Can We Agree On Rules? [Pt. 1]

Is is the letter or the spirit of a rule that really matters?

The Teardown

Wednesday:: February 14th, 2024

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Dan Luu wrote an essay about how large platforms have difficulty moderating their content because there isn’t broad agreement on the rules. There is, of course, technology to remove or flag content that violates rules. But the fundamental problem discussed in Dan’s essay focuses on rule origination. Do people running these platforms agree on what these rules should be? Do users agree how the platform they use should be policed?

Early in the essay, Dan links to a simple game created by David Turner called No Vehicles In The Park. The game is simple in concept. You are asked to determine whether something is a vehicle in a park. That something may be a car, or a stroller, or a plane flying over the park. The game doesn’t ask you to determine the intent of the rule or potential violator. Instead, you determine only if the object in the scenario presented in each question is a vehicle in the park.

The game’s result screen and commentary provide some information on the game’s intent: it is hard to achieve complete agreement on how to interpret simple rules.

I played the game and scored an 85%. In my reading of the game’s results, that score means I agree with 85% of people that played the game and answered all the questions. To use an example, I described an ambulance driving into the park to help someone as, indeed, a vehicle in the park. Over 60% of people agree that the ambulance is a vehicle in the park.

For my next post, I’m encouraging you to play the game, grab a screenshot of the results for your own records, and post your score to the comments. I’d like to expand on differences in results in my corpus of readers.

Also, I’m curious for your comments on these bullets:

• Did you answer strictly based on letter of the rule, or intent, or did you find yourself mixing the two?

• Which object stood out as having the largest gap between the letter rule and the intent in the scenario?

• Is this a valid experiment? Why or why not?