions a lot. Then I r…
> The intro to the quiz asks you to answer the questions literally, but by asking this the author kind of assumes their own conclusion.
...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.
Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that it won’t always be enforced that way. For example: in the city of Melbourne, there are sometimes signs instructing cyclists to dismount (e.g. at railway level crossings), or that you aren’t permitted to cycle in such-and-such a place (e.g. railway platform). Their illustrations always depict an upright bicycle. I ride a recumbent tricycle, which the Road Safety Road Rules considers to be a bicycle…
We recently had this problem in Sweden: There are parking spaces where "Caravans" or "Campers" are forbidden (because they either tend to stay there all day or sleep) - we have a VW T4, it is considered of class "car" in Germany. We still sleep in it. Are we allowed to stay on these parking spaces? We decided: No. Our interpretation was that overnight-stays are unwanted by the local population or government. But the…
To me, it is as simple as the questions in the link. It is a van. You sleep in it. It is clearly a camper van. In my opinion, anyone who disagree are doing so to be edgy or cause problems just for the sake of it. Of course, there are a lot of those kinds of people.