parl_match 2023-06-24 00:09 UTC link

I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is. In rules like this, vehicle is defined - often to be about being motorized or speed. This metaphor doesn't map cleanly to when rules are less specific or laid out - because in this situation, the rules have been well tested and made to be unambiguous!

It also suggests that there is only one rule that should be followed. For example, it asks if an ambulance in the park is okay - well of course, the "no vehicles" rule would be violated.

I get the point of the exercise, but it's not really a great analogy imo.

Macha 2023-06-24 00:20 UTC link

The number at the end is unclear - it says I agreed with the majority 11%, but then it shows a bunch of charts. Yet the three I said were vehicles (the car, the police vehicle, and the ambulance) are the only 3 above 50% support, so it seems I agreed with the majority 100%. I even opened a second session in another browser and hit yes to everything to see if the numbers in the chart was the amount that agree with me, and no, the numbers didn't invert so it seems the chart is measuring yes answers.

Yenrabbit 2023-06-24 00:21 UTC link

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

bhaney 2023-06-24 00:21 UTC link

Nitpick: The summary at the end labels your choices as "You think it is not a vehicle" or "You think it is a vehicle" based on whether or not you said the situation violates the rule, but some of the scenarios were clearly about whether or not something was in the park, rather than whether or not it was a vehicle. I can think a plane or a space station is a vehicle without thinking it violates the rule about not being in the park.

Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.

hahajk 2023-06-24 00:21 UTC link

What this highlights is that online we have lost - or at least eroded - social norms. If I see a sign that says "no vehicles allowed", it's obvious they don't mean wagons and strollers. In almost all cases the police and the public are 99% in sync. Online, though, the moderators are forced to do a careful study of every action and become asinine literalists lest a horde of boundary-pushers ruin it for everyone.

petercooper 2023-06-24 00:22 UTC link

I said no to every question as even in the cases where a vehicle did enter the park, it was only one and the rule says "no vehicles". Remember that the No Homers Club was allowed to have one Homer.

casey2 2023-06-24 00:27 UTC link

Just because "some people" believe something doesn't mean you have to make a webapp "debunking" them, and just because law is often complicated with many edge cases doesn't mean it can't be simpler or partly automated.

Everyone here implicitly knows that natural languages have ambiguity this is why formal languages were invented and it's painful that governing bodies hasn't caught up in many places. Imagine a world where you could diff laws from federal to state, state to state, stateA.city to stateB.city or StateA.cityA to StateA.cityB. or a log where you could see exactly when a law was changed and why.

lsy 2023-06-24 00:34 UTC link

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

cmdli 2023-06-24 00:35 UTC link

I’m honestly not sure what the point of the exercise is. I went through and answered honestly, and looking at the end results it seems that most people agreed with me (the only significant minority disagreements were about the bike and the tank). Overall, it looks like almost all of the cases have a clear opinion?

I expected it to get into difficult edge cases, like somebody riding a motorcycle or landing a plane, but it never went there. A plane flying overhead doesn’t constitute “in the park”, and it looks like almost everybody agrees on that point.

ComputerGuru 2023-06-24 00:38 UTC link

I think the police and ambulance examples are interesting. To me, they're clear and blatant violations of the rule. To be sure, I certainly think it's ok that they broke the rule, but they still broke the rule. Yet some (45% of respondents) clearly think the rule wouldn't apply to them in the first place?

nitwit005 2023-06-24 01:06 UTC link

This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising.

If this included a definition of a vehicle, and asked if a vehicle was in the park, I'd expect consistent answers outside of the oddball aircraft and space station questions.

I'd note my local park has such a rule, and the sign has pictures of what are and are not allowed, including a picture of a drone.

derefr 2023-06-24 01:15 UTC link

To me, if I see a rule trying to ban "vehicles" without defining "vehicles", I take my concept of "vehicles" by deduction: I think about all the ways that things that I know of as being "vehicle-esque" could be problematic in various different ways such that you'd want to ban them — being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example); property damage (skateboards, dirt bikes) — and then I guess that the "spirit of the law" is to put whatever requirements in place would be required to reduce the instances of those problems.

The banning of certain explicit classes of vehicles is only a byproduct, not the end-goal, of such a rule; and so it doesn't actually matter what is or isn't a vehicle — the word "vehicle" in such a rule is acting as a conceptual stand-in for whatever things cause uniquely vehicle-in-the-park-ish problems; and anything that doesn't cause such problems, isn't "a vehicle."

I find that this lens on rule enforcement is a useful guide, because whatever the text of the law ends up saying, the enforcement of the law will hew to the spirit that the text of the rule is being interpreted to have, by those charged with its enforcement. (I.e., the non-working tank is almost certainly a "vehicle" by any definition a bylaw would pose, but if they deliver it to the park on a non-damaging sled, let it sit there for a while, then haul it away on the same sled, then it's not causing any of the problems that "vehicles" cause, and so it's very unlikely that any bylaw-enforcement officer would actually ticket the owner of the tank for having it in the park.)

kazinator 2023-06-24 01:25 UTC link

If the park is in my neck of the woods, I can just use this definition:

"vehicle" means a device in, on or by which a person or thing is or may be transported or drawn on a highway, but does not include a device designed to be moved by human power, a device used exclusively on stationary rails or tracks, mobile equipment, a motor assisted cycle or a regulated motorized personal mobility device

[BC Motor Vehicle Act, 1 Definitions]

https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/stat...

The words written on some sign on a road or park are not meant to be freely defined by whoever happens to be reading the sign.

crazygringo 2023-06-24 01:52 UTC link

I'm fascinated by the fact that my takeaway is the precise opposite of what the author intended.

To me, the answer to all of the questions was crystal-clear. Yes, you can academically wonder whether an orbiting space station is a vehicle and whether it's in the park, but the obvious intent of the sign couldn't be clearer. Cars/trucks/motorcycles aren't allowed, and obviously police and ambulances (and fire trucks) doing their jobs don't have to follow the sign.

So if this is supposed to be an example of how content moderation rules are unclear to follow, it's achieving precisely the opposite.

(To be clear, I think content moderation rules are often difficult to figure out when to apply. I just think the vehicles-in-park rule is much, much, much clearer than many content moderation rules.)

jrm4 2023-06-24 02:31 UTC link

Lawyer here.

I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. I teach legal research and I do some open discussions in the beginning and (no judgment of course) someone ALWAYS brings up "if they wrote the laws clearer..."

nope. nope nope nope. This is not how it works.

ajani 2023-06-24 02:59 UTC link

Rules, if taken as written, are never clear.

Try to define "furniture". You may say "Something to sit on". But what about a table. Ok, something to keep things on. But then is a soap dish furniture?

Furniture is a concept. It has fuzzy boundaries of meaning. And the meaning is only ever clear in context. And context is not just what is said alongside the concept. It is also the exchange itself in a particular situation.

When 14 years olds play ball in a "garden" area of a park, it's clearly disruptive. It can hurt someone, destroy the foliage etc. But when you play ball with a couple of 4 year olds in a garden, no one will suggest you stop. It is understood that a 4 year old in a play area with teenagers is at risk of being harmed, and so better to keep them in the garden area.

Rules, and the standardization of some of them into a system of law is problematic only if taken literally. As long as the what is written is understood to be a scaffold for actual meaning derivation from context there is no problem. This is the reason why judges, juries and courts exist - to interpret the law. And in the absence of formalization or systematization, common law applies. And at a very simplified level, common law is mostly common sense. Common as in shared among many. Common sense as in the sense and meaning shared among most of us implicitly.

jujube3 2023-06-24 05:08 UTC link

Translation: his parents are lawyers, so he has a low opinion of the rule of law and wants to "problematize" it. In favor of arguing for, essentially, despotism.

But his own experiment shows that most people do agree on what even a deliberately poorly worded rule means in most cases. So it basically shows the exact opposite of what he was trying to prove, which is that rules are unworkable.

The "game" (I use the word loosely) gets quite silly. The space station passing overhead is not "problematic" for a rule about vehicles in the park, except for someone deliberately trying to be obtuse. Like with the rest of this other nonsense, if it ever did become problematic, someone could change the rule to clear it up. The end.

1970-01-01 2023-06-24 14:31 UTC link

This is fun! I propose a few more scenarios:

     A hot dog cart serves food in the park.

     A 1997 pickup truck is rusting away on the bottom of the park's lake.

     An elevator moves equipment up and down floors within the park's maintenance building.

     Deep under the park's lake, a nuclear submarine hides from satellites.

     An ice cream truck sits just on the border between the park entrance and a private road to a residence.

fefe23 2023-06-24 15:09 UTC link

Fascinating exercise. During my first attempt I found that I had to look up the actual definition of vehicle.

I initially thought that a vehicle means someone is being transported by the vehicle, using an engine.

According to wikipedia vehicle also includes things being moved by muscle, and it is not limited to transporting persons, also wares.

I also changed my mind on whether a police or EMT falls under the rule. It obviously does. There has to be a second rule overriding this rule for those cases.

Also I changed my mind on the paraglider and the ISS. The ISS is a vehicle but it's over the park not in the park. The paraglider is a vehicle under my new understanding of the definition, and it does not matter whether the initial thrust came from when the paraglider was outside the park.

It also explains why the rules in the park near me prohibit _driving_ a bike in the park, not having one.

edmundsauto 2023-06-24 19:47 UTC link

All the discussions over interpretation are missing the point of the exercise, which is to show how hard it is to find agreement over something as emotionally neutral as "is the vehicle in the park".

Communication and interpretation is hard. This is a blind spot for many techies, who think there are "right answers".

iherbig 2023-06-24 00:13 UTC link

I'm not sure if you do, honestly. The point of the exercise is exactly the ambiguity that stood out to you.

Also, the question was very explicitly not asking if an ambulance in the park is "okay." The question is asking is it a rule violation.

It's an excellent analogy, in my opinion, because what it's trying to be analogous to is the general ambiguity of language that makes content moderation difficult. It's hardly even an analogy because it is about precisely an identical concept: determining whether behavior is violating a rule.

version_five 2023-06-24 00:16 UTC link

Yeah, he needs a better example. Vehicle has some ambiguity when you hint about it in the introduction, but not much. If he'd said "mode of transportation" that night be more ambiguous- skating could be one or could be recreational and not to go anywhere. But then I don't know how people would get into the park.

And separately, a lot of the ambiguity in content moderation comes from people trying to frame what they don't agree with as something that's against the rules. If a vocal group doesn't like ice skaters, you can be sure they'll be giving detailed explanation why skates are a literal vehicle.

bhaney 2023-06-24 00:24 UTC link

I think it's giving you a percentage of people who answered exactly the same as you on all questions.

Edit: Okay I have no idea what it's meant to be (other than "11")

loeg 2023-06-24 00:25 UTC link

I think what it highlights is that the meaning of words depends on context and stripping all context from a rule and situation makes that ambiguous. Reading more into it than that seems silly.

aleph_minus_one 2023-06-24 00:27 UTC link

> I got a few questions in, and the thing that stands out is the ambiguity of what a "vehicle" is.

Exactly. I being a non-native English speaker, just to be sure, looked up in a dictionary: the most common German translation of "vehicle" is "Fahrzeug".

Of course, as it is quite common, there do exist laws in Germany

> https://gesetze.io/definitionen/fahrzeug-f9r8

what is a "Fahrzeug" and what is not, and also a German Wikipedia article that goes quite deeply into this topic:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrzeug

Just to bring up a linguistic point (it is far more common in German than in English to carefully analyze words if subtle parts of the meaning are to be cleared up): actually, one could argue (contrary to the Wikipedia article) that "Fahrzeug" comes from "fahren" (to drive); thus a "Flugzeug" (airplane) is not a Fahrzeug, because it flies (Flug -> flight) instead of driving (but as mentioned: the Wikipedia article states a different opinion: Flugzeuge are Luftfahrzeuge, while, say, cars are Landfahrzeuge, i.e. both vehicles belong to sub-categories of Fahrzeuge).

---

But back to the topic: as a non-native English speaker

- all my arguments are based on the most common German translation "Fahrzeug" of "vehicle". What if some subtleties are lost in this translation?

- I doubt that the typical English native speaker tends to think as deeply about words as is not unusual in Germany (when I did analyses of English words to native English speakers they nearly always admitted that they never ever thought of such analyses)

semiquaver 2023-06-24 00:27 UTC link

Given that the whole exercise was about meticulous line drawing I think this bit of nitpicking is entirely appropriate. Clearly “is a vehicle” and “is in the park” were the two major axes that each question needed to be plotted on.

nocoiner 2023-06-24 00:36 UTC link

An absolutely unarguable point. Well done.

jakelazaroff 2023-06-24 00:38 UTC link

It seems pretty spot on to me! A "vehicle", like "hate speech" or "words that glorify violence", is an category that humans create, and the things that fit in that category vary from person to person and situation to situation.

I'm curious — what do you think a better analogy would have been?

kccqzy 2023-06-24 00:42 UTC link

Social norms are quite culture-specific. Online people from all countries and cultures interact, and that's where some misunderstandings come from.

It's not a big problem if everyone is civil and existing moderation mechanisms aren't overwhelmed; people quickly learn from online faux pas and the online social norm is restored.

code_duck 2023-06-24 00:43 UTC link

One thing that makes this exercise fairly useless is that any real world law or rule would have exemptions for such circumstances, and a definition of “in the park” and what a vehicle is… not just one sentence with no clarification. Beyond that, also a history of previous legal interpretation to which one could refer.

paxys 2023-06-24 00:50 UTC link

Count the number of times you have used the words “most”, “almost”, “only disagreements…” etc. in your two paragraphs, despite the fact that all of them were relatively simple scenarios like you said. That is the point of the exercise. Yes people mostly agreed on most things, but they did not absolutely agree on everything. And those 20-30% of people arguing about 20-30% of edge cases is where all the disagreements and flame wars and toxicity comes from.

lacker 2023-06-24 00:56 UTC link

That seems like good analogy to content moderation. You have to ask "is the forbidden content actually on the site?"

For example you can have a rule like "no sharing pornographic content", but then are people allowed to share links to forbidden content? Links to sites that are 100% links to forbidden content? Links to sites that have one link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? Links to sites that have one extremely prominent link to forbidden content among a lot of other links? How prominent? Etc etc etc.

wzdd 2023-06-24 01:03 UTC link

My reasoning was that in emergencies, typically, certain rules don't apply to certain groups of people if their actions are related to the emergency. Therefore, a police officer driving a police car into the park (assuming they're doing it because of the emergency) is not a violation of "no vehicles in the park" because for that officer, in that situation, there effectively is no such rule.

In the real world, we might debate whether it was actually an emergency and so on, but here we're told straight up.

nohaydeprobleme 2023-06-24 01:05 UTC link

I also answered no to every question and got the "11%" statistic, matching the percentage that many other users here received.

paxys 2023-06-24 01:09 UTC link

The instructions for the exercise tell you straight up to ignore any and all exceptions, yet 30% of people chose to apply their own judgment in the police and ambulance case because it felt right to them. Very telling.

whimsicalism 2023-06-24 01:16 UTC link

We are all the 11%

jjcon 2023-06-24 01:24 UTC link

That is exactly the point - who defines racism? sexism? Moderators are going to disagree because of how nebulous those terms are

sosodev 2023-06-24 01:26 UTC link

Are you sure? Legal systems have been arguing about the semantics of "obvious" rules for thousands of years.

teeray 2023-06-24 01:30 UTC link

A vehicle is any kind of tool that makes locomotion for any animate or inanimate object easier. This includes wheeled craft, seafaring vessels, shoes, aircraft.

The whole exercise is easier once you realize the park is a nudist colony.

sangnoir 2023-06-24 01:32 UTC link

> This proves that deliberately bad instructions produce bad results. That's not surprising.

Here's a common example from real life: "No pornography". Even SCOTUS famously couldn't define obscenity ("I know it when I see it")

rlpb 2023-06-24 01:37 UTC link

I think you might have arrived at the Mischief rule of statutory interpretation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule).

nonethewiser 2023-06-24 02:03 UTC link

Exactly. There is a clear majority in the answers. Sure, there are edge cases, but they are edge cases.

But I also want to say this is a really cool website. I love how he used this experience to set the table for what is otherwise essentially a blog post. Very cool.

But to hone in a bit more:

> It was about content moderation. Specifically, some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply.

His experiment not only doesn't prove this because of the observation you made (there is a clear majority opinion), but also because the "simple rules" people want ARE simple in contrast to the current standard of assuming you need to be a moral authority. The supposed simple rules aren't simple because they avoid controversy. They are simple because they don't avoid controversy. They are minimal. Basically just take the stuff virtually everyone agrees on, or is illegal/possibly illegal. Yes, there are gray areas there. There are always gray areas. But the gray areas surrounding "we need to shape productive discourse" is a lot more controversial than the gray areas surrounding "is this legal?" Once you stop using moderation to implicitly endorse speech you aren't as responsible for anything that is said. This is the entire point of section 230.

And before someone says "well if you have offensive content then advertisers will leave," I want to point out that is not a content moderation problem. That is an advertiser attraction problem. If the goal is advertiser attraction then we are playing a completely different game and you should remove everything that is remotely controversial. Or consider that your business model is inherently bad for speech.

rmorey 2023-06-24 02:05 UTC link

Did anyone not get 11?

hsjqllzlfkf 2023-06-24 02:11 UTC link

That definition looks like it only applies to highways, whereas this exercise is much broader.

SheinhardtWigCo 2023-06-24 02:23 UTC link

You're overthinking this. To recap the rules of the game:

1. Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park."

2. Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.

Your job was to determine if rule 2 ("this rule") has been violated. By playing the game, you are fulfilling your job and thus the rule is never violated.

lkbm 2023-06-24 02:29 UTC link

Now hold on, doesn't the person on skates have two vehicles?

irjustin 2023-06-24 02:39 UTC link

> Yes, I'm aware this has nothing to do with the point of the exercise.

No actually I do think it does and is captured beautifully in the game. Things that clearly once vehicles are arguably no longer - like the war tank.

Like Michelangelo's David, is the nudity porn? is it obscene? for who? Is this a website about art? or a porn site? education site? a site for children?

Each one of those sites have differing views of the exact same thing.

Love this exercise.

ClumsyPilot 2023-06-24 02:45 UTC link

> being loud; having a lot of inertial momentum when colliding with pedestrians; littering (the horse example);

Well, there are many possible options, so this does not help unless you know which issue was bothering the rule-makers.

I know a park that allows horses but not bicycles.

bentcorner 2023-06-24 02:50 UTC link

It's interesting to think about the same sign and "vehicle" in different contexts could have different answers.

For example, the same sign in a school hallway leading to an enclosed play area for kindergartners would most certainly result in more violations.

ssnistfajen 2023-06-24 03:02 UTC link

It's exactly the point of the exercise. Whether something is a vehicle and whether said thing is "in" the park are both separate dimensions of logic that each individual applies differently towards their decision making. This is exactly why content moderation has trouble to stay consistent and rarely pleases everyone, because so many nuances from non-intersecting aspects of logic/context/culture/opinions are forced to consolidate into a binary choice (violation vs. non-violation).

Editorial Channel

What the content says

Structural Channel

What the site does