Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed
danluu.com
danluu.com
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.
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.
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.
There was a WWII tank in a park I would spend time in as a child. It was alongside an ancient fire truck and a steam locomotive. There were all totally awesome until they got fenced off for some reason.
Is the pedantic answer really uninteresting if it leads to unintuitive answers?
>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?”
See, but that's what makes it interesting. You can't just make the law equal to some ad hoc poll of "do I want my tax dollars used to discourage this" for every possible behavior within the park. At some point, for lack of better expression, the rubber has to meet the road. The gut opinion on what is appropriate in a park has to be translated into a rule for the park, and the question of if the rule was violated or not has to be able to be determined entirely on the basis of hard evidence should a ticket for it ever go to court.
At least part of the point of the exercise is that even for something where there's general agreement on the principle (like "people should use pedestrianized parks appropriately"), the translation into an obvious rule (like "no vehicles in the park") fails to capture that intent and the extent to which there actually is general agreement is inversely proportionally to how fully spelled out things are.
The park is interesting because its boring. Its not a hot button issue where people have disagreements on matters of principle like guns or abortion or javascript frameworks. So why is it so hard to write an objective, enforceable rule codifying the seemingly universally agreed and understood idea of what a park is supposed to be? If we can't even get universal agreement on something non-controversial, such as the rules which make a park a park, such as "no vehicles in the park", how can we expect any system of law to work more generally?
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.
Deciding whether it violates the rule can be done in a fairly objective way. Deciding whether circumstances justify violating the rule is where the subjectivity is, but the test says nothing about that.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why follow the rules of some online survey? Logically you should do whatever provides you the maximum emotional benefit, regardless of what the rules say.
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_experimen...
Obviously, no one expects the rule to cover all edge cases, so we have to extrapolate what the rule writer meant to say.
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.)
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.
I mean that in a serious way. It's very clear people lie on much more serious polls than this.
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.
Endless regress detected, redo from start.
100% agreement with the majority per question might put you in a very small minority, BTW.
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.
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.
So... motorized wheelchairs are vehicles?
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
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.
I look forward to bring my vehicle by navigating through my 4D tessaract to a place where I could not have had the information of the rule.
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.
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
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?
And/or discomfort and/or lack of understanding that real-life rules aren't exhaustive - they're meant to encircle a range of situations, but their borders are necessarily fuzzy, and borderline cases are, by design, to be judged on by humans on a case-by-case basis.
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.
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.
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.
Mine was 70%.
In this game, in my state, bicycles would not be allowed unless the sign mentioned the law that allows them.
I would have expected it to be easier to strictly apply a simple rule, but it turned out that interpreting the intent of the rule was less contentious and easier to apply. Ambulances in the park are not a violation, not on the grounds that some other rule overrides the no-vehicles rule, but that they don't violate the spirit of the rule.
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.
The game would be more interesting if the rule were "Threatening speech is not allowed."
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.
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.
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.
Is in the first screen.
I got 100% because I assumed it was not written by a lawyer. Context matters.
2. It's an agreement score, not an achievement score. All it does is measure how many questions you agreed with the majority on. The score does not convey a value or judge your actions, it's just there to inform you how closely you align to others' answers.
The fact that you feel you did it wrong is just a bonus for the author (and spectators like me!)
However if you look at the statistics you'll see a lot of people consider a boats, skateboards, sleds and even RC cars as vehicles.
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.
But the game isn't about "should the rule be ignored?". That's a different game.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Imagine being asked to remove all road blocking vehicles from a park. Would you consider the sales trailer someone got somehow in there, even though it basicaly just a frame without engine too?
The point here is context and changing it does not effect your definition but your interpretation.
Why would that be an issue? Logs aren't vehicles.
Laws of my country clearly say it's no longer a vehicle if it didn't move for a long time or can't move anymore, and thus has to be registered and permitted as a building.
The laws also say it is a building and not a vehicle if it performs the function of one.
Alternately, if your car runs out of gas, it is no longer a vehicle.
There are a whole range of silly distinctions.
With a car, I guess one answer would be "The part that has the VIN on it is the car", but apparently there's no universally agreed on location. I would probably go for the drive shaft.
For example, a car that is temporarily in an auto shop for repairs? If your intent is to say that it's no longer classified as a vehicle until it is once again functional, then I think you'll find that your definition deviates pretty significantly from a conventional dictionary definition (a device intended for transport).
That's a relatively large desync which will only hinder consistent communications with the vast majority of English speakers.
That one is easy. Just war is the one that bring many benefits to me and my friends (well, whatever you call my social intimate circle), while destroying those other evil dudes that cast some shadow on my stable predictable world resources exploitation, all that only at the cost of nameless plebeian peons.
Or said otherwise, war is unjust when it negatively affects "the mighty me who can unleash propaganda to manufacture consent toward whatever fits my agenda".
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] In the, at the time, second or third largest school district in the US.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moderation can also be accomplished via a user-level web-of-trust system, where each user can choose who to trust as a moderator, and this trust can propagate recursively to the people trusted by the people you trust, and at each level (even when manually choosing people to trust) this trust can be fuzzy (not full trust vs no trust, but potentially something in between those two), and rapidly decreasing the more distant you get from those you've manually chosen to trust. To solve the issues of spam, censorship, and convenience simultaneously, you simply assign to users some moderators on the trust list by default and allow users to opt out of that trust.
This approach is also applicable in the same manner to the similar problem of curation (i.e. choosing what to highlight instead of what to hide), where the same four approaches are also applicable with largely the same pros and cons.
With how much matrix multiplication were doing for machine learning using the matrix approach now might be feasible.
The point of the vehicle in the park game is that complexity isn't always reducible to a tractable problem. Which is fine, and we should learn to engineer systems that embrace the fuzziness, rather than assuming the problem is tractable and solvable.
Huh? There are only two moderators here and they aren't chosen by users, nor do users have to make any choice about "trusting" them. The HN moderation system bears no resemblance at all that I can see to what the post I responded to was describing.
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.
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...
They don't agree that you should take a common sense approach to moderation, provided that you are actually doing the job of moderation? Or they don't agree that those were the instructions of the "no vehciles in the park game"?
If the game has instructed you to "pretend you are an enforcement official, and your only official guidance is this sign, understand that the purpose of this rule is to keep the park safe, but you might get reprimanded if you kick someone out of the park and you can't convince a jury that they were breaking this rule". This would probably be sufficient context to get everyone to agree that none of the examples given were examples. It seems like a lot of caveats, but most of these are implicit if you're an officer, which is a fair context to apply to moderators.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
“I'm a good driver, so my lifted F-150 is such a vehicle”
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.
If many trees fall in a natural disaster, can a tree removing vehicle enter the park?
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.
Relying on people to do the right thing fails. American government got two good centuries out of "assuming good intent" before the lack of written rules was weaponized. In a perfect world we wouldn't need an explicit code of conduct for supreme court justices, but we are not in a perfect world.
Aside from the Ambulance thing-- no. It's just a park. So let's relax. Content moderation is also totally imprecise with edge cases. Most likely no one dies from it well or badly applied.
Exactly. Life and liberty, in that order
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 ;)
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
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.
If you're interested in "people disagreeing on what should be allowed", then you must state the rules in a way that allows them to establish the intent of those rules.
Instead the experiment was not evaluating people on their ability to agree on the intent of the rule "no vehicles in the park" but on their agreement over the meaning of the rules of the experiment itself.
Since these rules were intentionally left hidden, you should expect there to be lots of disagreement on what they are. Which was evident in the original comments section.
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.
It is a bad chart though. I was confused too.
But either way, when I said "is a vehicle" it said I disagreed with the majority.
/shrug
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.
- 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?
> 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)
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.
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.
There is no clarity on what the context of the application of a rule is.
Is an ambulance a vehicle in the park? Of course. Should the rule apply to an ambulance on duty in an actual park? Of course not.
Is a memorial tank a vehicle in the park? Obviously. Would some people object the memorial? For sure. Likely because they don’t like tanks in the park, not because of the vehicle rule, however they may use the vehicle rule to object.
So - amazing data. Wrong question.
I propose that the differences in opinion are likely differences in understanding the ill-defined context of the question.
The whole point of the article is that *on large platforms* it is impossible to have policies on moderation, etc. that people agree on. Not small, interest-specific, geographically and linguistically focussed niche platforms.
The example is further perfectly illustrated by users here dropping their confident, just-so how-tos that would accomplish difficult tasks like moderation easily, and other users disagreeing with their equally confident, personally experienced difficulties in executing such just-so plans.
If you can define the question so narrowly as to make the answers obvious, you're not talking about the same problem anymore.
If the experiment was, "When should a park in your neighborhood apply the rule 'no vehicles in the park'?" I believe the outcome would have been very different with near universal agreement on the most important questions.
Maybe someone should try such an experiment.
This is all absolutely implicit context for many real world rules enforcers. I would bet money that if you reran this experiment with that prompt you would get over 60% of people in 100% agreement.
Add to this that spaces that are worth being highly visible in will have their rulesets attacked and rules stretched to the maximum, plus the fact that users individually are not worth much, and that most publicly visible moderators are unpaid, and you have a recipe for user misery and moderator indifference.
The solution is to pay your moderators so you can attract higher quality talent and more stable labor.
Or don't, if enough users will use the platform anyways.
Which proves it's not actually impossible, the majority opinion is actually sensible, and this take is incorrect. Case closed.
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.
> 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.
I think the main problem is not agreeing on interpetatoons, which humans have dealt with forever, but the particular undemocratic processes on the main platforms we have today (corporate controlled generally).
The rule says, “No vehicles in the park” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36453856 - June 2023 (1186 comments)
Consider this classic essay entitled The Myth of the Rule of Law by Georgetown law professor John Hasnas.
https://www.copblock.org/40719/myth-rule-law-john-hasnas/
It begins with a series of questions about what’s protected under the First Amendment. None seem particularly tricky. The answers all seem fairly clear cut.
Except, you guessed it, they are all controversial. In fact, none of them stand on firm ground at all. The essay brilliantly shows that government is always “rule of men,” and “rule of law” is a mere diversion. This essay will blow your mind.
body { max-width: 9in; }
Could be a minimalistic starting point ;)
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.
Also, life itself optimizes for self propagation, not happiness. Sometimes (long term), they can overlap. Surprisingly often (especially short term), they do not.
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.
1. Common law (determined by precedent), the UK system.
2. Civil law (determined by textual interpretation of a code), the US system.
3. Qadi law. (determined by a local judge who rules according to the local societal norms and current context, neither by text nor precedent), the Ottoman/Islamic system.
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.
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.
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.
There's a big difference between "what moderation rules should apply" and "how do I interpret this one vague rule." Questions like "can I play with a toy car in this particular park" are answerable. If some people want the rule to be different, that's another story. People's ability to interpret a vague rule out of context doesn't really bear on the question of how hard or easy it is to agree on rules for a community, or to write good rules that are easy for moderators to apply.
Not every single person in a community needs to like a rule. And if rules are not specific enough, they can be made more specific.
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.
I think when looking at "choice" * "intensity" results would be much more homogeneous.
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.
In the park example, the important is that most if not all users should be satisfied with the experience they live in the park most of the time. If your park is the sunny nudist Valley, probably the expectations of rules won't be the same than those who live on the demure cold hill. And as far as everyone is free to go live wherever the rules feets best to their own general tendencies, you don't structurally design your society to generate drama about mundane frivolous topics.
Of course if you want to be the platform that bind them all, for example because you think people are brainless cash cows, you are going to face soon or later the fact that rules for demure nudists doesn't grab a very large audience.
The article does mention a bit fediverse, but then conclude that if you can't have everyone in the same park, you failed. Having a single park with the same permanent rules for everyone will not satisfy even a single individual, because people have moods and interest that evolve over time. Yes it has a cost to go from one park to an other. Compare it with the cost it would imply to have a single park for everyone.
People need some minimum life-experience as well before they can pass judgement, which many in the "audience" simply don't have. I for instance find it easier to talk about a start-ups problems to someone that had run a restaurant for a few years than to a developer.
All that means is that moderation can be achieved, it just costs a lot and may not scale easily.
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.
So the whole promise "this is a proof that moderation is impossible" is actually unproven.
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%.
There is no such thing as a singular rule. They are embedded in a host of other rules either explict or as (cultural?) assumptions. What is a park, what is a vehicle, what is 'in'? There are domains, like math, where effort is made to be completely explicit, but that doesn't work everywhere.
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?
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.
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.
not obvious. there could be weight limits such that heavy vehicles like that could become trapped.
You think you can see all the edges until you zoom in and realize each edge is multiple edges, recursively.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Please someone send me more links to games like these
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if there's something about the points raised in this article that the typical HN denizen is constitutionally predisposed to "not getting". The overall conclusion is along the lines of "stuff is complicated and throwing rationalityh at it won't help" and "the solution (if there is one) would be a messy, partial, human solution".
The lesson that I think more people need to take from this is thereby to have more compassion for people who broke some supposedly-clear rule, by (at least) reconceptualizing the role of moderation by: 1) having multiple checks and balances on moderators, including both an easy way to appeal decisions to a preferably-higher and necessarily-separate power and a way for users to hold moderators accountable for their actions; 2) insisting that enforcement happen in public; 3) providing numerous examples of what has been allowed or not in the past (precedent is not to be confused with epicycles); 4) offering a way for users to ask, without judgement, whether a specific thing would be allowed before they take an action (transferring liability on the punishment off of the user, even if later on the action is deemed an offense); and 5) instead of focusing on listing simple "rules", spend your time documenting what your goals are along with your philosophy of enforcement.
Note: I actually am an elected government official for a local government--not the Recreation and Parks District, but I do work closely with them--and I am the chair of our policy committee, in addition to having spent a decade as a key moderator of a very large ecosystem of software developers, working on rules for both the software people could distribute/sell as well as doing live moderation of chat rooms. In so doing, I got to work with other people whose opinion on moderation I came to trust deeply, and spent an incredible amount of time just having discussions about how to deal with moderation in general as well as how to balance it inside of a system where I also insisted that I could not myself become a centralized dictator, which is how people always seem to want to approach the problems of content moderation, ignoring any chance to empower users in their own paths. I thereby want to be clear: I come at this as someone who isn't trying to blanket defend people who like to abuse either the system or other people... and yet I also don't think the way most people approach moderation actually solves that problem in a reasonable or principled way.
I thereby think it is worth trying to use this analogy a bit to show how current moderation systems seem to often work: you want to bring your toy car to the park, but see a sign "no vehicles in the park", and you want to be a good citizen so you call the office of the local park district to ask if this is OK; 99% of the time, you get an automated message to read the sign, and 1% of the time you get a person who says "I am sorry but if I told you whether or not that toy car is a vehicle, then bad actors will destroy our park". You then show up to the park with your toy car -- sure it couldn't possibly be a vehicle -- and a police officer shows up, throws you in jail for the day, and tells you you are banned from the park for life. You ask what you did--"OMG, was it the toy car? I am so sorry I didn't think it was a vehicle"--and the officer looks you dead in the eye and says they can't tell you what you did; or, if they do say it was the toy car, they refuse to engage in any form of discussion of why this toy car is somehow different from all of the other toys you see strewn around the park at that same moment.
- 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.
HN is heavily moderated and it certainly wouldn't be the place it is without it.
The fact that people downvote a different opinion here shows the degradation of the great tech culture that stood for freedom. Now it is dominated by coddled children who get offended at the drop of a hat.
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.