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The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

novehiclesinthepark.com

941–950 of 1001 posts

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#941

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you jump, do you leave the park? If you jump really high? Or are flung via trebuchet?

That's absurd generally, but for purposes of this rule specifically, I think it works out totally fine, yes. Because if you replace the human jumping with a vehicle jumping (being that the rule is regarding vehicles, not humans) then the answer to the question of whether a violation has occurred is "yes" -- repeated violations does not matter when answering. For flying vehicles, only taking off or landing in the park…

How about hovering? at what height does it become not the park? 10 centimeters above the park is one thing and space is at 100 kilometers, but there's a lot of room in between those for disagreement.

At what point is a helicopter hovering above the park in violation?

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#942

Perfect illustration of how tricky it can be to draw a firm line. Another survey in this same genre is "the rape spectrum" with >5k respondents ranking scenarios: https://aella.substack.com/p/the-rape-spectrum-survey-result... Tough topics to discuss (I see why the OP went with vehicles in the park). I'm glad I'm not in the content moderation business!

Yeah. Sometimes I see private Facebook groups by otherwise smart people, where one rule is something like "racism of any kind is forbidden". As if the addition of "of any kind" made the concept of racism any less vague.

I think that it might make expectations about moderators' interpretations less vague.

That still seems as if it adds some useful information. It's informing people ahead of time that moderators will probably not interpret "racism" in the narrowest possible sense, or likely even in a medium grey-area sense, but rather in a broad sense.

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#943

I'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…

> "To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear."

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...

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#944

Translation: his parents are lawyers, so he has a low opinion of the rule of law and wants to "problematize" it. In favor of arguing for, essentially, despotism. But his own experiment shows that most people do agree on what even a deliberately poorly worded rule means in most cases. So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable. The "game" (I use the word…

> So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.

I did not interpret the creator's point to be that rules are unworkable, so much as that rules alone are insufficient. ie, that even the simplest of rules need to be augmented by human judgment.

But rules are still an important ingredient, as they and judgment complement one another.

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#945

I'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…

> 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) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign. Now you're assuming the intent. The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle drivi…

> 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.

They really need to work on their signage wording.

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#946

I'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…

> 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) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign. Now you're assuming the intent. The park could contain loose soil on the edge of a cliff, so any vehicle drivi…

From computer programming we know that strict rules for complex systems become unmaintainable messes, with countless edge cases that result in things either just not functioning or - worse - allowing people to bypass the rules entirely to, e.g., run malware.

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.

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#947

All the discussions over interpretation are missing the point of the exercise, which is to show how hard it is to find agreement over something as emotionally neutral as "is the vehicle in the park". Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".

Except the top comments aren’t doing that. They’re all saying it’s a flawed contrived example and despite that the actual results show most people agree. And not only that, the questions get ranked by decreasing agreement which shows that it’s pretty easy to make a cut off if put up to vote.

Are bitcoins allowed in the park or beanie babies since people consider them investment vehicles? Are pill capsules allowed in the park as they are vehicles for medicine? Are brains allowed in the park because they are vehicles for consciousness?

All the example shows is that rules need definitions or they need juries. And why is subjectivity even bad? It’s impossible to do anything without some degree of it. It’s also impossible not to have rules, like there are hundreds of unstated ones going on all the time and no one including the author is objecting to them. They aren’t objecting to the rule against DNS attacks or a thousand other examples.

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#948
Austria has this sort of problem when it comes to forests and cyclists. You might want to read a longer article in German about this https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000134804355/als-oesterrei... but the gist of it is: The law until 1975 didn't allow anyone (that's everyone in Austria) to enter forests (which in comparison belong to only a few people, besides the state).

Now that problem with this law (Forstgesetz 1975) is in § 33 (3) where it says "befahren" (drive) which is a very general word when the parliamentary discussion about the law in 1975 clearly meant motor vehicles and even lists them in the discussion but not in the law. A few years later mountainbiking became a thing and the owners of forests insist that the law includes mountain bikers. Fast forward to 2023 and the law still needs fixing...

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#949
post #51

The thing that really proved this game's point for me is the comments here from people giving slightly different versions of "well it's obvious what 'vehicle' means".

It’s weird that I barely see any comments like that. most people seem to be simply saying the game is silly because it’s so contrived and gives no definition of vehicle.

Re: The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

#950

Here is something else. During the pandemic, I went through MacDonald's drive-in on bicycle, because you couldn't go into the restaurant. I was refused service because I was not a vehicle, and since only the drive-in was operating, I was absolutely refused service. They claimed it was for safety. Though technically it is true that a bicycle is not a vehicle according to the BC Motor Vehicle Act, the Act also says: "a…

I'd like to know what they think is unsafe about this.
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