[HN Gopher] Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed
___________________________________________________________________
Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed
Author : imadj
Score : 180 points
Date : 2024-02-09 12:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (danluu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39299186
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That's a terrible idea. Some problems:
|
| - Agreeing on what's allowed is not the same problem as
| agreeing on what happened.
|
| - If you can't tell what happened, why are you issuing a
| judgment at all? Look at the incentives: when nothing has
| happened, a policy of not issuing judgments means that someone
| who files a spurious lawsuit will win 0% of the time. A policy
| of "I try to break the calls evenly for both sides" means that
| they win 50% of the time. This has enormous costs (you're going
| to see a lot of spurious lawsuits, and half of them will win!)
| and no benefits.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| - I agree that what's allowed is not the same as what
| happened, but I think the basic notion that a group of people
| can agree that a certain allowable subset is acceptable even
| if none of them personally would choose that exact subset is
| very similar to the basic notion that group of people can
| agree that they will all call certain things as fouls even if
| none of them personally would choose those exact things.
|
| - One doesn't blow a whistle when nothing has happened.
| (indeed, one doesn't blow a whistle even when something _has_
| happened, but it would be to the advantage of the fouling
| party if play were to stop). It 's easy to tell who is at
| fault with a spurious lawsuit, to wit: the filer.
|
| The situation I was describing is one where it's obvious from
| the geometry that _someone must have fouled_ (because
| otherwise the play would not have included an element of
| danger) but it is not obvious which player was responsible
| (because, especially among professional players, a
| significant part of the game is faking other players into
| committing fouls on you, so when you get two of these people
| in a play, each trying to sucker the other, determining which
| one was actually the victim becomes ... difficult*)
|
| The sort order is not (arbitrary hash, justice), it's
| (justice, arbitrary hash).
|
| * As a player, given that there are usually dozens of fouls
| called per game, if you want to win, you have to be able to
| win even with a couple of bad calls -- because that's how
| everyone wins. A legal system is willing to take years to
| reduce (but not eliminate) arbitrary factors; a leisure sport
| accepts more arbitrariness in exchange for getting decisions
| made in under 5 seconds.
|
| In upper league play, one has two officials on the field, who
| attempt to coordinate such that at all times one of them is
| looking down the axis of play and the other is perpendicular
| to it, and one official elevated as much as possible, who
| breaks ties in case (in a private official only discussion)
| the first two each call the foul on opposite players. Even
| with this set up, when the third may call "no foul", the
| third should call a foul (deciding for one of the field
| officials or the other, arbitrarily if necessary) in cases of
| significant danger. The role of keeping play safe is (for the
| officials at least, and we'd hope also for the players) much
| more important than the role of helping determine who
| prevails that match.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's easy to tell who is at fault with a spurious
| lawsuit, to wit: the filer.
|
| This directly contradicts your linked comment above:
|
| >> I once talked with a judge who told me "I try my best to
| be just, but when it's impossible to be just, I have to
| settle for arbitrary".
|
| This is a terrible idea. It also makes this irrelevant:
|
| > One doesn't blow a whistle when nothing has happened.
|
| You don't get to choose.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| There's no contradiction.
|
| It's not impossible to be just with a spurious lawsuit;
| the just resolution is to throw it out (and sanction
| repeat offenders).
|
| Maybe there's a misunderstanding about what the judge
| meant? He was talking about how sometimes things are not
| as fungible as the law would like to pretend. So take
| Solomon and the baby. Solomon chose to award 1/2 the baby
| to each claimed mother. An actual judge would have to
| award a whole baby to an arbitrary mother, along with a
| monetary transfer from that one to the other one, which
| may be a lawfully equitable judgement, but lacks the
| justice of Solomon's.
|
| > > One doesn't blow a whistle when nothing has happened.
|
| > You don't get to choose.
|
| Are we mixing the judges' problem with the referees'? I
| absolutely get to choose when to blow the whistle; I'm
| wearing it. (as mentioned earlier: as foreseen by the
| rules, if the fouling team would benefit, I _should not_
| whistle)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The judge has the same problem we've been talking about
| the whole time: he can't tell what happened.
|
| You quoted a judge saying that in that scenario the right
| thing to do is to make an arbitrary decision. That is
| wrong. Very wrong.
| wccrawford wrote:
| In my experience, people disagree about the "vehicle in the park"
| game because they try to apply other rules that are not part of
| the game.
|
| Ambulances, for example, are clearly vehicles, and if they're in
| the park, the rules has been violated.
|
| That doesn't mean the ambulance driver is in the wrong, though.
| There could be other rules that supersede that rule. We aren't
| told of any, though, and are simply asked about that one rule.
|
| The only judgements that we're asked to make are "What is
| considered a vehicle" and "What is considered to be in the park".
| That's because these things are not defined for us and are open
| to interpretation.
|
| Interestingly, though, the game said I agreed with 74% of people,
| which was a lot higher than I expected it to be.
| pkasting wrote:
| This may be because some people are assuming this is a rules-
| driven culture and some are assuming it's a principle-driven
| culture. (In real world examples we could also have a power-
| driven culture.) Understanding that a difference exists, what
| their effects are, and which you're in is important. Given
| insufficient information to clearly determine, people are not
| wrong to operate in either regime.
| Verdex wrote:
| This line of thinking does make me wonder if the path forward
| might be a system of authority and variable consequences
| instead of trying to find consensus.
|
| Agreeing is hard but the ambulance has the authority to ignore
| rules in the interest of the common good.
|
| Similarly skate boarders and mothers with wagons don't have
| authority to violate rules but because the consequences
| (hypothetically imagined here) is based on weight then they can
| violate the rule with relative impunity because such a minor
| infraction of the rule only endangers them to passing enforcers
| to say "shame on you" to them.
|
| At this point to me it seems the hard point is objectively
| applying consequences in a moderation setting. I'm not sure how
| to make a call that someone is being only a little bit of an
| asshole in anyway that allows an online community to function
| in a way that is cohesive.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > but the ambulance has the authority to ignore rules
|
| But the game isn't about "should the rule be ignored?".
| That's a different game.
| Verdex wrote:
| The game is a meta commentary on how moderation is hard.
|
| My commentary is an orthogonal commentary on moderation
| using the game and previous conversation comment as input.
|
| Interestingly enough, I realized that my thoughts is just a
| vague restating on how the criminal justice system is
| supposed to work (at least in the US).
|
| You have laws and then some people are allowed to ignore
| them and some people ignore them because the consequences
| aren't sufficient to be problematic to them. Judges and
| lawyers facilitate and split hairs.
| jprete wrote:
| I tried the game after your comment and got 100% agreement with
| the majority.
|
| My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered object
| capable of moving itself along with one or more people (not
| necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold). "In
| the park" means in the region of space where one could
| physically interact with people in the park, or alternatively
| in its legal jurisdiction; the airspace a few thousand feet
| above the park's topmost solid point is almost never under the
| jurisdiction of the park itself.
|
| I agree with the overall point about moderation, but I find
| this a bad example because I think someone reasonably rules-
| oriented would settle on very similar rules.
| true_religion wrote:
| I went with anything that moves unpowered or not that is not
| also a living thing is a vehicle so long as it falls within
| the light cone that could theoretically be projected from the
| park grounds directly upwards if it were in a vacuum.
|
| Not many people agreed with me, but it's a strict rule that I
| could imagine something like the military trying to enforce
| over a top secret area.
|
| It blocks everything ambiguous so only the horse was not a
| vehicle.
|
| Overall I think it's a good experiment as it shows why it's
| good to enumerate examples of what is and isn't part of a
| rule in order to adjusted it the future.
| gifvenut wrote:
| Light cone? But over the park is not in the park.
| card_zero wrote:
| > "In the park" means in the region of space where one could
| physically interact with people _in the park_
|
| Endless regress detected, redo from start.
|
| 100% agreement with the majority _per question_ might put you
| in a very small minority, BTW.
| reichstein wrote:
| I got a 100% agreement with majority too. I did not try to
| define anything formally, instead I judged each case by
| itself, asking whether I'd consider that thing a "vehicle".
| Which ended up meaning "car" in practice.
|
| You only go mad if you try to lawyer things. Or your
| opponent does, which means that this test lacks the thing
| that really makes rules-making hard: determined opposition,
| would to trust your every word.
| lolc wrote:
| It's a good example exactly because it demomstrates how
| people will disagree about easy rules. All while they somehow
| remain unable to acknowledge this. That's the actual point to
| me.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Its hilarious that the top comment on this submission still
| doesn't "get it". Set theory and combinations get thrown
| out the window to loosely redefine "majority" to make a
| point.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yeah, "I got 100%" therefore it's easy.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered
| object capable of moving itself along with one or more people
| (not necessarily comfortably! This is just a mass threshold).
|
| So... motorized wheelchairs are vehicles?
| throwuwu wrote:
| And this is why we have videos of bicyclists yelling at
| parapalegics.
| jwagenet wrote:
| The test prohibits vehicles, not specifically automobiles,
| but basically everyone interprets the rule to only apply to
| automobiles.
|
| Are motorized wheelchairs vehicles?
|
| > a thing used for transporting people or goods, especially
| on land, such as a car, truck, or cart
|
| I'd say yes
| bagels wrote:
| Yes. But that doesn't make the rule just and doesn't mean
| it would be enforced.
| Rapzid wrote:
| > My rule was that a vehicle was an artificially powered
| object capable of moving
|
| The definition of a vehicle is quite broad and you've scoped
| it rather narrowly. When left so open people may scope it
| more or less narrow and land on differently scoped
| definitions.
|
| I think there is certainly a middle ground when making
| rules(and laws). But this example purposefully uses an ill-
| defined rule to drive a point home.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Part of the issue here on why people are adding rules to this
| game is because there is a real life abstraction in what
| seemingly most people would consider nonsensical rules.
|
| If you said "are borbs allowed in the bezzilizx" it would be
| more interesting on what the gradient of answers would be as we
| are not making as many presuppositions.
|
| For example, if my grandma is dying of a heart attack in the
| park, one of the most common behavior of those involved will be
| "fuck your rules, get the ambulance down here". This is that
| humans are not yes/no rule following computers and we will
| gladly toss rules to the side over a number of factors
| encompassing everything from immediacy of need to the depths of
| our greed.
| moolcool wrote:
| The presuppositions are what make the question interesting.
| It's an explicit test of pedantry.
| j2kun wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| 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.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| 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.
| bagels wrote:
| The ambulance violates the rule, but few would care that it
| does.
| barrkel wrote:
| Courts tend to care, when something goes wrong; e.g. the
| ambulance causing injury all by itself.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > Ambulances, for example, are clearly vehicles, and if they're
| in the park, the rules has been violated.
|
| The game would be more interesting if the rule were
| "Threatening speech is not allowed."
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Many years ago I witnessed an interesting interaction on a
| gaming forum.
|
| Player A was trying to recruit players for their group.
| Player B posted about some bad experiences they had with
| Player A being hard to work with in the past, which prompted
| Player A to reply with some vicious personal attacks. Player
| B then quoted Player A's post in full with commentary to the
| effect of "Thanks for illustrating my point."
|
| When the moderator came in, they deleted Player A's post
| attacking Player B, but left Player B's post quoting it
| alone.
| dale_glass wrote:
| A quite common approach, yes.
|
| As a moderator you often know know that somebody should be
| removed, but for the sake of PR it's often unwise to just
| have an internal talk, reach an agreement that "yup, this
| person is an ass", and then ban them seemingly out of the
| blue, even if there's a bunch of excellent reasons. It's
| easy for drama to erupt, especially when that person has
| been around for a long time and is a regular.
|
| An easy solution is to watch out like a hawk for the right
| incident and do it then, and sometimes to even try to
| intentionally push things along so that it's especially
| obvious to all bystanders.
|
| And leaving some evidence to show everyone why you did it
| also helps.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| What you describe gets far closer to why moderation is
| tricky. The interesting question--to me at least--is
| whether some subset of people can apply such reasoning
| consistently.
|
| Danluu is arguing that because a set of randomly chosen
| people cannot agree how to apply a simple statement like
| "No vehicles in the park" that moderation is impossible.
| If so, the same would no doubt be true of the following
| language in an NDA:
|
| > Each Receiving Party shall: (a) maintain all
| Confidential Information in confidence; and (b) exercise
| at least the same degree of care to safeguard the
| Confidential Information that it uses to safeguard its
| own Confidential Information (but no less than reasonable
| care).
|
| Yet, US courts would not have a lot of problems
| interpreting this language consistently because terms
| like "reasonable care" have definitions that anyone
| trained in the law would understand. [0] The fact that
| uninitiated people may not be able to do so is not
| relevant.
|
| [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_care
| dazamarquez wrote:
| The game does not ask whether the vehicle should be allowed in
| the park. It only asks whether the thing is a "vehicle" and
| whether it "is in" the park.
| arp242 wrote:
| > The only judgements that we're asked to make are "What is
| considered a vehicle" and "What is considered to be in the
| park".
|
| Which is a pointless question to ask because that's not how
| parks operate.
|
| This entire test is flawed, and any conclusions derived from it
| are worthless.
| moolcool wrote:
| "No vehicles in the park" is a rule explicitly written for
| humans, and rules written for humans have reasonable and
| obvious exceptions which don't have to be explicitly stated.
|
| If a convenience store says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service",
| no reasonable worker would refuse service to someone wearing a
| dress.
| masklinn wrote:
| > If a convenience store says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No
| Service", no reasonable worker would refuse service to
| someone wearing a dress.
|
| Odds are good they will if they disapprove of the dress, or
| if they disapprove of the someone's wearing of a dress.
|
| Because the rule is not actually about shirts or shoes, it's
| about throwing out people considered undesirable. Those signs
| were invented to throw out hippies.
|
| Similarly "please wait to be seated", used to be only in
| high-end restaurants, lower end ones introduced them so they
| could ignore / refuse to seat hippies. It's much easier to
| make a patron leave when they've been standing at the
| entrance for half an hour than when they've seated
| themselves.
| moolcool wrote:
| What about when they say "long haired freaky people need
| not apply"?
| cmaggiulli wrote:
| I would argue that "no shirt, no shoes, no service" is not
| rule but rather a concise and simplistic phrase that
| communicates the spirit of the rule to a broad audience. The
| rule is that a human must have their feet, part of their
| lower and upper body covered or else they will be denied
| entry and/or refused service. The phrase is just a way to
| communicate that rule in a concise way
| moolcool wrote:
| That's kind of my point though. Written rules sacrifice
| specificity for brevity all the time, and it works for most
| reasonable people most of the time.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| The game explicitly says to ignore _everything_ except the one
| stated rule:
|
| > _You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which
| overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles.
| Please disregard these rules; the park isn 't necessarily in
| your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain
| rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of
| whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should
| be allowed)._
| mikewarot wrote:
| >The game explicitly says to _ignore everything_ except...
|
| I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it. I live in
| the real world, not hypothetical-land. Too much of what's
| wrong with the world starts with people ignoring the real
| world, and going hypothetical.
| hibbelig wrote:
| > I don't agree with that condition, and ignored it.
|
| Fascinating. It's a game! No Knight moves one square to the
| right and two up, but it seems chess players have no
| problem with it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Because chess has a throughout specification (at least
| now, not sure if it was always that way). A knight is
| only a night and cannot fall under any other category.
| Can you think of a rule in chess that is not well
| defined?
| rileymat2 wrote:
| I think which player gets white is ill defined by the
| game proper, and selected by the various
| organizers/players.
|
| Edit: I think in tournament chess there is some ill
| defined rules around play behavior/distractions.
| pixl97 wrote:
| But it's kind of the point that the well defined parts
| such as movement allowed per piece aren't really up for
| discussion.
|
| Where the contention occurs is on human behaviors. Where
| the rules for chess are pretty simple (and yes, this does
| lead to difficult to compute and complex behavior), the
| motivations that humans follow both individually and as
| social structures are far more complex and contradictory.
| hibbelig wrote:
| Well, GP compared the rules against real life and decided
| that they are different from real life, so they shouldn't
| be followed.
|
| Chess rules are also different from real life, but people
| don't have any issues following them.
|
| The question whether it was "well defined" doesn't come
| into play here, I think: the rules in the game tell you
| to ignore any overrides (such as that certain vehicles
| may be allowed in an emergency situation). And GP decided
| to ignore that part.
|
| I think interesting discussion can be had even when
| respecting this rule. For example, I decided that a skate
| board is not a vehicle but a bike is.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Lets take chess and the knight, and 2 - 1 movement rules.
| If there are pieces in front of the knight you pick up
| the knight off the board in 3 dimensional space, right?!
| The rules of chess only define the final end point of the
| piece and not the physical motion in real space to reach
| that location.
|
| With this said, if you're in a professional setting, and
| you pick up the king and fly it around like an airplane,
| everyone is going to get really tired of your shit.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| They'd be tired of your shit because you'd be acting like
| an ass, not because you'd be breaking any game rules.
| navane wrote:
| So your saying, what if the game was not hypothetical?
| mikewarot wrote:
| It's like the Stanford Marshmallow experiment[1]. The
| experiment measured the wrong thing, the credibility of the
| experimenters in the eyes of the subjects. If you didn't
| believe they would deliver on their promise, you took the
| first reward.
|
| I don't agree with the conditions of the game, because far
| too much damage is done by people who "both sides" or "I'm
| just asking questions" or otherwise hedge on normal
| socially accepted behavior. The post fairness doctrine[2]
| world is a harsh place, and it's made me grumpy.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_expe
| rimen...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| There's a big gap between "they measured the wrong thing"
| and showing up to play a game but not following any of
| the rules. If you object to the game then why are you
| pretending to play it?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Then why on earth are you playing a game which is _purely_
| about hypotheticals to begin with? It 's like if someone
| were to sit down to play Monopoly but refuse to hand over
| rent because "I believe that having a dwelling should be
| free". Ok, good for you, but then it's really foolish to
| play the game to begin with.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| The point of the game is to illustrate this behavior.
| That is why they use a real-world example, to produce
| different results when different people are asked the
| same question. It's not a math problem.
| lucianbr wrote:
| I can't ignore everything that is not mentioned in the game
| description. I would not know the definition of the words
| used, like the meaning of "rule". Obviously you are supposed
| to use _some_ external context. Everything in reality has
| context.
| PBnFlash wrote:
| If we ignore the law of universal gravitation the ambulance
| can hover over the park.
|
| Rules are a part of how the world works as is the violation
| of them. Thought problems that deviate so far from reality
| are more a test of abstract thinking.
|
| Rules implicitly exist for terminal goals (don't kill the
| grass in the park so people can enjoy it) but get abstracted
| into actionable decrees that are not necessarily aligned
| (Becky can't enjoy the grass if she's dead.)
| stereolambda wrote:
| I'm also somewhat surprised how people flatly refuse to
| handle being asked to apply rules as written, which the game
| does. (Otherwise I would assume they just haven't read the
| introduction closely.)
|
| To my mind, the park just needs an additional rule that
| allows for 911 emergencies, but this does not make these
| vehicles not vehicles. I am ready to disregard rules in a
| bunch of cases in real life, but I would not call this
| following the rules. Sometimes you just disregard rules and
| authority because you value quality of human life more.
| "Rescuing" these cases after the fact as following the rules
| actually smells faintly authoritarian to me (so that you get
| rid of legitimate rebellion), though maybe it's an
| oversensitive take.
|
| Also surprised that I ended up agreeing with 93% of people
| apparently. This is despite applying a probably idiosyncratic
| definition of vehicle: separate from the functioning of human
| being, with a mechanism of propulsion and capable of
| transporting things or persons. I ended up allowing almost
| everything. I would disallow bikes but not kick scooters.
| Maybe I got owned by the "bikes are vehicles" propaganda.
|
| And for moderation, any judicial role is a form of political
| power. This is why making it limited and not completely
| concentrated is more important than trying to come with
| perfect rules. In practice, this means you can voice your
| discontent and realistically go somewhere else.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Well, it is self consistent at least to ignore rules that
| are dumb, both in the case of the park and the case of the
| game, haha.
|
| Really though, I wonder if the results are flavored by the
| surrounding context in which the game tends to be linked. I
| made what I thought were common sense exceptions I think
| because it was linked in an article about people not
| agreeing on what is allowed. The thought in my mind was:
| come on, people can just be reasonable.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| But if something is an exception then _by definition_ it
| 's breaking the baseline rule, right?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Sounds like they were trying to forced their desired outcome
| instead of getting the real one.
|
| Vehicle (in most rules) means motorized, heavy, and
| dangerously fast, making most of the options not vehicles.
| Emergency services are exempt from the rule during
| emergencies, and therefore not breaking it.
| seeloops wrote:
| The way I (and I think the majority) interpreted it, was:
| "What did the person who wrote this rule _intend_? " i.e. The
| spirit of the rule, not the letter.
|
| Obviously, no one expects the rule to cover all edge cases,
| so we have to extrapolate what the rule writer meant to say.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > That's because these things are not defined for us and are
| open to interpretation.
|
| This is actually a deep philosophical and practical issue
| called the frame problem. It is not tractable to define all the
| axioms and presuppositions for any given set of rules. That's
| why the American system has a legislature and separate
| interpretive body in the judiciary.
| card_zero wrote:
| It's often useful to invoke the fictional "reasonable
| person".
| pixl97 wrote:
| And yet this falls strongly on cultural norms and leads to
| a great number of issues where cultures mix.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| My take is that most people cant resist the urge to assert what
| they think they rule _should_ be, complicating the test.
| ambulances aren 't allowed, but they shuld be. Drones are
| allowed, but they shouldnt be.
|
| I think it speaks to a deep discomfort with the idea that
| rules, even theoretical ones, might not be agreeable or fair.
|
| I was surprised to see I got 100% agreement with the majority
| on each question. But I guess that means i would still disagree
| with most everyone on at least one question
| cmaggiulli wrote:
| My 0.02 but the airspace above the park is not the park or
| else you could take that to a logical extreme. A park is the
| land/waterways within a geographical bounds with a specific
| designation. It does not include the air above the park which
| is why planes flying over your house are not trespassing
| ziml77 wrote:
| Planes flying over your house are not trespassing because
| they are far enough up that they are considered to be on
| public highway. If you hover a helicopter over my house and
| hang via a rope outside my bedroom window, you are
| absolutely trespassing even if you have not touched the
| building or the ground at any point.
|
| And going to logical extremes is always going to lead to
| absurdity. Let's go in the other direction. A hovercraft
| doesn't touch the ground, so would a reasonable person also
| consider that to not be on their property when it's powered
| on in their front yard?
| nradov wrote:
| How about a hovercraft, which rides on an air cushion
| without actually touching the ground?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > because they try to apply other rules that are not part of
| the game.
|
| And I suspect that most would disagree they do that (because
| most people would have a hard time thinking of themselves as
| rule violators) which would then lead to something like "the
| rule is stupid" or "this is pedantic".
|
| No Vehicles In The Park is super interesting.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The struggle here is _ambiguity_. That 's a hard problem _for
| computing_ , but not a hard problem _for people_. An ambulance
| can simply break the rule, because human rule-makers are able
| to make exceptions.
|
| A lot of people are very excited about LLMs, because they can
| encounter ambiguity without halting. Unfortunately, what they
| _can 't_ do is _resolve_ that ambiguity. We are still only able
| to compute context-free rules.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Is a modern shoe a vehicle? It provides a spring bounce assist
| to motion. If it is not a vehicle, then why would a pair of
| roller skates or even a bicycle be one? I answered that the
| roller skates were not a vehicle, and though it took some
| longer thought answered the same about the bicycle and
| wheelchair.
|
| Mine was 70%.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > That doesn't mean the ambulance driver is in the wrong,
| though. There could be other rules that supersede that rule. We
| aren't told of any, though, and are simply asked about that one
| rule.
|
| Yeah, this was my thought exactly. Anyone who says an ambulance
| is allowed is not following the rules of the game, which say to
| _only_ consider the "no vehicles in the park" rule. In a real
| scenario, there would of course be other rules (the WW2 tank
| would be there by permission of the park management, for
| example). But if you only consider the one rule (as you were
| told to) then the answers are imo quite straightforward.
|
| I agreed with 93% of people when I played the game, so it sure
| seems to me like there's broad agreement on this.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| In general the way to get out of this successfully is to have a
| moderation team and a process that (enough) users trust, and the
| way you do that is to just _not_ try to make everyone happy and
| accept that some people are going to disagree with the moderation
| decisions, and it's fine if they just _leave_. It's one of the
| reasons that I think the best subreddits and smaller independent
| online communities like hacker news and metafilter remain so
| stable for so long.
|
| Facebook and twitter and the like are doomed to be in this trap
| forever because their pursuit of global growth means they _have_
| to make everyone happy, and in the process make _no one happy_.
|
| And this is also one of the reasons why, wisely, most western
| democracies try and stay out of the business of regulating speech
| entirely.
| richrichie wrote:
| The objective of social media platform like FB or X is not to
| make you happy. You are actually the product.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I was going to reply something along the lines of this.
|
| FB/X are sites that want to have broad appeal in order to
| attract as many as possible to sell their eyeballs to
| advertisers. But attracting as many people as possible means
| you are going to have groups that do not and cannot agree
| which causes strife.
| lazide wrote:
| Platforms optimize for engagement (and ad spend), not
| happiness. Sometimes (long term), they can overlap.
| Surprisingly often (especially short term), they do not.
|
| Also, life itself optimizes for self propagation, not
| happiness. Sometimes (long term), they can overlap.
| Surprisingly often (especially short term), they do not.
| dahart wrote:
| The problem with the 'no vehicles in the park' example is that
| the question is _intentionally_ vague. I feel like we do
| ourselves a disservice to hold this particular example up as a
| way to conclude that everyone disagrees and it's impossible to
| agree and let's throw up our hands. The way forward is to put
| more precision into the rule statement. And yes, there might be
| diminishing returns and ;it might even be impossible for every
| last person to agree, but that's an actively harmful take-away if
| it's possible to get 90% or 95% or 99% to agree by just being
| _slightly_ more specific. A huge portion of the 'no vehicles in
| the park' questions are already answered by existing US aviation
| laws, for example. Another huge swatch of the questions would
| have been answered if the rule was 'no _motor_ vehicles in the
| park'. By intentionally withholding the actual rules, this survey
| doesn't strike me as evidence that agreeing is hard, it seems
| like more of a trick question.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Yes, that's true. But in the act of crafting a deliberately
| ambiguous rule, it teaches others in the position of crafting
| real rules that they must be thoughtful in doing so.
|
| It is easy to phone it in and act like "do what I mean, not
| what I say." If you're being thorough, you could iteratively
| refine the rule and replay those 20-something questions to see
| how each iteration affects the specificity of the language. A
| simple rewrite like "The operation of motorized vehicles on
| park grounds is prohibited" makes a lot of those questions
| moot, but there are still unhandled cases. I see how it can be
| a useful exercise, especially for inexperienced rule makers.
| dahart wrote:
| Yes, exactly! 'no vehicles in the park' should be used as a
| teaching moment, and not as an example of why we can't or
| shouldn't try harder. It would be really interesting if the
| survey had been A/B tested to find the minimum additional
| verbiage that brought maximum agreement. Don't most do people
| know at some level that laws are hard to make and often have
| corner-cases, loopholes, or unintended consequences? We don't
| conclude that laws are impossible to make perfect, we simply
| keep refining the laws, right?
| Hasu wrote:
| > We don't conclude that laws are impossible to make
| perfect, we simply keep refining the laws, right?
|
| Uh, we definitely do conclude that it's impossible to make
| the laws perfect. And we have an entire institution with
| the responsibility for refining laws (the judiciary), and
| they disagree with each other all the time.
|
| This is very strong evidence that it is, in fact,
| impossible to get people to agree on what's allowed. With a
| dedicated institution, you can get close enough for
| government work (literally) but people are still arguing
| over the meaning of the Constitution even after hundreds of
| years of refinement.
|
| I think programmer-types think, "Well a detailed-enough
| specification of all the rules is just like a computer
| program" and sure, it is. Except that computer programs are
| written in unambiguous language and interpreted by machines
| that have perfect understanding, _and we still write
| imperfect programs that don 't do what we want all the
| time_.
| dahart wrote:
| So you're saying we should stop refining the laws because
| it's impossible?
| Hasu wrote:
| I'm not sure how you interpret "It is impossible to make
| laws perfect and unambiguous for all humans everywhere"
| as "We should just give up on refining laws because we
| can't get to perfection". We refine enough to have a
| working system, which is nowhere close to having no
| disagreement.
| dahart wrote:
| What's the point of saying something's impossible? Why
| frame it that way? Should we keep trying, or no? Perfect
| isn't the goal, and "impossible to make perfect" isn't a
| _useful_ summary, right? It seems like that's what you
| saying, and I agree. The only reasonable question is
| whether it's possible to improve, and the answer is yes
| it is possible to improve.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I'm not sure how you interpret "It is impossible to
| make laws perfect and unambiguous for all humans
| everywhere" as "We should just give up on refining laws
| because we can't get to perfection".
|
| Because the sentence you quoted was "We don't conclude
| that laws are impossible to make perfect, we simply keep
| refining the laws, right?"
|
| "conclude" here means a full conclusion, stop and do
| nothing else.
|
| By quoting that entire sentence, and saying "we
| definitely do conclude that", it sounds like you're
| arguing we shouldn't bother with refining. And nothing
| else in your post praised the attempt to refine.
|
| Even now that you've corrected that misreading of your
| post, it means you were arguing against a strawman.
| dahart was just saying not to give up.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > it seems like more of a trick question.
|
| Eh, I don't exactly but this may be because I've hung around
| lawyers too much in my life. Everything is argued at the border
| between black and white, the size of the grey zone can differ
| pretty significantly. In addition your upbringing can have a
| significant impact on what you view as black or white in the
| first place.
|
| There is a reason that in the US alone there are millions of
| pages defining laws and rules. It's the fact we cannot make
| simple rules that cover the majority of human behaviors. Humans
| will always push the grey zone either by intention or complete
| accident.
| dahart wrote:
| Right! We keep arguing about the gray areas, and in the mean
| time we make headway in refining them and defining what is
| black and what is white, little by little, right? Lawyers
| don't usually argue over things that are well defined though,
| unless they're trying to make a contrived point. They treat
| the 'no vehicles in the park' example differently than most
| people. The example invites assumption. It would be entirely
| different if the example said the park's pathways are public
| sidewalks and as such are under the same laws. Then it would
| be more obvious that the survey results isn't exhibiting
| disagreement, it's exhibiting lack of knowledge and incorrect
| assumptions of the existing laws.
|
| You're right we have a lot of laws, but I'd argue the laws
| aren't actually that complex, framing it as millions of pages
| might not be accurate for which laws apply to me. Each state
| has their own laws, the majority of which are similar. For
| any given topic, say driving in traffic, most of it is
| covered by a modest number of rules & pages. The large number
| of total pages in US law is more about the large number of
| topics and behaviors and technologies. It's true that a
| simple shared rule cannot cover driving a car, copying a
| movie, getting into a fight, trading stocks, and food safety
| all at the same time.
|
| Edit: for fun, I just looked it up and the US federal code is
| ~60k pages. It's large, but it's easy to see why looking at
| the list of 54 titles https://uscode.house.gov/ I don't see
| page counts for any state codes I'd tried to lookup, but I'm
| not surprised if it's similar. On one hand, to your point,
| it's a lot of laws. On the other hand it's almost surprising
| that state and federal laws combined are less than a million
| pages, considering the breadth and enormity of the topics
| that is covering hundreds of millions of people.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is also complicated by a few other factors, for
| example, what is counted as a law.
|
| Are building codes laws? If we consider them as laws, you
| have to take those codes over 50 states, plus any
| differences in local municipalities in effect.
| dahart wrote:
| Yes building codes are laws, I'd say. You do have to take
| all of them, if your point is to show how many combined
| laws there are. You do not have to take all of them if
| your question is what are the rules about building a
| single-family home on this plot I own in Pasadena, CA.
|
| This is relevant to all the laws. I'm not part of a bank
| or a factory or a railroad, and I live and work in one
| specific city in a specific state. Therefore, the vast
| majority of laws that exist don't apply or matter to me
| right now. The sum of laws that do apply to me aren't
| that big or that complicated. Lots of other people have
| different situations, and banks and factories exist, so
| this is why we need to have lots of laws. I'm hopefully
| just stating the obvious, I'm just saying having a lot of
| laws isn't a problem, and doesn't demonstrate the thesis
| that it's impossible to agree on what's allowed. All it
| really demonstrates is there's a lot of people that do a
| lot of different things.
| imadj wrote:
| > A huge portion of the 'no vehicles in the park' questions are
| already answered by existing US aviation laws
|
| It's just an illustration of how a seemingly simple rule at
| first glance is open to be interpreted differently.
|
| Sure you can add nuances and be more specific about edge cases,
| but every edge case has its own edge cases, you're not solving
| the problem by this strategy, only digging a bigger hole and
| increasing overhead for yourself.
|
| The author could've used any number of rules and laws and still
| came up with edge cases where the audience would to fail to
| reach an unanimous decision. The US law is full of loopholes,
| adding more rules isn't a solution, it merely change the
| question. If you commit to that strategy, of eliminating
| ambiguity by adding more rules, you'd be playing catch-up
| forever.
| dahart wrote:
| What I'm objecting to is the binary goalpost of 'unanimous'.
| We don't need unanimous in order to statistically improve the
| level of agreement. I disagree that covering edge cases makes
| the hole bigger. The number of edge cases, and the level of
| agreement are two different things, and it's possible to
| improve agreement even if the number of edge cases goes up.
|
| > The author could've used any number of rules and laws and
| still came up with edge cases
|
| And yet, the author could have stipulated motor vehicles and
| a 400 ft FAA air ceiling boundary to the park, and _most_ of
| the trick questions in that survey that generated
| disagreement would suddenly flip to everyone answering them
| correctly.
|
| I don't understand what your suggested alternative is. We
| already continuously refine our laws to cover edge cases.
| That is the takeaway for the contrived 'no vehicles' survey.
| Are you saying we shouldn't be improving laws because it's
| impossible, or what?
| imadj wrote:
| > We already continuously refine our laws to cover edge
| cases.
|
| Exactly the author's point. There's no set of rules that
| clear every possibility. You just keep adapting, and the
| other side will keep involving.
|
| > the author could have stipulated motor vehicles and a 400
| ft FAA air ceiling boundary to the park
|
| Then there'd been new 'trick' questions with new edge cases
| where people are split too.
|
| I think you might have misunderstood the expierement, did
| you get to the end where the author explain his intention?
| This set of questions aren't a challenge, just a game to
| illustrate a point.
| dahart wrote:
| > did you get to the end
|
| Yes, I did. The end is precisely the annoying part, and
| is making the same 'it's hopeless' argument as the blog
| post here. The author said "Some people think there could
| be simple rules [...] I want to problematize this.", and
| " pinning down a definition is usually impossible", and
| "You might think you can add enough epicycles to your
| rules to avoid this problem". He concedes that one can
| reduce the problem in the middle of paragraph 5 after
| stating over and over that the problem is insurmountable.
|
| I think some folks are misunderstanding my comment; I'm
| aware that moderation and laws are hard, and that edge
| cases are fractal whack-a-mole. I'm pushing back on the
| summary take-away message, on the framing. It's a
| subtlety, but I think an important one. I don't think the
| right message to send as the top and foremost idea is
| that it's impossible, and making it any better is a
| complete and total slog that introduces exponential
| problems. I think a better message is that words can be
| interpreted in many ways, so care is required, and with
| effort it's possible to make significant improvements.
| And I think the 'no vehicles' in the park _could_ have
| easily demonstrated that just a few words would have
| fixed the bulk of the issue, but the author chose not to
| in order to serve the framing he intended.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Then there'd been new 'trick' questions with new edge
| cases where people are split too.
|
| Yeah, and they'd be orders of magnitude less important.
|
| Agreement across a selection of events, weighted by
| likelihood of actually happening, would skyrocket.
|
| The amount of effort it takes to improve agreement by a
| certain amount is very relevant to the point being made.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > And yet, the author could have stipulated motor vehicles
| and a 400 ft FAA air ceiling boundary to the park, and most
| of the trick questions in that survey that generated
| disagreement would suddenly flip to everyone answering them
| correctly.
|
| Sure; but people don't read a screed of small-print
| legalese when walking into a park with a matchbox car in
| their pocket. And similarly, people don't read 20 pages of
| legalese terms-of-use before posting to a forum. The rules
| for getting on with those around us need to be as simple as
| the Ten Commandments. Violating rules about what's allowed
| in a park generally doesn't lead to litigation, so you
| don't need a litigation-proof legal code to express those
| rules.
|
| Many schools have a small set of concise rules constructed
| by the students, and I wish national laws were more like
| that.
| dahart wrote:
| This is a new different goalpost, right? The survey was
| about how clear the rule is, about whether the rule can
| be understood, not whether people will read or follow it.
|
| Btw I feel like I didn't propose a screed of small-print
| legalese. I'm asking why the actual survey couldn't say
| 'no motor vehicles in the park, up to 400ft AGL', and
| compare the results to 'no vehicles in the park'. That
| statement without any legalese or fine print would have
| covered most of the tricky answers, and this whole survey
| _could_ have been used to show how easy it is to make
| progress with relatively simple refinements.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 1. "In the park" shall be construed as meaning below
| 400ft.
|
| 2. "A vehicle" shall include: 2.1 any
| conveyance with two or more wheels, suitable for
| transporting one or more adult humans 2.2 any
| powered flying object, whether or not it is capable of
| conveying people of whatever size
|
| 3. This rule does not apply to the following vehicles:
| 3.1 Emergency vehicles attending an emergency
| 3.2 Wheelchairs, when being used by a registered disabled
| person
|
| I could go on ad nauseam; you simply can't cover all the
| cases. You have to accept that rules have to be
| interpreted; and once you accept that, it's clear that
| simpler rules are better. Ideally, The Golden Rule would
| be enough: treat others as you would expect to be treated
| yourself. But a lot of people treat that rule as the
| specimen example that proves that rules are made to be
| broken.
| dahart wrote:
| Not sure if we're talking past each other; I'm not
| arguing that "all" cases can be covered, nor whether
| rules have to be interpreted. I agree with you that
| simple rules are better, which is why I tried giving an
| example of one that is much simpler than your example
| ("no motor vehicles in the park below 400 ft AGL"). Yes
| it's clear that you can, if you want, construct a very
| long and complicated list, but that doesn't prove
| anything, right? Most parks and swimming pools and gyms
| have a longer list than your example. What would be
| interesting, and what I wish the 'no vehicles in the
| park' author had done, is measuring how much better
| adding 1 word or 5 words or 100 words is compared to
| leaving the rule super vague. I would predict there's
| easy low-hanging fruit with just a few words that would
| correct the majority of their trick questions, and then
| diminishing returns with a longer and longer list. A
| carefully worded middle ground is probably going to best
| balance trying to maximize conciseness and simplicity and
| clarity while minimizing confusion.
|
| That said, your example rule list above, if it was used
| for 'no vehicles in the park', would undermine the
| author's point and answer most of the questions
| definitively without confusion. Your example would
| demonstrate that adding rules increases clarity and
| reduces confusion.
| spc476 wrote:
| When I was in high school [1] students were given a rule
| book on the first day of school each year. It was always
| amusing to read the weapons rule: "No weapons are
| allowed, which include, but are not limited to ... "
| followed by a paragraph long list of "weapons." Many of
| the rules were like that, "blah blah which includes, but
| limited to ... " I can only conclude that such lists were
| the result of some student somewhere arguing that "this
| isn't a weapon."
|
| [1] In the, at the time, second or third largest school
| district in the US.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| > A huge portion of the 'no vehicles in the park' questions are
| already answered by existing US aviation laws, for example.
|
| Which evolved by arguing about rules, because landowners had
| the reasonable and probably correct expectation that their
| property rights extended upwards to infinity.
|
| > Another huge swatch of the questions would have been answered
| if the rule was 'no motor vehicles in the park'.
|
| It's trivial that changing the rule to make it narrower changes
| the outcome. But then people won't agree about whether the
| change should be made. How annoying a vehicle is isn't
| determined by its method of propulsion.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| This is why the tank example is the most interesting one.
| Because clearly by any standard it is a vehicle in the park,
| but clearly its function in the park is completely out of
| scope of what the rule is trying to achieve.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I think the park rule would work better if it were "Don't be an
| ass in the park".
|
| I think most of us would agree on what that means. The guy
| parachuting into the park, for example, is clearly in violation,
| whereas the ambulance driver and kids playing with toys are ok.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Most of "us", but what about "them" over there?
| pixl97 wrote:
| And yet the world is filled with so many assholes of different
| sorts, in practice it would never work.
| renewiltord wrote:
| What, I'm fine with the parachutist. This is totally consensus
| bias.
| Karellen wrote:
| Very few people think they're the one's being an ass. They have
| a perfectly valid justification for why what they're doing is
| not being an ass. It's everyone _else_ that 's the problem.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
| richrichie wrote:
| Moderation is a bad idea, especially on places like hacker news.
| Blasphemy.
| jmull wrote:
| It's hard to tell if you're joking but in case this is meant
| seriously or is taken seriously...
|
| HN _is_ heavily moderated and it certainly wouldn 't be the
| place it is without it.
| eviks wrote:
| It may be impossible, but those contrived games don't illustrate
| that. For example, it sternly warns that the responders should
| disregard all rules from their day-to-day lives, which would
| simply not happen, people don't clean their minds for some games
| and will apply other those other things when making decisions.
| Also, as is common in these games, they're underspecified, so a
| lot of "disagreement" is just differences in terminology. So you
| can be in agreement on the policy (that this type of vehicle/non-
| vehicle) should be allowed in the park while disagreeing on the
| definition
|
| Also, if your failure mode is for someone to "called for her to
| be physically assaulted, doxed, etc.,", then agreement is
| irrelevant, you can be in total agreement on rules and still call
| that for non-rule-specific reasons (people are complicated and
| have emotions)
|
| But the main fail is in reducing agreement to a binary, so that's
| why "Exactly. There is a clear majority in the answers" is
| correct an a recipe for having a broadly popular moderation
| policy
| lazide wrote:
| My experience is that the fundamental issue is that people agree
| or disagree on things for the most part based on their perceived
| location relative to 'the group', not based on if they think the
| thing itself is actually reasonable or not. At least within some
| (surprisingly large) bounds.
|
| Some people will fundamentally 'center' on what they think the
| group will think, others will 'go more', others will 'go less',
| and some will 'go opposite'. A few will go 'fully independent',
| but they'll only take 'independent' directions no one else has
| taken, which isn't actually independent.
|
| If modeled out with one set of 'group thought', I'd be surprised
| if it followed anything but a bell curve.
|
| It's why things are so all over the place right now online - the
| same process is happening, but with infinite apparent 'groups'.
| So it's scattering things more randomly than would historically
| have happened. Maybe even an inverse bell curve, actually.
|
| Rationalization then happens after the fact.
|
| It's the Overton window, but what happens when there is not a
| single window - but everyone nearly has their own, custom window.
| xeromal wrote:
| I wish there was a button I could hit to format this site into
| something readable about 8-10 inches wide.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Un-maximize your browser window, then resize it to 9 inches
| wide.
| xeromal wrote:
| Too lazy to do that. Need a button
| brabel wrote:
| In Firefox (and I think many browsers) there's a button.
| It's called "reader view". It looks like a page with some
| text on it.
| xeromal wrote:
| Thank you this is exactly what I'm looking for
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| You have a button. It's that button right next to the
| window's close button.
| xeromal wrote:
| Got a screenshot? I don't see it. My screen reader shows
| me a minus and an X
| alexmolas wrote:
| Some months ago I did https://danluucination.github.io/, which
| is danluu site but with some CSS
| fabianholzer wrote:
| Copy your favorite classless css framework into this:
| https://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/make-bookmarklet.html -
| drag the bookmarklet into your favorite bar, and there you are
| :)
|
| body { max-width: 9in; }
|
| Could be a minimalistic starting point ;)
| Retr0id wrote:
| On Firefox, this button is Ctrl+Alt+R
| 5cott0 wrote:
| Something we can all agree on.
| alexmolas wrote:
| If you look this from a statistical point of view it turns out
| that people agree a lot. Out of all the 2**26 (~26M) possible
| sets of opinions only 9432 different opinions are generated. We
| have data for around 37k users, so if users opinion was so
| special we would expect around 37k different opinions, but we
| only have 4k.
|
| It would also interesting to see how many different opinions are
| there if you allow fuzzy matching. Users disagreeing in only 1 or
| 2 questions probably have the same idea of what the rule means.
| rvnx wrote:
| Once you do the test, you understand that "Why it's impossible
| to agree on what's allowed" is actually the opposite: a proof
| that the vast majority of people manage to agree even on
| ambiguous or unspecified rules.
|
| So the whole promise "this is a proof that moderation is
| impossible" is actually unproven.
| j2kun wrote:
| His ultimate point:
|
| > No large platform can satisfy user preferences because users
| will disagree over what content should be moderated off the
| platform and what content should be allowed.
|
| But he makes to attempt to say what we should do about it. In my
| view, we should not try to make explicit coding of rules so
| precise as to be automatable, but rather make it clear, to the
| communities the platforms serve, what the values are that
| underlie the rules, and to say "apply the rules in line with
| their spirit." This is the same sort of reasoning humans use in
| everyday life, it's why you don't get ticketed for jaywalking
| across an empty street, and it's why courts get flexibility with
| their interpretations of law.
|
| The value underlying "no vehicles in the park" is that a park
| should be a place for recreation and all-ages shared use. This
| implies the space should be free from the danger posed by the
| regular traffic of a busy street. A motorized wheelchair doesn't
| pose this danger so it is allowed. Nor does a bicycle, unless
| we're talking about a large amount of bicycles representing a
| heavy flow of traffic, because that traffic would be dangerous to
| kids in the park.
| bloopernova wrote:
| This is partly why I really liked the idea of Slashdot's meta-
| moderation. Although it could probably be gamed by enough
| determined people.
|
| Moderators should be moderated too, because just like humanity in
| general, there's going to be a spread of skill levels among the
| mods.
|
| I wonder if there's ever been a site that has "moderator karma",
| a score/scores by which a moderator's "performance" can be
| measured. History of that score too would be interesting to see,
| potentially showing if a mod has deteriorated in their judgement
| lately, stuff like that.
|
| It feels like there could be more done to find useful data about
| moderation decisions.
| winwang wrote:
| I've thought a bit about this. Some revenue sharing for top
| mods and corporate oversight (with statistical tooling) to
| incentivize continued good moderation. Public moderation
| actions and votes on them, etc.
| wmf wrote:
| Slashdot had a rule that factually wrong posts cannot be
| downvoted. I disagree with this rule. If I exercise "moderator
| nullification" by breaking this rule, what are meta-moderators
| supposed to do? Should they follow Slashdot's rules exactly or
| should they also yield to their personal values? I don't think
| adding more layers solves anything.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| I have enjoyed the game, although I find that it is really
| inconsistent with reality. The reality is that there is a judge,
| an authority, an enforcing body, and contingencies for failures
| of each of those.
|
| One example is that in my house, you're not allowed to use
| profanities around children. Who determines the profanity? I do.
| I'm the authority. I'm the judge. I'm also the enforcer.
|
| In the event of a rule break, a warning is given, and if the rule
| is accepted, it isn't spoken of again. If there's pushback
| against the rule, it will include an explanation of the
| enforcement. For this to be successful, there has to be
| consistent enforcement, an explanation of the authority that I
| hold, and the prefect execution of judgment rendered.
|
| My family knows that profanities exist, we patents use them at
| times privately, that people use them in different capacities,
| and for different reasons, yet under my direction they will not
| be used in my house. This isn't a value judgment of a guest's
| usage but one of teaching control over one's tongue while under
| my authority.
| interestica wrote:
| > The reality is that there is a judge, an authority, an
| enforcing body, and contingencies for failures of each of
| those.
|
| The reality is that interpretation can change over time. There
| are a few major court rulings that have been subsequently ruled
| differently. Heck, the fact that the Surpreme Court is not
| likely to be unanimous demonstrates that even the judges will
| disagree.
| dambi0 wrote:
| Do you have a list of profanities that you share with your
| guests before they enjoy your hospitality?
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| So when you're gone they can swear to their hearts content? (ie
| there are no laws if a cop isn't looking?)
| fargle wrote:
| this shows why it's impossible _for "HN" readers and like-minded
| people_ to agree on anything. the _entire_ rest of mankind isn 't
| bothered by such nonsense:
|
| - the bureaucrat that comes up with the sign does not carefully
| consider the wording of the sign nor the ordinance, it's
| frequently more than a little vague, but it doesn't matter. his
| point is to assert control over something, no matter how trivial.
| a long complicated, precisely worded sign is unhelpful to him,
| simple words and having a good amount of ambiguity are both to
| his benefit.
|
| - the guy that does whatever the sign says not to on purpose
| parks his lifted truck on a boulder in the middle park after
| ripping up the grass a little. if the police were around he
| wouldn't do this, but they aren't, so he is definitely not a
| coward or a conformist at all. his girlfriend regrets her
| choices.
|
| - the police are who enforces the rule, so it's irrelevant
| whether they are breaking the rule or not. the other emergency
| services operate, in the police's opinion, under their
| protection/direction, so they're usually ok too.
|
| - the pedant pulls out the oxford dictionary and argues about
| whether a stroller or the aircraft or tank on display technically
| violates the rule. nobody notices unless another pedant shows up
| and starts quoting HN statistics or arguing the virtues of
| webster's vs. oxford. it's irrelevant anyhow because neither of
| them know how to drive, which is honestly the ethical thing. an
| argument breaks out about whether the reason it's ethical is
| because of pedestrian fatalities or global warming.
|
| - nobody cares whether the tank is a violating the rules because
| it weighs 50 tons (ok damnit you pedant 42 tons), the owner is
| the city who isn't going to fine itself, and nobody is going to
| tow that thing.
|
| - karen shows up and tries to tell a much more socially adept mom
| that her stroller is a vehicle and against the rules. when the
| karen is first ignored and then told _exactly_ where to stick it,
| thanks to tik-tok the community has an ad-hoc emergency real-time
| vote about the issue and the consensus is that karen is burned at
| the stake, metaphorically (usually).
|
| - everybody else notices (or doesn't) the sign, doesn't read it
| that carefully, and just mostly does what everyone else does
| anyhow.
|
| - the park department eventually puts up bollards that
| effectively define "vehicle" as things that do not get stuck on
| and fit through the bollards. Excepting the things that got
| lifted in there by a crane or have the key to the gate.
|
| in actual fact, everybody does sort of agree in real life. even
| the assholes that don't follow the rules usually know it (i mean,
| that's the whole point). a few folks are truly oblivious, but
| they usually just do what everyone else does anyhow.
| efitz wrote:
| The whole reason that we're having such a disagreement on
| moderation is that moderation has been weaponized for political
| purposes.
|
| This has happened over and over - Twitter, Reddit, Facebook,
| YouTube, Wikipedia, even here (try posting a skeptical take on
| climate news).
|
| I don't know what the rules should be. But I don't think that we
| can have well informed people if a small subset are allowed to
| filter what ideas people are even allowed to consider.
| lazide wrote:
| Or it's all a proxy for control over the identity of society,
| and what is and is not allowed - and who is in control for
| defining it.
|
| It's an ideological war.
|
| Often these escalate to actual violence.
|
| It's also a common (real) thread behind domestic violence, IMO.
|
| Incompatible world views coupled with inability to actually
| integrate them successfully in a workable way.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| > The next most naive suggestion is to stop downranking memes,
| dumb jokes, etc., often throw in with a comment like "doesn't
| anyone here have a sense of humor?".
|
| The fact that forums that don't aggressively moderate for picspam
| (so-called "memes") become dominated by picspam is exactly why
| any moderated forum needs to aggressively moderate such content
| if it wants to be a platform for intelligent discussion. On large
| social media where you're effectively doing the moderation
| yourself (think Twitter), that's why you have to mute or unfollow
| users who regularly post picspam.
|
| To make an online community usable, you have to moderate it to
| systematically exclude low IQ users or the entire community
| becomes low IQ and completely unusable. Stupid content gets
| enormous amounts of engagement. This wasn't as big of an issue in
| the past when the internet was less mainstream because stupid
| people weren't on it in significant numbers.
|
| A badly moderated community moderates for a particular set of
| opinions that the mods agree with rather than for IQ. That means
| it becomes filled with stupidity that people on that side agree
| with. Most moderated communities go that route because it's
| easier to filter for opinion rather than intelligence but it
| makes them worthless for any kind of serious discussion.
|
| Moderating for civility is one filter that works somewhat well
| because many stupid people resort to ad hominem attacks (think
| stupid nicknames for political opponents) as if they were
| arguments. But intelligent people are sometimes uncivil
| especially if they run out of patience arguing with an idiot.
| Things can also get heated between people who are friendly and
| intelligent if they have an irreconcilable disagreement on a
| topic both feel strongly about. Such debates often get wrongly
| confused for flame wars by mods so you do have to be careful
| about applying civility rules.
|
| Of course, any social media platform that wants a large
| mainstream audience is not going to follow this approach to
| moderation because you'd be systematically excluding at least the
| bottom 85% or so of the population to maintain a platform that's
| usable for high IQ people. If you assume 2 standard deviations
| above average as the minimum to be capable of intelligent
| thought, you're looking at excluding 98% or so of the population.
|
| In short, I disagree with the author's opinion that most people
| don't want a social media completely dominated by stupid "jokes"
| and picspam. I think that's exactly what most people want which
| is why platforms that value user growth and engagement over
| quality of discussion tend to converge on being dominated by
| stupid comments, pictures and videos. The next step after that is
| to remove or shadowban stuff the advertisers don't like which
| results in moderation based on viewpoint. Reddit is Reddit
| because that's what is most profitable for Reddit. The only way
| out of that vicious cycle is for a community to not rely on ad
| revenue and care about maximizing intelligent conversation not
| engagement.
| coldtea wrote:
| The "No Vehicles in the Park" game is not so much about the
| impossibility to agree on what rules to set (like "no vehicles in
| the park"), as it is about the ambiguity of rules (what is a
| vehicle? where does the park begin and end? are emergency
| vehicles OK?).
|
| Using a common sense intepretation, solves most of the
| "insurmountable" issues it presents, even though the way the game
| is setup is supposed to prove how that's impossible, in practice,
| real parks, with real similar restrictions, don't have those
| problems - or extremely rarely, and mostly with individuals with
| mental health issues which would contest the rules whatever they
| were.
|
| Apparently when it's not about contrived scenarios in test form,
| those issues don't really occur.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| Is there an easy way to make sites like these more readable? With
| the wall to wall text on a 32" monitor, negligible margins, small
| text interspersed with giant graphs with giant captions, it's a
| bit hard to move past the form and focus on function.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Try turning on reader view in your browser. This puts the text
| into a much more readable column.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The rule says, "No vehicles in the park"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36453856 - June 2023 (1186
| comments)
| codeflo wrote:
| "You agreed with the majority: 100%"
|
| Which proves it's not actually impossible, the majority opinion
| is actually sensible, and this take is incorrect. Case closed.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| The fact that you agreed with the majority answer to each of
| the individual questions, 100% of the time, does not mean that
| there is widespread agreement on the rules, which is part of
| what this article gets at.
| codeflo wrote:
| But there is widespread agreement. Looking at the graphs, the
| only questions where opinions are in the 40%-60% range are
| the bike and the tank memorial. Neither of those two is even
| in the 45%-55% range, and on everything else, there's an even
| clearer majority. So even this intentionally and
| unrealistically vague rule would work in practice. This
| proves the opposite point of what's claimed here.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I don't think the rule was intentionally or unrealistically
| vague at all - to the contrary, it was extremely
| straightforward, and the directions ask you to ignore any
| preconceived notions, such as laws in your jurisdiction.
|
| What's clear to me from the graph - and the author of this
| article - is that it's unlikely for any one person to agree
| with any other one person on how the rule should be
| enforced - in at least one (or likely many) circumstances,
| you will probably disagree.
| codeflo wrote:
| You think that any rule in any realistic scenario would
| be just a single sentence containing an ambiguous word
| without any known surrounding context, clarifications,
| examples, or rationale? I've never seen such a thing.
| This scenario is completely contrived, and _still_ , it
| kind of worked.
| glitchc wrote:
| I did the quiz, got 93%. The common sense factor should prevail
| in all circumstances.
|
| First, An implicit assumption. No vehicle implies no motor
| vehicle.
|
| Second: The purpose of the park, namely to allow people to enjoy
| nature.
|
| Third, the rationale for the rule: A motor vehicle is much faster
| and heavier than every other entity using the park. Ergo, it has
| the capacity to cause great harm (ex. running over a soccer
| team).
|
| One can deep-dive all manner of philosophical arguments, but the
| principle of least harm while allowing maximum freedom is the
| true, unspoken rule. Ergo, any vehicle that can co-exist without
| hampering or endangering others enjoying the park is okay.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't think the problem is that people disagree on obvious
| non-edge-cases
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Clearly the rule is too broad and thus it's ambiguous. Simply
| restating the rules in precise terms will solve the problem.
|
| I've been in parks where a dozens or more bylaws are listed at
| the entry to the park. Thus little is left to the imagination.
| If a dozen rules isn't enough then just add more [detail] until
| the right level of compliance is achieved.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Adding detail to rules doesn't increase compliance. In fact,
| as fewer people become willing to engage with their length
| and complexity, it probably decreases it.
| squigz wrote:
| Do you really think most people read and comply with a dozen
| or more rules listed at a park?
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| > Ergo, any vehicle that can co-exist without hampering or
| endangering others enjoying the park is okay.
|
| "I'm a good driver, so my lifted F-150 is such a vehicle"
| spencerflem wrote:
| hampers them, they have to be worried about being run over
| airstrike wrote:
| > but the principle of least harm while allowing maximum
| freedom is the true, unspoken rule
|
| Exactly. Life and liberty, in that order
| raverbashing wrote:
| Pretty much this
|
| Also, the articles tries to pull the "there's no majority
| opinion" which is a sneaky trick and it's false. Because no,
| you can't consider the set as indivisible and one set of
| opinions different from the other, when they only differ by
| something like "if a tank should be considered". This is a
| similar problem to the air force finding out there's no
| standard human
|
| And I'd say that, as much as lawyers like to play gotcha with
| the laws, I think you'd find the average lawyer is more
| realistic and practical than the "actually" takes here on this
| park problem
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| What are you talking about? If you have the set {A, B, C} and
| {A, B, not C}, those are two different sets. And the
| difference is going to matter precisely when C or not C comes
| into effect.
|
| Like imagine two parks - you have Central Park in nyc that is
| full of statues, sculptures, etc. And you have a National
| Park that is essentially a pristine nature reserve with some
| back roads in it. The majority opinion of "if a tank should
| be considered" is going to change drastically between those
| two parks
| whakim wrote:
| But if you look at the graph of response sets it clearly isn't
| "common sense." Most people _don't_ agree and don't come close
| to agreeing and, as Dan says, this is a fairly trivial example
| which doesn't delve into corner cases.
| lukan wrote:
| My takeaway is, the rule was just bad defined. If you define
| crystal clear rules, things are different.
|
| And they usually are much clearer defined:
|
| - no cars
|
| - no drones
|
| - no noise
|
| (emergency cars allways gets an exception)
|
| The tank example was not clear whether they just put it there
| because they wanted to, or because they had permission. So
| yes, when you have unclear rules, you get Drama.
|
| So of course there remain corner cases. But they can be the
| exception and not the norm. I do remember some fallout for
| example when at corona times a police car with high speed
| chased a teenager through a park for not wearing a mask -
| nope, this was not an emergency, justifying annoying and
| endangering normal people in the park. But usually this does
| not happen.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > My takeaway is, the rule was just bad defined
|
| To reflect real life: there is a reason why rules aren't
| specific and allow for judgement calls. Your clearer rules
| for instance, allows for manned flying vehicles like
| helicopters.
| lukan wrote:
| - no noise
|
| Also you don't have to specify rules that are covered by
| general law. In most states it is illegal anyway, to fly
| low altitude with helicopters over populated areas for
| fun.
| whakim wrote:
| But you're just moving the goalposts. According to your
| rules, a toy car should be banned. Should we define in
| excruciating detail what a car is? Should we define an
| exact decibel level at which the noise threshold kicks in?
| People will always argue about what constitutes a rule
| violation - for example, _you_ don't believe that the
| police car should have been allowed to chase a teenager for
| failing to wear a mask, but I'm sure there's plenty of
| people who disagree. Should we define "emergency" to the
| nth degree? Does the park need a 13-volume rulebook?
| lukan wrote:
| "Should we define an exact decibel level at which the
| noise threshold kicks in?"
|
| Possible, but usually not necessary. With noise, any
| unnecessary noise is meant. If a baby cries that is hard
| to prevent, but the parent will still try. If some
| hooligans howling around - that should not happen.
|
| "According to your rules, a toy car should be banned"
|
| My rules would - like usually - contain a symbol as well,
| making it clear with "car" a real "car" is meant. And toy
| cars that do produce loud noise - yes, I would ban those.
| They can be really annoying.
|
| It depends what kind of park it should be. There are
| parks, where even playing kids are not wanted. (fancy
| castle parks) In a city park, it depends on what the
| people want - and yes, you can have text under the park
| rule sign, which is how I know it.
|
| Usually the guidline should be common sense and not
| disturbing others - but for those cases where people
| disagree - then you can refer to the rules.
| whakim wrote:
| As long as you're appealing to "common sense" at any
| level then people will disagree. 1 in 10 people think
| piloting a commercial airliner over the park violates a
| "no vehicles in the park" rule, which seems crazy to me
| but obviously logical to others.
| lukan wrote:
| "but for those cases where people disagree - then you can
| refer to the rules."
| whakim wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we're just going round in circles now.
| The point is that people disagree about _everything_ , so
| anything you leave up to "common sense" will cause
| disagreement. Any you can't possibly define rules for
| everything either.
| lukan wrote:
| No, "common sense" is the default. And where that is not
| enough - you can have rules for most common cases, to
| settle any dispute. And if there are edge cases that
| frequently cause disturbance where no clear rules cover
| them - then those cases can be put into the rules. It is
| not that complicated.
| glitchc wrote:
| Just picking up on the tank example, I said no since the
| tank would need a motor vehicle to get there.
| Delk wrote:
| "No noise" is certainly not clear-cut. It may seem that way
| from any subjective perspective of what counts as noise,
| and it can seem so obviously right, but it's certainly not
| objective or universal. Which, I believe, is part of the
| point of the post.
|
| Apart from that, let me give a real-world example of how
| clear-cut things become not so clear-cut, from a legal or
| rules point of view. Where I live, vehicles and other means
| of traffic used to be clearly divided into categories:
|
| - Cars are, well, cars
|
| - A motorcycle is a motorized two-wheeled vehicle with an
| engine displacement greater than 50 cubic centimetres or
| with a maximum speed of more than 45 km/h
|
| - A moped is a motorized two-wheeled vehicle with both
| engine displacement and maximum speed less than above.
| (It's still a motorized vehicle but the legislation is
| somewhat laxer in parts due to lower power and speed.)
|
| - A bicycle is a non-motorized, human-powered vehicle with
| at least two wheels
|
| - Roller skates, skateboards, kick scooters etc. are not
| considered vehicles, so any person travelling on them is
| considered a pedestrian.
|
| There may have been some other categories but you get the
| general idea.
|
| Cars and motorcycles aren't allowed on bike paths. That
| would also include parks. Mopeds may be allowed on bike
| paths by an explicit sign, although you aren't likely to
| see one on a park path.
|
| Then someone comes up with the electric bicycle.
|
| Since the bicycle is defined as non-motorized, and an
| electric bike clearly has a motor, does it count as a
| bicycle or a moped? Is it allowed on bike paths? Or in
| parks?
|
| It's not entirely an academic matter of definitions either.
| An e-bike running 30 or 35 km/h may not be fast enough to
| ride on the street among car traffic, and most people
| probably wouldn't be comfortable riding one there. Also,
| it's slow enough that most car drivers probably wouldn't
| want those in the street. But in addition to being
| motorized by definition, such an e-bike might also be
| practically kind of fast for urban bicycle paths. People on
| bicycle paths started feeling uncomfortable with e-bikes
| zooming by, not to mention pedestrians on shared
| pedestrian/bike paths.
|
| So, where do e-bikes belong? Where are they allowed?
|
| And once you've solved that one way or another, someone
| comes up with the electric scooter. Their speed may also
| vary from somewhat faster than walking speed to something
| resembling fast e-bikes. Is the person riding one a
| pedestrian? A bicyclist, similarly to e-bikes? Is the
| vehicle a moped instead? Should you be allowed to ride an
| electric scooter going 30 km/h in a park? One with a
| maximum speed of 25 km/h? If not, what about the lycra-
| wearing dude on a bike going upwards of 30 km/h?
|
| If all of the above are allowed, why aren't mopeds or
| motorbikes if they stick to riding no more than 30 km/h?
| Because of the noise? What if they're electric?
|
| And this is while still staying reasonably objective. If
| the electric bicyclist or scooter rider is disallowed from
| parks or bike paths but a road cyclist going over 30 km/h
| is allowed, in some significant number of people that's
| going to spark a sense of unfairness. If their views aren't
| heard, that can lead to resentment. Some of the people who
| don't care for any two-wheeled vehicles and who just want
| to enjoy a stroll don't want to be scared by anyone going
| too fast.
|
| What should or shouldn't be allowed, or indeed what's
| reasonable and what isn't, definitely isn't clear-cut in a
| sense that people in general can agree on.
|
| Forum or social media moderation is certainly going to be a
| _lot_ more up to interpretation than that depending on
| people 's values, personal experiences, context, etc.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, you can have speed limits. Forbid ICE engines
| (noise).
|
| Also forbid or allow skateboarding (noise)
|
| etc.
|
| "What should or shouldn't be allowed, or indeed what's
| reasonable and what isn't, definitely isn't clear-cut in
| a sense that people in general can agree on."
|
| Yeah, it is not. It depends what the park aims for to
| please and what the majority of its visitors expect. But
| you can have clear rules that cover most common cases.
|
| Same with social media.
|
| No need to cover ALL cases. Reality _is_ complicated. And
| if a edge case happens often - you can make a new rule.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I got 100% agreement with the simple rule of "no driving car-
| like things into/through the park".
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| So no RC-cars? It is a car-like thing (in fact it is just a
| very-small-car thing)
| Eridrus wrote:
| You can be obtuse if you like, but the point is that if you
| try and think of what the most likely interpretation is,
| you can nail it on the head with no issue.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| > least harm while allowing maximum freedom is the true
|
| According to who?
|
| Is your quadcopter allowed to videotape and infringe on my
| right to privacy?
|
| Is the added noise of someone having a BBQ party in the park a
| harm or not? What about people drinking?
|
| > Ergo, any vehicle that can co-exist without hampering or
| endangering others enjoying the park is okay.
|
| So are cop cars allowed? Cops routinely drive into parks to
| harass homeless people or arrest drug dealers. Are you ruining
| their enjoyment of the parks?
| hattar wrote:
| > right to privacy
|
| In a public park?
|
| > So are cop cars allowed
|
| No, but a thing about rules is that they generally only work
| if there's someone who is able and willing to enforce them.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| > In a public park?
|
| There is a reasonable expectation of privacy. So if you
| went around with a big TV camera and just started sticking
| it in people's face, that would get the cops called on you
| real quick.
| lolinder wrote:
| The question of what hamper is or endangers others is far from
| objective, though. I would interpret the rule to ban
| skateboards and drones from the park if it were up to me
| because I find that they get in the way of my personal
| enjoyment of spaces like that, but I know plenty of other
| people who would disagree with that interpretation.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| Can an ambulance enter the park to save someone in a life
| threatening emergency?
|
| If many trees fall in a natural disaster, can a tree removing
| vehicle enter the park?
| krisoft wrote:
| > Can an ambulance enter the park to save someone in a life
| threatening emergency?
|
| But that is not what the question asks. Of course we should
| let an ambulance enter. Especially if they are there to save
| someone's life. They violate the rule, but we ignore the rule
| for this specific case.
|
| The text of the quiz explicitly asks for this: " You might
| know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local
| rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please
| disregard these rules;"
|
| And "Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is
| violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)."
|
| Simply many people are realy bad at this type of thinking.
| They know what they think the answer should be, and they
| answer accordingly, instead of answering as requested a much
| more contrived and technical question.
| bagels wrote:
| Usually these things are applied with discretion, even if not
| literally allowed by a sign.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I often wonder about electric bicycles. There are certain
| trails around here that are very strenuous to bike on. As a
| hiker, I don't mind dodging the occasional cyclist on them.
| Instead I just respect that cyclist. This works because they
| are few.
|
| Lately, there have been many more cyclists on this trail. Many
| of which are less experienced. When I witness an accident I
| often make bets with my dog: I bet it was an ebike in violation
| of the "no motor vehicles" rule. I'm usually right.
|
| Do you think it's appropriate to consider this controversial
| notion when deciding what rules to enforce?
|
| > Cyclists on ebikes tend to be less skilled than other
| cyclists, in potentially dangerous ways.
|
| Because it's really not about the vehicle at all.
| Rapzid wrote:
| You shouldn't really need to wonder about this. Trail systems
| are starting to specify if motorized bicycles are allowed,
| and most of them only allow motor _assist_ bikes.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm not uncertain about the rules. They're not allowed
| here. I'm uncertain about whether I'd like to see those
| rules enforced.
|
| Mostly, I don't want to see rules enforced except when the
| consequences are significant: Be good, or be good at it,
| either works.
|
| I feel a bit weird compromising on this stance because I
| think ebike riders are generally not skilled enough to
| safely navigate these trails.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| In most jurisdictions e-bikes are motor vehicles. Frequently
| if they are under 1000 watts they are in a special class of
| motor vehicle, same as mopeds/scooters. Technically they are
| typically not legal to have on bike paths, as motor vehicles.
| But this varies by jurisdiction.
|
| Over the 1000 watt limit (1200w or 1500w some places) they
| tend to be considered motorcycles and require a license and
| break lights at a minimum to be legal.
|
| Basically everyone ignores this and treats them like regular
| manual bicycles though.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| You are clearly in the majority. But let's pick another person
| at random -- what is the probability that you agree on all
| questions? (Hint: it's not 93%!)
|
| You are aligned with majority opinion, but you still disagree
| with most people.
|
| ---
|
| There is some similarity to the problem the USAF faced when
| they wanted to make a cockpit that fit the average pilot:
|
| >Using the size data he had gathered from 4,063 pilots, Daniels
| calculated the average of the 10 physical dimensions believed
| to be most relevant for design, including height, chest
| circumference and sleeve length. These formed the dimensions of
| the "average pilot," which Daniels generously defined as
| someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 per cent
| of the range of values for each dimension.
|
| >[...]
|
| >Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the
| average range on all 10 dimensions.
|
| https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
| jedberg wrote:
| I got 93% agreement based on a simple rule: It's a vehicle if it
| is touching the ground and powered with a motor.
|
| And if I were moderating a community, which I have done a lot of
| in the past, I would clarify the rules as soon as this
| disagreement popped up. This isn't a great experiment because it
| doesn't involve any judgement calls -- you can apply a (pretty
| simple) objective ruleset here.
|
| The main areas where I disagreed with the majority are a police
| car and ambulance. The police car and ambulance are clearly
| vehicles. People who said no were applying other rules. But again
| that rule is simple -- emergency services are exempt when
| responding to emergencies.
|
| Moderating actual communities is a lot more difficult because
| there aren't a simple objective set of rules you can apply.
| Judgement calls are necessary. We ran this experiment on reddit
| for a while. We would present the user with a link and ask them
| "is this spam". It was rare for a link to get 100% (or even 98%)
| yes. Only the very most obvious cases. Otherwise most links would
| be closer to 60-70% if it were "spammy". And only things like
| wikipedia would get close to 0%. Everything else in between was a
| spectrum.
|
| _That_ is what makes moderating hard.
|
| The conclusion of this experiment is correct, but I would say the
| methods are deeply flawed.
| TheNorthman wrote:
| I think you're reading the chart wrong. The majority does say
| that police cars and ambulances are not allowed in based on
| that rule.
|
| It is a bad chart though. I was confused too.
| jedberg wrote:
| Well I said yes and the bar was red, which says to me I
| disagreed with the majority. I assumed the bar indicated how
| many people said it wasn't since I said it was and the bar
| was red.
|
| But either way, when I said "is a vehicle" it said I
| disagreed with the majority.
|
| /shrug
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is the tank a vehicle?
| jedberg wrote:
| The question specified that the tank can't move under its own
| power because it has no motor anymore, so no.
|
| If the motor still worked and it was moved through the park
| with said motor, then yes.
|
| The real question here is how did they move the tank? Most
| likely with a powered vehicle, which would of course violate
| the rule. But I'm sure there would be a permitting process
| for temporarily allowing certain vehicles in the park, such
| as construction equipment.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| Okay so if we have tank with no motor is not a vehicle, and
| a tank with a motor is a vehicle then I have some follow up
| questions for you.
|
| - Is a tank with a motor that doesn't function a vehicle?
|
| - Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no keys in
| existence, a vehicle?
|
| - Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no wheels, a
| vehicle?
|
| - Is a tank, empty of gas (so unable to move by its own
| power), but otherwise functional a vehicle?
| jedberg wrote:
| Your questions are irrelvant. It didn't ask "is this a
| vehicle". It asked "is this a vehicle _in the park_ ". Is
| the tank touching the ground (yes) moving under its own
| power:
|
| - Is a tank with a motor that doesn't function a vehicle?
|
| No
|
| - Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no keys in
| existence, a vehicle?
|
| No
|
| - Is a tank with a functioning motor, but no wheels, a
| vehicle?
|
| No
|
| - Is a tank, empty of gas (so unable to move by its own
| power), but otherwise functional a vehicle?
|
| No
|
| Because in none of those cases can it move through the
| park under its own power.
|
| Like I said, there is no subjectivity here. The rules are
| simple and clear.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| See also, the impossibility of AI "Alignment"
|
| I think about this problem of coordinating human action pretty
| much constantly, and IMO it is the foundational challenge of all
| of humanity.
|
| It's beyond clear to me that aligning human desire (and codifying
| them) is mathematically impossible _even within the same
| individual over the lifetime of the person_.
|
| Why? Human desires and actions are not coherent, predictable or
| consistent, even to the Human making the actions. Self reported
| desires and goals will diverge in extreme ways through the
| lifetime of an agent.
|
| As a result, the foundational requirement of a stable and
| coherent system is an impossibility because the indivisible unit
| of measurement: The human, is not consistent with their goals.
|
| If the individual agent's goal criteria is not known, or worse is
| unknowable for future time steps (my claim), then there is no
| possible system that can be codified which does not impede an
| individual's action vector in favor for some other structure that
| promotes another individual's action vector, provided there is
| variability in the agent's goal vectors.
|
| Someone is going to be prevented from doing what they want to.
| Unfortunately there is no way to objectively determine a set of
| action-contexts that can be objectively agreed to satisfy all
| persons intended action-vectors, because of physics.
|
| People have attempted many ways at addressing this.
|
| Non-hierarchical formal structures rarely coalesce into long-
| lasting organizations because the actors typically reject any
| reduction to their autonomy on behalf of a larger organization.
| As a result they don't grow and are very susceptible to
| environmental "shocks." Examples of these are the existing small
| mutual-communities that generally never get much larger than the
| Dunbar's Number of whomever the most powerful organizer in the
| community is (~few 100 people).
|
| Hierarchical formal structures encode an opinionated version of
| how the agents within the system are limited in their actions to
| the benefit of a larger organizational structure. This has the
| benefit of growth and accretion of resources that would make the
| organization more robust to shocks, however in every case there
| are significant limits on the action-vectors of the agents in
| order to be part of the organization. Examples of these are
| religious faiths, which require significant adherence to social
| behaviors, and often have significant limitations on the
| behaviors of the actors to benefit from the group resources.
|
| There really isn't anything in between unfortunately. History
| shows that the latter types of groups will overrun all of the
| former types of groups when they are in competition for growth in
| some physical space.
|
| There do not exist social structures that are robust to
| significant changes in the composition of the criteria for
| success that do not create social divisions that realign power.
|
| I honestly don't know what to do about this because it seems
| intractable to make a future society that is coherent and stable
| given that the foundational unit of society is not coherent and
| stable.
| ribit wrote:
| I am a bit confused by this since I got agreement with over 90%
| of people. Are others getting much lower scores? My result
| suggests that is indeed possible to agree :)
| mic47 wrote:
| The problem is the argument over those 10%.
| Spivak wrote:
| That's not the author's point. The number of people that agrees
| with _all_ of your answers was likely very small. This is
| relevant to rule making systems because you have to make a
| decision on every situation yes /no, you can't leave undefined
| behavior, and the ruleset is adopted in totality.
|
| If you were part of a huge zoning board for example and you
| proposed your rules the set of people that have no issue with
| it less than 1%.
| geor9e wrote:
| You didn't get agreement from over 90% of people. That's not at
| all what it says. You agreed with the majority 90% of the time.
| If you don't understand the huge difference, let me illustrate
| an easier to understand example. Suppose 1000 people answered
| 1000 questions, and all answers individually are in a 50.1% vs
| 49.9% split. There's essentially no agreement at all in the
| group, but you got a 90% score yourself, simply by siding with
| the 50.1% majority on 90% of the questions. Suppose also all
| 1000 people each choose a unique set of the 100 to dissent
| about. So, you're in agreement with exactly 0%, the group
| itself essentially agreed about nothing, yet you still scored a
| 90%.
| cmaggiulli wrote:
| The vehicle in the park game seemed very obvious to me with a
| 100% result. I'm having a hard time imagining what others could
| have disagreed with.
|
| A vehicle is loosely defined as a human-sized ( but not
| necessarily human operated ), generally functioning motorized
| transport device. Emergency vehicles in the park technically
| violate the parks rule ( even though the violation is basically
| rendered meaningless ).
|
| A tank would be a vehicle even if it was inoperable, but not if
| it was intentionally made inoperable. It ceases to be a vehicle
| and instead becomes a display piece, memorial, etc.
|
| In the park means any land or water within the parks geographic
| bounds, but definitely not airspace.
|
| A toy is a toy. It may be a replica of a vehicle but it is not a
| vehicle. A bike, skateboard, rowboat, etc are not motorized and
| are therefore not a vehicle in the most common colloquial usage.
| interestica wrote:
| A bit more info on the origins of this. The original that David
| draws on is a hypothetical proposed by H.L.A. Hart in 1958. The
| original is looking specifically at law and the fact that even
| for 'settled meaning' of a term or phrase there will still be the
| "penumbra of debatable cases". (The penumbra being the almost-
| shadow between light and dark).
|
| > If we are to communicate with each other at all, and if, as in
| the most elementary form of law, we are to express our intentions
| that a certain type of behavior be regulated by rules, then the
| general words we use - like "vehicle" in the case I consider -
| must have some standard instance in which no doubts are felt
| about its application. There must be a core of settled meaning,
| but there will be, as well, a penumbra of debatable cases in
| which words are neither obviously applicable nor obviously ruled
| out.[1]
|
| I'm most fascinated by it from a UX perspective in public space:
| how will a user respond to 'penumbral' or edge-case data? Can
| that be used to refine wayfinding signage? How will a user react
| or change pathways when encountering information that doesn't
| fall right in that expected area? (Yes, I'm actually wondering of
| the implications of _actual_ signage, not just hypothetical.)
|
| We see it often in transit systems. It's where someone might
| misinterpret a sign or information (in a predictable manner) and
| latter blame themselves once they learn of the 'intended'
| information (which will seem obvious in hindsight). Yet, they are
| not to blame.
|
| [1] Harvard Law Review Vol. 71, No. 4 (Feb., 1958) - H.L.A. Hart
| - Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals [p607]
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/1338225 (note: it wasn't hard to
| find a copy via Google)
| yawboakye wrote:
| at the core of this is language, which is both a lossy medium for
| transmitting thoughts and-appears to be designed to be-ambiguous.
| it doesn't help too that we don't study it anymore, and seem to
| be slowly gravitating towards a small core vocabulary that is
| called into all sorts of services. our words are in tension at
| all times. on common sense, i'd define it as the substrate of all
| of one's experiences through life. it's empirical. there's no
| absolute common sense where there's no absolute experience. and
| that's why education and other forms of civilization-preserving
| socializations are important. where you find yourself in firm
| possession of common sense that your interlocutors seem to lack,
| be curious and learn about their life experience.
| bee_rider wrote:
| IMO another aspect that could have been highlighted is that
| really rule-enforcement is "part of the game," despite any
| attempt to take it out, and people will engage in strategies that
| attack the rules.
|
| There are lots of strategies that attack the rules in the
| pedantry space. One could post odious content that carefully is
| constructed to not break the rules. Or post odious content that
| breaks the rules in a manner similar to the rule-breaking of
| somebody you don't like, to highlight uneven enforcement. Post
| rule breaking content, but of a type which is generally non-
| odious and general not banned. Try to find room to quibble about
| what exactly justified an exception.
|
| I think the WWII tank is an interesting question. It is clearly a
| vehicle, so not allowed by the rule. But it is non-functioning,
| so it isn't at risk of violating the most likely intentions of
| the rule (to prevent noise and injuries). It is an unusual
| artifact in that it is a monument to a war which is generally
| considered (to a basically unmatched degree) to have been just.
| If we allow the tank, do we allow an Iraq war or Vietnam war
| tank? We just need to solve the question of which wars are just,
| first, I guess, so to enforce our no vehicles bylaw we'll have to
| solve all of politics. Or maybe add a "no war related monuments
| rule" which seems nice until a veterans group wants to donate a
| couple benches with little plaques on them.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > It is clearly a vehicle, so not allowed by the rule. But it
| is non-functioning
|
| If it's non-functioning it can't be a vehicle. Even without
| thinking deeply about it this seemed obvious to me.
|
| Reducing to the absurd, at what point can you strip down a
| vehicle until it is no longer a vehicle? Down to the
| powertrain? Down to the axles and wheels? Is a single
| uninflated tire without a wheel a vehicle?
| rini17 wrote:
| That's irrelevant. Someone leaving broken cars in the park or
| even only a few parts will certainly be considered a
| violation by a majority. To your objections they might say -
| it's littering anyway and we don't want that do we?
| wisty wrote:
| That's littering.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| Well, this sort of illustrates the point, because to me an
| object that would be a vehicle if it was functioning is
| clearly still a vehicle. A broken-down vehicle vehicle is
| still a vehicle, even if it's non-functioning. A car doesn't
| stop being a vehicle while it's in the shop.
|
| Perhaps there is another category for vehicles which are
| irreparably damaged and will never function again. But even
| then, I want to define it as a broken vehicle, a sub-type of
| a vehicle.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > A car doesn't stop being a vehicle while it's in the
| shop.
|
| To me a car doesn't stop being a _car_ , but it stops being
| a vehicle when it is not capable of a vehicular function.
|
| > But even then, I want to define it as a broken vehicle, a
| sub-type of a vehicle.
|
| We disagree.
|
| Would you consider the exterior armor frame of a tank
| resting on treads to be a vehicle, even if lacking all of
| the internal parts? Would you consider the internal parts
| to be a vehicle even if lacking all of the external
| framing? If it can't move (or carry people/objects) without
| mechanical repairs is where I draw the line. If adding
| fuel, oil, or any other consumable allows it to move then
| I'm fine calling a non-functional vehicle a vehicle.
|
| The real question is how many people did it take to carry
| that non-functional tank into the park? If they moved it in
| with another vehicle then it's obviously a violation of the
| vehicle ordinance. But carrying it in (as long as they
| didn't use something like logs to roll it on) is fine.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their
| jobs don't have to follow the sign.
|
| not obvious. there could be weight limits such that heavy
| vehicles like that could become trapped.
| jimberlage wrote:
| A reasonableness test (like what a court system uses) makes this
| quiz really easy to answer. Basically everything is either
| allowed or a margin case except for the person driving their
| Civic in the park.
|
| TBH, I think if you have this quiz to a non-engineer, they would
| come away wondering what the point is.
|
| Perhaps the answer is that content moderation should just let a
| judge make a decision and maybe appeal?
| smitty1e wrote:
| > the propensity of humans to pick on minute differences and
| attempt to destroy anyone who doesn't completely agree with them
| hasn't changed
|
| This invites the question of whether the proximal cause for
| destroying The Other is the issue, or merely a pretext for
| destruction.
|
| These situations can be as icebergs, with quite a bit going on
| out of view.
| epivosism wrote:
| This is nearly identical to a thought experiment I created on
| manifold markets about a real boat marina which has a sign saying
| "Boat Owners Only"
|
| https://manifold.markets/Ernie/boat-owners-only-sign-correct...
| 78% You can go in if your boat is in this marina right now.
| 77% If your boat here sinks can you go in? 71% If there is
| a fire and your boat stored here burns up partially and is not
| seaworthy, can you go in? 71% If your boat is here and you
| contracted a spot, but all legal record of that burned in a fire,
| and the only one who remembers who is still alive is you, and you
| paid cash, are you allowed in? 69% If your boat is here and
| you contracted a spot, but all legal record of that burned in a
| fire, are you allowed in? 66% If you owned a boat which is
| here, but it's been molecularly exchanged for identical but
| different atoms by aliens, you can go in 57% Only official
| owners of a specific but unspecified boat located on the dock are
| allowed through 56% You can go in if you own a real live
| seaworthy boat now anywhere in the world. 56% If you
| privately own the company that owns the boat, you may enter
| 53% The dock owner is not allowed to go in, unless he is or is
| with a boat owner 52% If you stole a boat, parked it here
| with a legal berth lease contract, then left, and return, can you
| go in? 50% If you are a shareholder in the company that
| owns the boat, you may pass 50% If California becomes
| officially Marxist, where ownership is an exclusive right of the
| state, can you anyone go in at all? 50% If the 24 hour
| video surveillance of the marina is disabled, that invalidates
| that sign immediately above, creating a presumption that all the
| signs on the fence are false, and making it the case that only
| non-boat owners are allowed. 50% You can go through if you
| open the gate 49% You can go in if you own any kind of boat
| in any condition in the world, including toy boats, model boats,
| Lego boats, virtual boats in baldurs gate etc. 47% The gate
| will prevent all non-boat owners from passing. Guests and
| passengers must swim 46% The sign isn't about who is
| allowed through, it's about the contents of what's on the other
| side. Everything beyond the fence is a Boat Owner. 45% You
| can go in if you have no boat, but plan to buy one someday and
| have a contract for a reserved berth space 44% If you own
| 1% of a boat here you can go in 39% You can go in if your
| spouse is a boat owner 38% If you own half a boat stored
| here legally you can go in 34% You can go in if you own a
| Binary Oxidizing Acetylitic Thermometer. 34% Bonus: people
| who own three boats stored here can alternate sleeping
| arrangements so that in any seven day period they never sleep in
| one more than 3 days, legally? 34% This market will
| entirely be excluded from leagues 34% You can go in if you
| are a former boat owner but have converted it to a sailplane,
| which is here. 34% You can go in if you are a leashed dog
| that doesn't own a boat, but is with a boat owner 34% You
| can go through if you have a contracted and paid berth here.
| 34% You can go in if you have a berth contract but are behind in
| payment. 32% You can go in if you have a rental boat stored
| here. 32% You can go in if you are a guest of someone who
| is a boat owner. 31% Ghosts are allowed because they say
| B.O.O. (Boat Owners Only), which is the password 25% You
| can go in if your grandpa is a boat owner 20% You can go in
| if you are ex navy.
|
| From being on that site for about a year, I learned a lot about
| how people think of laws, judgments, legalism etc. There isn't a
| consensus and it leads to lots of arguments. I personally am a
| lot less positive on legalism as the answer to everything, yet
| don't really know any other systems I feel safe with, either.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Tabs or spaces though?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsoOG6ZeyUI
| geor9e wrote:
| A bicyclist in Golden Gate Park once yelled at me for being on an
| e-bike, while pointing at a giant "No Motor Vehicles" banner at
| the entrance. I told him, actually, California vehicle code 24016
| specifically states "an electric bicycle is not a motor vehicle."
| He replied "You're a fu*king idiot".
| gadders wrote:
| Did you fight him?
| geor9e wrote:
| I think I said something silly like "alright im on a 100 mile
| trip, have fun in the park" and floored the throttle to 1300
| watts
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I agree with the principle of what he's saying, but using the
| game as an example exaggerates the level of difference here.
|
| People disagreeing on whether an ambulance is violating the rule
| are mostly disagreeing on a technicality of whether it counts as
| a vehicle in the park if you only have this one rule, but in
| practice almost everyone would allow it as an exception. Thus, it
| doesn't represent true disagreement for most.
|
| It's similar to how most message boards have some rule about
| civility and not being hostile/insulting, but if someone shows up
| who's unironically like "wow Nazis sure are great right??" then
| nobody has a problem with posters telling that person to fuck
| off.
| creer wrote:
| A converse to this is "Don't be the person that gets a new rule
| named after them." I find this one interesting. It's a meta-rule
| that actually aims at the spirit of the rules. (And requires a
| violation or meta-violation to come into effect.)
| reissbaker wrote:
| I think this is overstating the problem by comparing unique
| bundles of policy opinions, rather than looking at agreements on
| a per-policy basis. Out of 27 policies in the game, 20 policies
| had overwhelming support (>70% agreement) one way or another [1];
| those are obvious candidates for moderation rules. And of the
| seven controversial policies, there was still >60% agreement on
| five. There's certainly room to disagree on the controversial
| policies, but I think painting this as meaning there's less than
| 10% agreement overall, or that moderation is impossible, isn't
| really accurate. Most people agreed on most things.
|
| After all, we live in a society where we have ambiguous rules
| like these all over the place. Occasionally someone will get a
| weird-seeming enforcement action, or a weird-seeming lack of
| enforcement (compared to what the rules say -- for example, while
| it might seem weird that SF does not punish thieves for under
| $900 of stolen goods from a common sense perspective, it isn't
| weird from a letter of the law perspective: that's the actual
| law); but in my opinion that's fairly rare per-capita.
|
| But maybe I'm biased since I had 100% agreement per-policy with
| the majority ;)
|
| 1: https://postimg.cc/SjMbNMKW
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| On moderation in general. I think the main political problem
| isn't agreeing to any set of rules, and what those rules apply
| to, but when one group's definitions trump other groups
| definitions by fiat.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I think the core problem with the authors analysis is that it
| does not ask for intensity of opinion.
|
| I think when looking at "choice" * "intensity" results would be
| much more homogeneous.
|
| The author takes a stance of "me vs the readers" and asserts
| their own correctness and that we just don't get it, but fails to
| see why their argument is not convincing and ask what they would
| need to do to make it more convincing.
|
| I think if the author accounts for intensity, results _would_ be
| homogeneous and therefore the thesis of fractal disagreement
| would have to take backseat to a more dominating thesis, such as:
| It 's hard to decide what's allowed because those with power
| don't want to have power exercised against them and use their
| power to gain concessions via technical readings of law rather
| than intent based readings of law.
| praptak wrote:
| You would definitely get different results in another language.
| My best known language is Polish and the best translation of
| "vehicle" (pojazd) carries different connotations than "vehicle".
| For example a plane or a boat is definitely not a "pojazd".
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