Can You Enforce a Rule That Says 'No Vehicles in the Park'?
A 27-question game built around a single deceptively simple rule: no vehicles in the park. Each scenario asks you to judge whether the rule was broken, setting aside real-world legal exemptions or religious allowances. After the first seven questions you can skip to the end, where your answers are compared with other players' and the creator explains why the game exists.
Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
- benrutter
I liked this as an idea, and I agree with the point at the end that content moderation is quite difficult.
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.
- quixoticaxolotl
The game tries to make the case that the problem with the rule "no vehicles in the park" isn't underspecification, but I feel it misses some important dimensions when it does that. Specifically, it only looks at specifying the subject of the rule i.e. what constitutes a vehicle. It doesn't consider the intent behind the rule, or the balance of interests affected by the rule's application.
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.
- thinkingemote
Previously: 2023 1K comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36453856
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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.
- kristofferc
This felt very easy. And yes, a police car in the park violates the rule, but police are allowed to violate rules in certain cases.
- jstanley
I think the most interesting finding from this is that some people experience their sense of what should be allowed so strongly that it blinds their sense of whether a particular action technically violates a particular rule.