The author completely intended for this level of discussion by asking for you to dogmatically follow the rule and posing a lot of circumstances where most people would allow it to be broken. It appears to be working as intended.
I'm pretty surprised that you thought it was so black-and-white to allow things like emergency vehicles - a lot of places ban emergency vehicles (and they follow that rule) because they are too dangerous for those vehicles to enter. Personally, I assumed that might be the case given that the sign said no vehicles at all.
Also, the Monty Hall problem is not ambiguous at all. The clear answer is to switch doors thanks to how conditional probability works. The paradox is why people stick to their chosen door, and it is a weird psychology problem, but they are objectively wrong.
> The author completely intended for this level of discussion by asking for you to dogmatically follow the rule and posing a lot of circumstances where most people would allow it to be broken. It appears to be working as intended.
Yeah, this is what I saw the intent as. Author knew some people would interpret their words very carefully, being explicit to follow "the letter" (as is explicitly asked). But recognized that a large number of people wouldn't do this and let their own biases sink in. Then a meta conversation would start. Really all the gamble depends on is having a sufficiently large sample size. Even better if differing native languages. The "gotcha" people (like the shoes person), the dogmatic "obvious" people, and the "well in the real world" people even add to the chaos that illustrates the author's point: absolute precision in language (including interpretation) is impossible. Communication is inherently a fuzzy process. To me it is often striking that people don't recognize language as fuzzy.
> I'm pretty surprised that you thought it was so black-and-white to allow things like emergency vehicles
I didn't think that. I thought that the emergency vehicle one was a good question in which the resulting disagreement supports the author's point. The point being that content moderation involves shades of gray that two content moderators might reasonably disagree on.
But other questions (the wheelchair, toy cars, the ISS) are bad examples in which any disagreement demonstrates an implausible level of communication breakdown. An analogous situation would be a content moderator who painstakingly considers the letter of the law to determine whether time dilation opens a loophole in the "no child porn" rule - if the employer and the content moderator are acting in good faith, I cannot imagine this happening.
Well, "no child porn" is a comparatively black-and-white rule.
I would suggest you consider rules like "no racial/gendered slurs," which itself has caused a stir on Twitter recently when Elon Musk decided that "cisgender" was a slur. Most tweets that use the word "cisgender" to describe someone do so in a very negative light, often labeling them as "cisgender" with the implication that they are privileged, bigoted, and out of touch, but does that mean that the word "cisgender" rises to the level of a slur?
I'm pretty surprised that you thought it was so black-and-white to allow things like emergency vehicles - a lot of places ban emergency vehicles (and they follow that rule) because they are too dangerous for those vehicles to enter. Personally, I assumed that might be the case given that the sign said no vehicles at all.
Also, the Monty Hall problem is not ambiguous at all. The clear answer is to switch doors thanks to how conditional probability works. The paradox is why people stick to their chosen door, and it is a weird psychology problem, but they are objectively wrong.