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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

If people don't agree on it, then the clarity you feel is an illusion. The point of rules is common understanding of what is acceptable. Notably, you pulled a bunch of special cases and refinements from thin air. The way I read the setup, it was "crystal clear" that the rule was violated by emergency services, even if we could agree afterwards not to enforce it there.

And, yes, of course, moderation questions are much harder. At least with the vehicle thing people aren't usually aren't deliberately constructing tricky cases.

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I feel the same way as the above comment. If you were an actual administrator in charge of fining people for violating the rule, almost none of these examples should give you pause. You wouldn't be trying to give a ticket to planes flying overhead, for example. With these examples, there really isn't much disagreement on whether action should be taken, so any discussion of whether a rule is technically violated is moot.

If you didn't think a bicycle violated the rule, what about an e-bike? Or a fully battery-powered bike that doesn't require pedaling?

Those are exactly the questions the quiz should have asked, not clearly absurd examples that are unambiguously not vehicles in the park, like the ISS passing over the park.

Yeah that’s what I expected. Not a bunch of silly questions, but actually ambiguous ones

> Yeah that’s what I expected. Not a bunch of silly questions, but actually ambiguous ones

The fact that there's no clear consensus on most of the questions means they are ambiguous, no?

I love my fully battery powered ebike but I am well aware they are prohibited pretty much everywhere. When filling out the form I figured a bike is not a vehicle because they tend to be explicitly spelled out, but ebikes are more often prohibited (though in my area, not enforced), and my overpowered ebike is illegal everywhere, but I am respectful of others and there is no enforcement.

What about a bike that can provide thrust without pedaling, but you're not making use of that feature in the park?

Generally it is too difficult to enforce whether someone was or was not using a feature so in my area (SF Bay Area) they would just outlaw anything with a capability to do something undesired, regardless of whether it was being used. The thinking would go that if they catch someone they can point to the feature and say "you're breaking the law". No need to prove the feature was in use. Plus if you let people in with a bike with some undesired feature, people are going to end up using it and that would be what such a law would be trying to avoid.

You made the assumption the start screen explicitly asked users to not make, that is apply their local laws to the question.

I don't see it as applying my local laws. Everywhere I have ever seen that I can recall will explicitly spell out bicycles if they are prohibited. I have never seen a prohibition on "vehicles" that included bicycles. So I applied my understanding of the word vehicle. Of course I have not seen everywhere in the world, and the whole point of the survey is that people have to apply their own perspectives in order to even make a judgement, and this is the problem of content moderation.

The prohibition signs of the Vienna Convention are "No vehicles" (excludes cycles) and "No motor vehicles".

That also fits the English definition of a vehicle, which includes a bicycle.

> You wouldn't be trying to give a ticket to planes flying overhead

except you have just applied an assumption (which is often true) that may not be true depending on circumstances - that the planes were excluded because it couldn't have caused any negative effect.

For example, if the park had been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese#Isolation_and_unco... , and the intention was to keep the indigenous peoples isolated.

But this isn't a part of the rule, and it is an interpretation of the rule by the administrator. A different administrator might interpret planes that fly higher than audible altitude would be OK, while another one might consider a visual detection altitude to be a violation. And another might consider no altitude to be permissible (because if they crashed right there, they'd be falling into the park).

> they'd be falling into the park

That phrasing sure makes it sound like they're not in the park until they fall. Does it occur the moment they hit the ground, or sooner? If ground, then that tells us that the quadcopter isn't in the park while off the ground either; it's above the park.

Planes are usually required to fly above the height defined by property laws, and so it makes sense that "park" is deines by the areas that planes don't fly in.

I fully agreed with the GP for the same reasons: in my book everything except the Civic was OK, because that matches the intent of the sign.

In both law and real life, there is a common understanding (to use your term) that rules may be violated for the greater good. Does driving an ambulance into the park violate the letter of the rule? Yes, but it's still OK because we give emergency vehicles wide leeway to break rules so they can save lives. Judaism even encodes this in a general principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh

Well my view was that the answer is yes the ambulance violates the rule, but violating the rule is morally fine there. But still pedantically yes the ambulance does violate the no vehicles rule.

Yes, the instructions say to not moralize, justify, or apply local laws. Strictly enforce the stated rule.

It's amazing how many people can't follow the instructions, without realising their proving the creators point. Even while arguing the creator is wrong!

The game was pretty clear that the question was not if it "should be allowed to violate the rule", but if it violates the rule in the first place.

Does something violate the rule if it’s allowed based on common sense? I don’t think so.

Lots of people are in jail or fired after following that logic.

And some people who didn’t follow that logic allowed millions of people to be killed.

This all ain’t easy.

Obviously, it does. The rule says "No vehicles in the park" and tells you specifically not to moralize , justify, or apply local laws.

It does not tell me not to moralize. It just tells me to not take any other rules into account that might exist, i.e. to not construct a legalistic argument.

But I don’t need to to allow ambulances. I think this is the core of what many engineers fundamentally don’t get about rules and laws in society?

The framing of the rules clearly places this rule firmly in the real world, in a real park.

Depends on the definition of "common sense".

I've heard it said that common sense is just what naive people assume is obvious.

I'm not sure about that but I do know that people often disagree on what is and isn't common sense.

I guess this is why English Common Law works. We use precedence to argue about how the words of the law should be interpreted and at least try to flush out ambiguity.

> In both law and real life, there is a common understanding (to use your term) that rules may be violated for the greater good. Does driving an ambulance into the park violate the letter of the rule?

The instructions specifically say not to apply this kind of logic.

> matches the intent of the sign

GGP made up the sign. The instructions describe a rule, not a sign.

I'm with the parent comment, as I think the context is important here.

If you think the emergency service vehicles violate the rule, how about a park maintenance vehicle or a park ranger vehicle? Would you say "no vehicles in the park" rule applies to them too, so they would be violating it?

Yes? I don’t understand the idea that being allowed to disregard a rule means that you aren’t violating it at all.

The whole exercise specifically asked us to ignore context, "common sense", etc. If we were supposed to consider an exception for park services, it would have been explicitly stated.

Of all the forums for an insistence on rigidly, literally following rules to make people's heads explode, HN is not exactly the most surprising, but it is one of the funniest.

To me that's precisely the point: since vehicle itself is not defined and is a subject to interpretation, excluding emergency services is less of a problem than carving out an accurate boundary around what is or is not a vehicle.

> If people don't agree on it, then the clarity you feel is an illusion.

Well, no, people can just be wrong.

Wrong people can have quite a lot of influence in an internet forum, so that's a distinction without much difference.

If the standard for a good policy is “a policy which no one can possibly ever be mistaken about,” then I don’t think there are any options available.

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