No Vehicles in the Park
novehiclesinthepark.com
novehiclesinthepark.com
That said, I'm not sure the game proved the point it intended to, for me at least.
My answers agreed 89% with the majority, and more importantly, on the visualization showing proportions of people classifying various examples as "a vehicle in the park" had a clear cut off point, before which I hadn't classified anything as a violation, and after which, I had classified everything as a violation.
The suggestion is (I'm not saying this is proven, only suggested), to me at least, that if you gave people the instructions:
> No vehicles are allowed in the park. A wagon being pulled is not a vehicle, but a rowboat is.
A very high number would come to the exact same determination as me.
Just for context, I'm just talking about the game itself, I definitely agree that moderation is a very tricky issue full of grey areas, and we'd all find it very hard to agree fully on a set of guidelines and then agree on when they're being enforced correctly.
In other words finding the game in the game can be a game.
- police car and ambulance: definitely reasonable exceptions (the only thing that surprised me is that slightly more people would allow the police car than the ambulance)
- memorial: you could argue that a static vehicle installed as a memorial does not count as a vehicle anymore.
- rowboats: if there is a lake in the park, and if there are rowboats on the lake, you would assume that it's allowed to use them?
etc. etc.
For me this clearly means police cars and ambulances violate the rule. Maybe violating the rule is ok, but that doesn't mean they don't violate it.
From a purely logical viewpoint (think; mathematics or programming, et cetera), that's absolutely true. In programming you'd have to do a properly coded `if/else if/else/finally` type situation or somesuch to allow the ambulance and/or police, otherwise the rule is violated by any vehicle that's not been explicitly allowed.
There's no right or wrong answers, so can it really be easy?
Otherwise it comes down to "is it a vehicle?" and "is it in the park?". There are comments from people saying they said that a police car or ambulance was not a vehicle in the park because it had a good reason to be there, which to me makes no sense at all.
The game makes very clear that it is not "would you allow this vehicle in the park?" but "is this a vehicle in the park?".
I don't think these are trivial questions at all. There's no sound definition of a vehicle.
If your definition depends on transporting humans than a wagon or even self-driving truck is not a vehicle. If your definition depends on transporting goods in a self-propelled manner than humans are vehicles.
The disagreement is that some people think a police car is not a vehicle in the park, because its presence in the park is justified.
> not everyone views a "justfied violation" as a subcategory of "violation", but rather as a subcategory of "not violation"
Seriously, I also think it was designed to not have right or wrong answers. I answered based on what I felt the spirit of the rule was - I.e., no Honda Civics. Apart from that, anything goes!
Edit: I know I said I was answering seriously for my second paragraph, but I really did think that the private vehicle example (someone’s Honda Civic) was as the only breach of the intended rule
Same thing about the WW2 tank that's not working. A vehicle that doesn't work is still a vehicle.
Also all the questions about verticality at least under my jurisprudence land is only owned vertically up to a certain extent after that is considered state property to be administered by authorities.
Well no, it specifically says it's a memorial - at that point it's a statue, like an art installation, especially if the tank is non functional(bonus question - what if it was never an actual tank in the first place, it's just some metal bent to look like a tank?). If the memorial was of a Napoleonic soldier on a horse, you wouldn't say it violates a "no weapons allowed" rule just because the statue is holding a sword.
If it's a real tank that just happens not to work any more then it's a vehicle even if it as a monument as well.
That completely depends on your definition of a vehicle. According to your definition an object that once met the conditions to be a vehicle will always be a vehicle. You can apply Theseus's ship to the WW2 tank replacing it's parts and then at what point does it seize to be a vehicle?
If your definition on vehicle depends on transporting humans than a wagon seizes to be a vehicle. If your definition depends on transporting objects in a self-propelled way than humans become vehicles.
Probably more relevant, such services usually get legal carve outs for purpose.
But the game specifically instructs the player to ignore any such consideration.
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Fun game! I like how even if you know the "rules" and try to play against or with them, it still is a challenge.
Yeah, but the majority is sane. There are only 3 vehicles in the park.
- Am I a customer when I go into the shop?
- How about if I don't buy anything this time?
- When I receive a marketing email from the shop, based on my previous purchases, am I still a customer?
- How about 1 year later and I haven't bought anything, am I still a customer?
So when can I park there?
(obviously in the real world, there would be terms and conditions, but it's an interesting way to talk to clients about definitions in their data)
How early in the morning can I feed them? Dude never says!
Maybe not if you have an appointment and will be there for an hour.
If you’re there for 15 minutes, open season.
Not necessarily, you can't apply terms and conditions to a sign. But original intent does matter, you can reason over why the shop owners put the sign there in the first place. Which is likely to allow their customers to park while making a purchase.
Would it also matter if the club had paid membership or anyone could belong to it for free?
Replace the rule with its intent - the grass shouldn't be damaged - and its balance of interests - the grass's short-term wellbeing should take less precedence than a person's - and you get a claim that is pretty straightforward to evaluate.
Instead of defending blanket propositions, perhaps content moderation should defend predicates - does X harm property Y? - and weights - does X injure Z?
Is this variation still subject to ambiguity? I don't know - I think it's subject to bias, but it's pretty much unambiguous.
Emergency vehicles are exempt, like police or ambulance.
When someone tells you what they believe in they might think it is clear but a little digging will show how ambiguous any moral or religious proclamation is.
I have been trying hard to figure out a way to force people to be explicit about their beliefs. What I came up with is https://forgemybeliefs.etewiah.workers.dev/. Would love some feedback about how I can improve it.
I hit the page and started typing an answer into the box without reading any of the rest of the page. "THE BUNDLE YOU WERE HANDED" was rather presumptuous. It seems you could just ask those five questions as agree disagree from 1-5 like every other psychology test and not use any AI.
The no-account choice is deliberate because beliefs can reveal sensitive things like religion and politics. But I can see how repeating “no account” makes it feel like a feature you should be suspicious of, instead of explaining the privacy reason once and moving on.
There’s no paid tier or trial that runs out
And yes, a 1–5 scale would be simpler if all I wanted was to record agreement. The idea behind free text and AI is to let people answer in their own words, then map that answer to specific statements they can review and correct—not give them a personality score.
Thanks again for your feedback - I've already removed the “The bundle you were handed” bit.
Edit: yes this is explained at the end of the article after the quiz. It's still a confounding factor.
I've been working as a software developer for a while now, and this feels a lot like when a customer says I want feature A and I have to ask 20 more questions to filter out edge-cases the customer hadn't thought of yet.
- What counts as "in the park"
- What counts as a "vehicle"
- If it is both a vehicle and in the park, is justified?
- Is a justified violation of the rules still to be considered a violation?
This is mentioned on the page:
> answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed)
I personally answered "not breaking the rule" to emergency vehicles and second-guessed the skateboard and bike ones.
If I were to rephrase the rule, I'd write it as "No motorized vehicles in the park unless for emergencies". This way you have less ambiguity for justification.
Well, let's play "what is emergency in the park" now. It's a game about language and rules. It consists of 27 questions, but after the first seven, you can skip to the end.
I think calling it a "rule" with a "violation" is bringing in some emotional baggage that some people can't see past.
If instead of "does this violate the rule?" the game simply asked "is this a vehicle in the park?" the disagreement would be resolved.
Some people seem to interpret "does this violate the rule?" as asking something more like "is this a vehicle that shouldn't be in the park?", even though the rule doesn't say anything about "should".
But the question is not "is this a vehicle in the park," it's "whether or not this situation constitutes 'a vehicle in the park' for the sole purpose of what was the lawmakers' intent when they made a 'no vehicles in the park' rule."
A toy vehicle in the park most definitely is "a vehicle in the park." But prohibiting toys in the park most definitely wasn't the lawmakers' intent.
If you think a toy vehicle is a vehicle then you should have answered that the toy car violated the rule.
The way the game is framed as “interpretation of the law,” it includes the supposed intent of the law.
> 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.
The game is entirely about what constitutes "a vehicle" and what constitutes "in the park", it explicitly instructs against "what do I personally think should be allowed in the park".
I think this is key. Having a tank, even if it is nonfunctional and being used as a war memorial is still a vehicle and should be banned unless an exception granted.
Otherwise you'll end up with a hundred "tanks" in the park because they are "allowed". This is one of the things that people who want to slash red tape don't seem to get. Just because it was difficult to get one going doesn't mean that we should cut the red tape. Perhaps we don't actually want/need 27 instances of it.
The reason a tank in the park violates the rule is because a tank is a vehicle and the rule is "no vehicles in the park".
The tank violates the rule and it is why it isn't allowed.
However there is a scenario (such as the war memorial,or an ambulance) where you may want the vehicle to have access.
I was just relating it to people who claim to want to "cut red tape/remove regulations" because most of the time the red tape scenarios are these where we want to be able to carve out exceptions for particular scenarios. But we still don't want it to be the default position.
This is explicitly irrelevant, the game makes this clear.
The whole point is -- to you this is extremely clear, along one axis of interpretation. To other people it may be extremely clear along another; the issue is those two "obvious" interpretations don't actually align.
Rule: no vehicles in the park.
A vehicle in the park violates the rule. If it's a vehicle, and it's in the park, it violates the rule.
Anything else you're assuming should be added to this comes from your own experiences, not from the problem statement.
> Is a justified violation of the rules still to be considered a violation? reply
Given the introductory text, neither is relevant:
> 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).
For people who hold free speech as a cherished principle, this is abhorrent. But it (and other forums following suit) encouraged a more resilient Internet, IMO. The Internet was an archipelago of forums. You had to sign up individually and each had their own culture. And there were just some places you just. didn't. go. Stormfront's trash stayed over there and everyone liked it that way.
Then skip ahead in time: we have Reddit's Big Tent free speech approach and now we have to see if a skateboard is a vehicle. Moderation is a thankless unpaid job and the support just isn't there. Sometimes people are dragging your community/site into the sewer except all you have are downvotes, which are a total joke. It's just feeding the trolls. Hey, it wasn't an explicit call to violence against specific people so you can say whatever you want!
Is a skateboard a vehicle? I dunno. But if it's a private park at private expense and all non-skateboarders have left because they felt uncomfortable being there, it doesn't really matter.
"Francesca drives her car into the park with hazards lights on"
Does this violate the rule?
It only asks two questions, strictly: is it a vehicle, and is it in the park.
So yes, francesca's car being a vehicle and in the park is a violation.
no, it asks if the rule is violated in each situation
I think you missed their joke :) the joke is that in europe (hence the Mediterranean) people often use "hazards on" as a justification for parking / stopping anywhere, especially where they aren't allowed to.
The interesting issue here is that we have a reversal of the function of language. Language is effectively a complicated form of pointing at things: what is a "bridge" we can point at bridges where we agree. Here, we're starting with the word and trying to point at all the things that word applies to, hence we're doing it backwards. We'll start fighting when we get to the corner cases because the rule of "bridge" isn't meant to be stretched to corner cases. This isn't an issue in life because the function of jargon is to cover corner cases. It's all well and good to that thing on your skin a "mole," but when you're in the doctors office, it's much easier for them to adjust the precision of their language between a "common nevus" and a "dysplastic nevus."
Here again, we're just pointing at things with language, but the resolution is turned up. The language should be serving the concepts, not the other way around. When language fails us -- when we don't have a word for what we're pointing at -- it's trivial to coin a new term or adopt a loan word from another language.
In a sense, here, the reason legalese exists is exactly because lawmakers want to adjust the resolution to prevent these types of problems. Otherwise they the same process will happen, but it will happen in the courts.
For me "vehicle" means "a singular thing designed and able to move people around under it's own power or via a powering mechanism that people generate themselves" and "in the park" means "touching the park": hence the memorial is not a vehicle because it no long able to move people around. However I see the sled and the surfboard as vehicles because they are designed to move people under the power of gravity/waves.
My definition, however, is fairly arbitrary and not actually significant except to the way I communicate. J.L. Austin, if I remember correctly, wanted to create a Descriptivist dictionary where they would literally just go around regions and countries asking people what they meant by words... unfortunately, he died very young and the project never happened.
Where I disagree most with the linguists I talk to is that I believe that the concept of "correctness" is instinctual to language, insofar is people care passionately about prescriptive rules. I just think that we can be descriptivists, and see language as a map where people are arguing about borders. That we believe these borders real, and are "correct" or "incorrect" in our tribe is important to the usefulness of the language and our survival, even if they are ultimately entirely arbitrary. Thus, I've always speculated that an instinctual "correctness" value would show up, and we very much see it everywhere -- like in this game -- and the concept basically has to be unlearned by most people when they really get into learning about language.
From what context? At no point does the game say that, and from both the questions and the epilogue it's made clear that the game is about finding edge cases for what passes as "a vehicle" and "in the park".
In this case, "vehicle" is defined by Wikipedia (and most other reference works) as "a machine designed for self-propulsion, usually to transport people, cargo, or both", but even that is ambiguous, as is "in the park", so at that point we look for the opinion of the "reasonable man". Whether skateboards, toy cars, horse, surfboards, aircraft above the park, drones etc. meet these definitions is the kind of ambiguity the quiz is looking for.
I would also note that the game is not formulated as a law. It is formulated as a colloquial rule - a law would never be presented as "no vehicles in the park". This lends itself to the contextual inference that narrows imprecise wording. If it were instead presented as "Article 5, Section 3: Vehicles are not permitted in the park. [Subsection: definition of vehicle]" it would likely do a better job of getting results that explore the ambiguous bounds of the definition rather than, as it currently does, getting results that clearly delineate at what is unambiguously an automobile rather than at what is unambiguously a vehicle.