> "Is the pedantic answer really uninteresting if it leads to unintuitive answers?"
Yes, because then we just get to arguing "is my car no longer a vehicle once it runs out of fuel and cannot function as a car?" then "is it no longer a vehicle if the battery is empty?" or "If the alternator is broken?" then, "does the vehicle-status depend on how quick and easy the fix is?" which are all dragging away from the question of "do people want a WWII tank in a park or not?".
And instead of asking "is a WWII tank in a park breaking the rule regardless of whether you object to the tank?" we could directly ask "do you object to the tank?".
> "By this reasoning, I counted the stroller, ice skates, and roller blades as violations yet did not count the toy cars, RC planes, nor the picnic wagon."
And now we're arguing whether RC planes count as vehicles, when people's objection might be noise in the park where RC planes with engines and drones are out, and RC electric planes/gliders are okay. Or people might think about safety - any plane near people is out, any plane away from people is okay.
> "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"
Why not? We can poll people on every behaviour seen in the park in the last year, online, in a few minutes, and make a bylaw listing the OK vs not-OK behaviours, democratically chosen. We don't, but I don't see why you say "we can't just do that" when we could do exactly that. Why does it have to be a single rule?
> "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'm not accepting that we can't get universal agreement on "no vehicles in the park" by nitpicking on what a vehicle is. On the ambulance it can be that some people answer "it's a vehicle so the rule is broken" because that's what the question tells them to answer even though they want ambulances allowed, other people answer "it's not a vehicle" because they want ambulances allowed and that's the only way to get them allowed, so we have a manufactured disagreement even if everyone wants them allowed. I'm conjecturing that we could get near-universal agreement on whether ambulances are okay (yes) by asking "are ambulances okay?" not "are ambulances vehicles?". Or even asking "is it okay if ambulances break the no-vehicles rule?". Maybe there's agreement on most, or all, of the questions if asked like that instead.
I also suspect bikes would be different depending if they are pedal or ebike, ridden slowly by little old ladies, or ridden by a racing peloton, or ridden as a busy through-commute every day. "bikes: yes/no?" isn't enough to classify those things differently. Bike racing: yes, no? Bike commuting: yes/no? etc.
>"is my car no longer a vehicle once it runs out of fuel and cannot function as a car?
If your car runs out of fuel in the park, it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule, though it is now likely breaking some other rule about littering in the park.
My fundamental disagreement is that if you allow for rules to be enforced in terms of what they were intended to say rather than what they actually say, then there actually isn't a rule at all. There's a pretense of law but in actuality its a dictatorship of whoever gets to judge what was "clearly" intended to be.
> If your car runs out of fuel in the park, it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule
Unless you put some fuel in it. To get it out of the park.
But then that would be violation, so leave it there?
I think all this meta disagreement, and the diverse counterintuitive reasoning arrived at by different attempts at consistency, demonstrate how hard it is to reach convergent agreement.
The hyperlogical pedantic reading makes the most sence from a game rule perspective. But agreement on initial perspective is difficult to obtain, even given “clear” instructions.
> "it is no longer breaking the vehicle rule, though it is now likely breaking some other rule about littering in the park."
Why isn't the WWII tank breaking the littering rule? Again your approach is leading to more and more pedantry instead of clearer rules.
> "My fundamental disagreement is that if you allow for rules to be enforced in terms of what they were intended to say rather than what they actually say..."
So let's make the rule actually say what we collectively intend it to say, then that problem goes away. We're in this stupid situation where the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed" but you haven't given a reason why the rules cannot say that. "Emergency services are exempt from park rules". If there comes a time of an epidemic of off-duty emergency service workers driving WWII era tank shells modified with blue lighs and sirens and electric unicycle propulsion through the park at high speed on their commute to their second jobs, that's a bridge to cross when it becomes the next most pressing issue in the park.
It should be that we can get past the easy cases "ambulances allowed" and we should be struggling with "what counts as loud and annoying music?" or "are flying drones more fun or more noisy and dangerous?". But instead we're falling over at "are ambulances really vehicles?" and "are statues vehicles?" because of ... bad question design.
> We're in this stupid situation where the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed"
No we aren't. At no time is it specified that the rules "cannot" say "ambulances are allowed". Merely it is specified that the current rules of the park "don't" say "ambulances are allowed". The game is explicitly putting you in the position of judge not legislator. The question of if the intent of having a park could be better codified with a different rule is also interesting, but its not the question the game is asking you.
The game could have gone down the rabbit hole of making a more complicated fictitious "Parks Act" and asking you to judge if each example is a violation or not. And sure this pedantic fictional law would probably better approximate what feels like the obvious intention of a park. But even with that, you'd still end up with surprisingly contentious disagreement when you ask people to apply the law. And you would still end up with people legislating from the bench, finding ways to judge the examples to fit their personal opinions of what a park is. And sometimes, even though the opinion of what a park is feels obvious and universal, it may actually be logically inconsistent and contentious in ways that you don't even notice until you sit down and actually attempt to codify the rules. If anything making the park rule itself an accurate-yet-complex piece of mini-legislation would distract from the point. The "no vehicles in the park" rule may be excessively coarse at capturing the intent, but as a rule it intentionally too short and direct for disagreement to stem from the inherent complexity of subsections and exception clauses.
So, I agree, the park rule can and should be codified better. And we could make our own game "park bylaw committee" about coming up with a set of rules for a park that actually match our expectations for a park. And I agree figuring out how to codify the intent of a park into meaningful rules would be its own interesting philosophical statement on the nature of law and systems of law. But its different from the point the game is making.
Yes, because then we just get to arguing "is my car no longer a vehicle once it runs out of fuel and cannot function as a car?" then "is it no longer a vehicle if the battery is empty?" or "If the alternator is broken?" then, "does the vehicle-status depend on how quick and easy the fix is?" which are all dragging away from the question of "do people want a WWII tank in a park or not?".
And instead of asking "is a WWII tank in a park breaking the rule regardless of whether you object to the tank?" we could directly ask "do you object to the tank?".
> "By this reasoning, I counted the stroller, ice skates, and roller blades as violations yet did not count the toy cars, RC planes, nor the picnic wagon."
And now we're arguing whether RC planes count as vehicles, when people's objection might be noise in the park where RC planes with engines and drones are out, and RC electric planes/gliders are okay. Or people might think about safety - any plane near people is out, any plane away from people is okay.
> "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"
Why not? We can poll people on every behaviour seen in the park in the last year, online, in a few minutes, and make a bylaw listing the OK vs not-OK behaviours, democratically chosen. We don't, but I don't see why you say "we can't just do that" when we could do exactly that. Why does it have to be a single rule?
> "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'm not accepting that we can't get universal agreement on "no vehicles in the park" by nitpicking on what a vehicle is. On the ambulance it can be that some people answer "it's a vehicle so the rule is broken" because that's what the question tells them to answer even though they want ambulances allowed, other people answer "it's not a vehicle" because they want ambulances allowed and that's the only way to get them allowed, so we have a manufactured disagreement even if everyone wants them allowed. I'm conjecturing that we could get near-universal agreement on whether ambulances are okay (yes) by asking "are ambulances okay?" not "are ambulances vehicles?". Or even asking "is it okay if ambulances break the no-vehicles rule?". Maybe there's agreement on most, or all, of the questions if asked like that instead.
I also suspect bikes would be different depending if they are pedal or ebike, ridden slowly by little old ladies, or ridden by a racing peloton, or ridden as a busy through-commute every day. "bikes: yes/no?" isn't enough to classify those things differently. Bike racing: yes, no? Bike commuting: yes/no? etc.