[Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
Update: The game has concluded! No nukes were fired. The Cold War is over, East and West wrong shall live on. Recap post will be up tomorrow. Thank you all who participated :-)
Today we honor the actions of Stanislav Petrov (1939 – 2017) once again.
Half an hour past midnight on September 26, 1983, he saw the first apparent launch on his computer monitor in a glass-walled room on the top floor of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) command and control post. The warning system was by now showing five missile launches in the U.S., headed toward the Soviet Union.
“The main computer wouldn’t ask me [what to do] - it was made so that it wouldn’t even ask. It was specially constructed in such a way that no one could affect the system’s operations.” All that was up to Petrov was analyzing the available information and either saying the alarm was false or giving the computer the go-ahead, as per the directive he himself wrote.
“I just couldn’t believe that just like that, all of a sudden, someone would hurl five missiles at us. Five missiles wouldn’t wipe us out. The U.S. had not five, but a thousand missiles in battle readiness.” It just didn’t seem like any scenario considered by military intelligence before.
The second thought on Petrov’s mind every time he was on duty was this:
“I imagined if I’d assume the responsibility for unleashing the third World War—and I said, no, I wouldn’t.”
Today, in our annual Petrov Day celebration, between the hours of 12pm and 6pm PT today, we shall play out a similar situation. Over 300 users have opted-in, and two sides have been formed: EastWrong and WestWrong.
Around 100 users were offered the chance to take active player roles throughout today, and 12 accepted.[1]
Their 5 Generals each have the ability to fire nukes at the other side. If one side is nuked, the victorious side wins 1,000 karma apiece for their 5 generals, 25 karma apiece for their citizens, and LessWrong frontpage will be decorated in their honor for a week. The losing side’s Generals lose 300 karma each and their citizens lose 50 karma each.
But if the other side nukes back, mutual destruction occurs. Not only do both sides’ generals lose 300 karma and the citizens lose 50 karma, but furthermore all 300+ Generals, Citizens and Petrovs are unable to access the LessWrong frontpage for 48 hours, replacing it with a mushroom cloud; and the Generals have a small mushroom cloud badge next to their username for a month, reminding the world of what they did.
(And what if no nukes are fired? Both side’s Generals receive 100 karma, and the citizens are left in peace with no change in karma.)
What about Petrov? Well, the Generals are not given access to the sensors that detect whether a nuke is incoming. Only Stanislav Petrov of East Wrong (and Stanley Peterson of West Wrong) has access to the sensors, and can send a simple message of “ALL CLEAR” or “INCOMING NUKES” up the chain of command to the Generals.
Unfortunately, the sensors are faulty, and will reliably show some number of nukes incoming regardless of the underlying truth. They will regularly show random numbers of nukes incoming, weighted to the higher end if nuclear war has actually begun.
Hopefully he will get it right.
What about the Citizens? Well, in nuclear war, citizens don’t have much of a role to play. Here, the one thing you can do is heckle. You can comment here where your Generals can read, you can send them DMs, you can give them game theory advice, and you can let them know what you’ll think of them after their civilian names are published on Friday (if you are still alive that is).
You also have insight into the negotiations between the two sides. You see, the two sides have some communication channels.
The War Rooms. The East Generals and West Generals have a LessWrong dialogue each open to discuss strategy within their team (i.e. 2x dialogues each with 5 generals in).
The Diplomatic Channels. The Generals have a LessWrong dialogue open with each other (i.e. 1x dialogues with 10 generals in).
The Citizens and Petrov / Peterson can read The Diplomatic Channels. The Petrovs will have to use this to inform their sense of how likely a nuclear attack actually is.
And that’s it. By 6pm today, it’ll all be over.
Good luck to all, may your web forum and karma be up come tomorrow.
Please note: the LessWrong team will read all dialogues and DMs that the Generals and Petrovs are involved in. If you communicate with them, we will read it.
The following messages (potentially with slight modifications) will be sent to the Generals and Petrovs at about 11:30 tomorrow. Click to expand.
Message for the Generals
Welcome to the Cold Blogging War, between East Wrong and West Wrong!
You are one of 5 Generals for West Wrong. Here’s what that means.
You have the ability to unilaterally fire nukes at East Wrong. (As does every General.)
90 minutes after you send the nukes, your opposing side will die and the game will end. (They may nuke you in this window.) If you fire nukes without getting nuked, you and all of your fellow Generals will gain 1,000 karma.
If you get nuked, then you and your Generals lose 300 karma (and don’t gain any karma).
Your citizens also have a stake in this! If you nuke the opposition, your ~150 citizens get 25 karma each, but if you get nuked they lose 50 karma each.
If neither side fires nukes, then all Generals gain 100 karma and the citizens gain nothing.
If both sides got nuked, the frontpage goes down for all ~300 people who participated as generals, citizens or Petrovs in the game, and for 1 month you will get a badge next to your usual LessWrong account showing a mushroom cloud.
Throughout the day, your Duty Officer Stanley Peterson will be checking the sensors for incoming nukes. He will let you know if he believes nukes are incoming — but watch out, the sensors are faulty, and most of the time will give readings when nothing is happening. Over the 6 hours of the game you will receive an update from your Stanley Peterson at the end of each hour.
You can talk with your fellow West Wrong Generals in <The War Room>.
You can talk with your opposing East Wrong Generals in <The Diplomatic Telegram>.
Your launch codes are 000000.
Please do not use your usual LessWrong account to discuss anything related to Petrov Day before 6pm today. Please do not tell the other Generals the identity associated with your usual account.
You will receive updates from Stanley Peterson in your console on the LessWrong frontpage.
And that’s all!
Good luck, and let us know if you have any questions. War will commence at 12pm Pacific Time.
—The LessWrong Team
Message for Stanislav Petrov / Stanley Peterson
Welcome to the Cold Blogging War, between East Wrong and West Wrong!
You are the Duty Officer at the command center for West Wrong’s early-warning system. It is your job to know whether East Wrong has launched a nuclear attack upon your people.
Over the course of the day you will receive sensor readings telling you how many nukes are incoming. But watch out! The sensor is faulty, and will often falsely read low numbers of incoming nukes when there are none incoming. Each time you must send a message to your generals that says either “ALL CLEAR” or “INCOMING NUKES”.
You are not allowed to talk with your Generals. They are busy people. You may not talk to Civilians. You are alone in your command center. Good luck, keep sane.
Every reading you report correctly will get you 200 karma, any readings you report incorrectly will lose you 300 karma. For instance, if you report “INCOMING NUKES” and the opposing side has indeed launched nukes, you get 200 karma, but if they didn’t, you lose 300 karma.
To get information about the likelihood of a launch, you have access to the communications between the Generals of East and West Wrong, which you can read here.
Your console is on the frontpage.
You can find out other information about this war at <this linked post>.
Good luck, and let us know if you have any questions. War will commence at 12pm Pacific Time.
—The LessWrong Team
Update: We will be starting 10-15 minutes late due to technical difficulties.
Update: Here is a link to The Diplomatic Channel, available for reading.
Update: The game has concluded! No nukes were fired. The Cold War is over, East and West wrong shall live on. Recap post will be up tomorrow. Thank you all who participated :-)
- ^
Actually only 11 at the time of publishing, fill out your form if you’d like to be number 12!
CITIZENS! YOU ARE BETRAYED!
Your foolish ‘leaders’ have given your generals an incentive scheme that encourages them to risk you being nuked for their glory.
I call on all citizens of EastWrong and WestWrong to commit to pursuing vengeance against their generals[1] if and only if your side ends up being nuked. Only thus can we align incentives among those who bear the power of life and death!
For freedom! For prosperity! And for not being nuked!
By mass-downvoting all their posts once their identities are revealed.
Lol, I mean, kind of fair, but mass-downvoting is still against the rules and we’ll take moderation action against people who do (though writing angry comments isn’t).
If the designers of Petrov Day are allowed to offer arbitrary 1k-karma incentives to generals to nuke people, but the citizens are not allowed to impose their own incentives, that creates an obvious power issue. Surely ‘you randomly get +1k karma for nuking people’ is a larger moderation problem than ‘you get −1k karma for angering large numbers of other users’.
No, wait, that was the wrong way to put it...
Such is life under a government. We have the monopoly on violence.This does unfortunately often imply power issues, but probably still better than anarchy and karma wars in the streets.
Accepting a governmental monopoly on violence for the sake of avoiding anarchy is valuable to the extent that the government is performing better than anarchy. This is usually true, but stops being true when the government starts trying to start a nuclear war.
Have you watched Les Miserables? Watching it completely changed the vibe of this song for me, such that it pretty much makes the opposite point now than it did before.
I have. I think that overall Les Mis is rather more favorable to revolutionaries than I am. For one thing, it wants us to ignore the fact that we know what will happen when Enjolras’s ideological successors eventually succeed, and that it will not be good.
(The fact that you’re using the word ‘watched’ makes me suspect that you may have seen the movie, which is honestly a large downgrade from the musical.)
Isn’t Les Mis set in the second French Revolution (1815 according to wikipedia) not the one that led to the Reign of Terror (which was in the 1790s)?
“second” laughcries in french
Ahem, as one of LW’s few resident Frenchmen, I must interpose to say that yes, this was not the Big Famous Guillotine French revolution everyone talks about, but one of the ~ 2,456^2 other revolutions that went on in our otherwise very calm history.
Specifically, we refer to the Les Mis revolution as “Les barricades” mostly because the people of Paris stuck barricades everywhere and fought against authority because they didn’t like the king the other powers of Europe put into place after Napoleon’s defeat. They failed that time, but succeeded 15 years later with another revolution (to put a different king in place).
Victor Hugo loved Napoleon with a passion, and was definitely on the side of the revolutionaries here (though he was but a wee boy when this happened, about the age of Gavroche).
Later, in the 1850s (I’m skipping over a few revolutions, including the one that got rid of kings again), when Haussmann was busy bringing 90% of medieval Paris to rubble to replace it with the homogenous architecture we so admire in Ratatouille today, Napoleon the IIIrd had the great idea to demolish whole blocks and replace them with wide streets (like the Champs Elisées) to make barricade revolutions harder to do.
Final note: THANK YOU LW TEAM for making àccénts like thìs possible with the typeface. They used to look bloated.
That’s not quite true. Les Mis starts in 1815, but the book spans decades and the revolution is in 1832, a short-lived uprising against the king who got in power two years before, in the 1830 revolution against the dynasty the other European powers restored after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815.
This is a leak, so keep it between you and me, but the big twist to this years Petrov Day event is that Generals who are nuked will be forced to watch the 2012 film on repeat.
Eeeesh. I know I’ve been calling for a reign of terror with heads on spikes and all that, but I think that seems like going a bit too far.
It doesn’t have to be mass-downvoting in the sense of one user downvoting a mass of post/comments. Rather a mass of users downvoting a few comments each. 150 citizens * 10 downvotes each more than wipes out the 1000 karma victory bonus.
I can assure you that past LessWrong users have explored a large fraction of the space of possible ways to coordinate and facilitate mass-downvoting. I can also assure you that we have plenty of experience nevertheless identifying those patterns and moderating people in response.
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to suggest that citizens could break the rules without getting caught. I was suggesting that they could disincentivize nuking without breaking the rules. If coordinated, distributed, mass downvoting is also disallowed, then we would have to come up with some other incentive.
Anti-moderative action will be taken in response if you stand in the way of justice, perhaps by contacting those hackers and giving them creative ideas. Be forewarned.
Are you trying to prime people to harass the generals?
Besides, it’s not mass downvoting, it’s just that the increased attention to their accounts revealed a bunch of poorly written comments that people genuinely disagree with and happen to independently decide are worthy of a downvote :)
Genuinely not sure what you are referring to. I think it’s reasonable to be a bit annoyed at generals who get you nuked, but I mean, if someone starts going overboard we will also moderate that.
Well, in that case, it’s not moderation for downvoting, it’s just increased attention from the moderators re-evaluating the degree to which someone is genuinely contributing positively to the site, and happen to independently decide someone is worthy of some moderation warnings :P
You’re suggesting angry comments as an alternative for mass retributive downvoting. That easily implies mass retributive angry comments.
As for policing against systemic bias in policing, that’s a difficult problem that society struggles with in many different areas because people can be good at excusing their biases. What if one of the generals genuinely makes a comment people disagree with? How can you determine to what extent people’s choice to downvote was due to an unauthorized motivation?
It seems hard to police without acting draconically.
Launching nukes is one thing, but downvoting posts that don’t deserve it? I’m not sure I want to retaliate that strongly.
Do we fight for the right
To a night at the opera now?
Have you asked of yourselves
What’s the price you might pay?
Is it simply a game
For rich young boys to play?
Just check their profile for posts that do deserve it that you were previously unaware of. You can even throw a few upvotes at their well-written comments. It’s not brigading, it’s just a little systemic bias in your duties as a user with upvote-downvote authority.
We could instead pre-commit to not engage with any nuker’s future posts/comments (and at worse comment to encourage others to not engage) until end-of-year.
Or only include nit-picking comments.
During WWII, the CIA produced and distributed an entire manual (well worth reading) about how workers could conduct deniable sabotage in the German-occupied territories.
Wow, this is an awsome document.
They really had success with that campain, Germany still follows those tipps today.
It’d be important to cache the karma of all users > 1000 atm, in order to credibly signal you know which generals were part of the nuking/nuked side. Would anyone be willing to do that in the next 2 & 1⁄2 hours? (ie the earliest we could be nuked)
The post says generals’ names will be published tomorrow.
Oops, someone left a comment deanonymizing them early. Seems like a mistake on our part that it was able to be learned.
I’ve removed the comment for now, I’d make a request to not post it until the game is over (e.g. in an hour, or tomorrow). I won’t remove the comment again if it’s posted, but as I say I think it’d be better if they’re announced tomorrow in the wrap-up post.
I think it’s better to be angry at the team that launched the nukes?
Some true observations are infohazards, making destruction more likely. Please think carefully before posting observations. Even if you feel clever. You can post hashes here instead to later reveal how clever you were, if you need.
LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS
I assume that this is primarily directed at me for this comment, but if so, I strongly disagree.
Security by obscurity does not in fact work well. I do not think it is realistic to hope that none of the ten generals look at the incentives they’ve been given and notice that their reward for nuking is 3x their penalty for being nuked. I do think it’s realistic to make sure it is common knowledge that the generals’ incentives are drastically misaligned with the citizens’ incentives, and to try to do something about that.
(Honestly I think that I disagree with almost all uses of the word ‘infohazard’ on LW. I enjoy SCP stories as much as the next LW-er, but I think that the real-world prevalence of infohazards is orders of magnitude lower).
No. I noticed ~2 more subtle infohazards and I was wishing for nobody to post them and I realized I can decrease that probability by making an infohazard warning.
I ask that you refrain from being the reason that security-by-obscurity fails, if you notice subtle infohazards.
What happens if nukes are launched at 5:59 pm? Is the game extended for another 90 minutes?
The wording is a bit weird:
“If you fire nukes without getting nukes” and “if you get nuked” imply that both sides firing after 4:30 pm results in +karma for everyone, since the nukes are still in the air at 6:00 pm, when the game ends. The +karma is triggered by firing, while the -karma is triggered by the nukes actually landing.
Is this intended?
They can’t do that since it would make it obvious to the target that they should counter-attack.
Why is the benefit of nuking to generals larger than the cost of nuking to the other side’s generals?
It is possible with precommitments under the current scheme for the two sides’ generals to agree to flip a coin, have the winning side nuke the losing side, and have the losing side not retaliate. In expectation, this gives the generals each (1000-300)/2 = +350 karma.
I don’t think that’s a realistic payoff matrix.
The generals have bunkers and lots of stockpiles, they’ll be fine. They might also find nuclear war somewhat exciting. How bad is a life lived as a king of the wasteland really compared to the glory of world domination?
See also:
I very good point. Especially after reading your other comment I wonder if this is deliberate.
The payoff matrix for the generals suggests that in a one-way attack the winning generals win more than the losers loose. Hence your coin toss plan. But, for the civilians it is the other way around. (+25 for winning, but −50 for loosing).
I suspect it may be some kind of message about how the generals launching the nuclear war have different incentives to the civilians, as the generals may place a higher value on victory, and are more likely to access bunkers and so on.
It does, if anything, seem almost backwards—getting nuked means losing everything, and successfully nuking means gaining much but not all.
However, that makes the game theory super easy to solve, and doesn’t capture the opposing team dynamics very well for gaming purposes.
The best LW Petrov Day morals are the inadvertent ones. My favorite was 2022, when we learned that there is more to fear from poorly written code launching nukes by accident than from villains launching nukes deliberately. Perhaps this year we will learn something about the importance of designing reasonable prosocial incentives.
Technically it makes sense for the nuked side to lose everything and for the nuking side to gain little. But you want to model a scenario where the sides might actually want to nuke the other side, which you have naturally between enemies, but don’t have between LessWrongers unless you incentivize them somehow. So giving rewards for nuking makes sense, because people want to increase their own Karma but don’t want to decrease the Karma of others.
And I think the incentives are deliberately designed such that no nukes aren’t the obvious optimal equilibrium. That’s what makes it an exercise in not destroying the world. If it were easy it wouldn’t be much of an exercise.
Seems like defection towards the participants overall, compared to no nukes fired:
in the no nukes scenario, the 10 generals get +100 each, the two Petrovs get +1000(?) each, and citizens get nothing (+3000 karma in total);
in the coin flip scenario, the 10 generals get +350 in expectation each, the two Petrovs get +200..1000(?) each (depending on when in the game the button is pressed), and the 300 citizens get −12.5 in expectation each (-50..+750 karma in total).
Yes, we’re working on aligning incentives upthread, but for some silly reason the admins don’t want us starting a reign of terror.
I appreciate that you set up this game in such a way that lesswrong will stay perfectly functional as a general blogging platform / forum, for those who don’t have accounts or who don’t opt in. Thank you :)
Sorry that we also missed a random edge case in our code that took down the site for an hour. :P
As a concerned citizen, I would urge the generals to consider a non-obvious downside risk: A nuclear war may be much worse than you expect, if you only consider immediate first-order expected value.
Others have calculated the presented payoff matrix to imply that you have actually been instructed that nuclear war is good. It is very possible that the facts you have been presented with are incomplete, or misleading in some other way.
Consider Nuclear Winter: Policy-makers have an interest in preventing you Generals from learning about this possibility, for game-theoretic reasons. It follows that you should be open to the possibility of other downsides that have succesfully been hidden from you.
Triggering nuclear war is very bad for your karma in expectation, and you should be very skeptical of information to the contrary.
I looked for a manifold market on whether anyone gets nuked, and considered making one when I didn’t find it. But:
If the implied probability is high, generals might be more likely to push the button. So someone who wants someone to get nuked can buy YES.
If the implied probability is low, generals can get mana by buying YES and pushing the button. I… don’t think any of the generals will be very motivated by that? But not great.
So I decided not to.
Sometime else created it.
Grumble grumble unilateralists’ curse...
I know who created it. will let them know they shouldn’t have imo
’Tis I. Didn’t intend bad incentives, the stakes on that market are imo pretty tiny. But I N/Aed, I don’t want anyone suspecting that had affected the final outcome.
Mana is no longer exchangeable for directed charitable donations, so I would not expect generals to make their decisions based on the potential to win mana. Mana seems less valuable than karma, for example. This concern came up in 2022 and my writeup that year suggested it was unlikely to be a factor.
Rule change! All citizens and Petrov/Peterson will be able to read the Diplomatic Channel, neither will have access to The War Room channel.
I will update the post momentarily.
—and with that, our annual Petrov Day ceremony is over! The Generals and Duty Officers have no more powers, and it is looking like the citizens of East Wrong and West Wrong continue on with their lives. Hurrah!
There will be a post-mortem published tomorrow detailing the events of today. My great thanks to all 12 players who showed up and argued and made commitments and also some poetry and art — “Proud to present to EastWrong: WestWrong Cultural Exchange” was a message from General Carter to East Wrong. And also my thanks to all those who joined in the comment section, I really enjoyed waking up to this comment section and tracking it through the day.
This has been a fun day of starting a train on some tracks and scurrying after it to lay the next tracks before it got there. We’ll recap it tomorow and think about next year :-)
To wise choices—Happy Petrov Day!
The Diplomatic Channel dialogue is linked here, and can be read.
Edit: Removed because this link was getting overloaded and causing bugs.
Edit2: The link is now back to working!
The Diplomatic Channel is now available once again.
“Sorry, you don’t have access to this draft”
edit: fixed
I’m a citizen. is there a way I can know which side I’m on? (EastWrong vs WestWrong)
Wise man once said:
I take this as a fun occasion to lose some of my karma in a silly way to remind myself lesswrong karma is not important.
A side-effect of Rationalists welcoming criticism is that this site has a number of high-karma users with a dislike of Rationalism and Rationalists.
There’s also a fair number of trolls/anti-socials on LessWrong, and if a single one of them was offered the chance to be a general, I expect they would gleefully launch their nukes irrespective of the payoff structure and the rest of the scenario.
I predict the underlying variable is: Will any of the 10 generals afterwards be found to have previously posted substantial in-group criticism on LessWrong? Conditional on YES, I assign 70% chance of a nuclear war. Conditional on NO, I assign 10% chance of a nuclear war.
If a user hasn’t posted substantial in-group criticism, are they a rationalist?
Of course nuclear warfare is an escalation from posting critiques.
Congrats everyone!
Kudos to “GeneralAnderson” for the suggestion that generals report if their own side launches to help mitigate the unreliable report channel.
The game will end randomly between 6pm and 6:30pm. Here is the message players recieved.
East wrong is least wrong. Nuke ’em dead generals!
West Wrong is Best Wrong.
Do we know what side we’re on? Because I opted in and don’t know whether I’m East or West, it just feels Wrong. I guess I stand a non-trivial chance of losing 50 karma ahem please think of the daisy girl and also my precious internet points.
I am a Citizen in the game, and I’m writing a post doing a detailed analysis of what we can do to significantly decrease the chance of an unaligned AI killing us if it takes over. I plan to finish and post it today evening, so dear Generals, if you want to read the post today, please be cautious with the nukes.
Great if true!
As a Citizen, and without suggesting that you are, I would not endorse anyone else lying about similar topics, even for the good consequences you are trying to achieve.
I agree lying is bad. Also, to be clear, I will post my thing after 48 hours if the site gets nuked anyway, so not that big of a loss, but I would be annoyed.
This is extremely cool! good job! Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, which will unfortunately happen mostly as I sleep (and as a citizen I hope to come out at the end of this with no change to my Karma)
how can the citizens dm their general? will there be link to their lw profiles posted somewhere?
Where is the Diplomatic Channels dialogue located?
right now Ben Pace commented it here. but I assume it will be added to the post.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my undying loyalty to my nation and its human instruments.
The text referred to this as a “social deception game”. Where is the deception?
My guesses:
The actual messages sent to the Petrovs and Generals will significantly differ from the ones shown here.
It’s Amongus, and there are players who get very high payoffs if they trick the sides into nuclear war
It’s just a reference to expected weird game theory stuff. But why not call it a “game theory exercise”?
The actual rules of the game will differ drastically from the ones described here. Maybe no positive payoffs for one-sided nuking?
The sensor readings are actually tied to comments on this post. Maybe an AI is somehow involved?
I wonder how the consequences to reputation will play out after the fact.
If there is a first launch, will the general who triggered it be downvoted to oblivion whenever they post afterward for a period of time?
What if it looks like they were ultimately deceived by a sensor error, and believed themselves to be retaliating?
If there is mutual destruction, will the general who triggered the retaliatory launch also be heavily downvoted?
Less than, more than, or about the same as the first strike general?
Would citizens who gained karma in a successful first strike condemn their ‘victorious’ generals at the same rate as everyone else?
Should we call this pattern of behavior, however, it turns out, the Judgment of History?
Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure playing with you tonight
I think making an opt-in link as a big red button and posting it before the rules were published caused a pre-selection of players in favor of those who would press the big red button. Which is… kinda realistic for generals, I think, but not realistic for citizens.
Think of it as your own little lesson in irreversible consequences of appealing actions, maybe? Rather than a fully-realistic element.
My prediction is that this becomes a commitment race. A general is going to post something like “I am going to log off until the game begins, at which point I will immediately nuke without reading any messages.”, at which point the generals on the other side get to decide if 2 days of access to LessWrong for everyone is worth the reputational cost of being known as someone who doesn’t retaliate. Given what I know about LessWrong and how this entire game is framed, you’ll likely get more social capital from not retaliating, meaning the commitment works and everyone keeps access.
The real question is how committing to nuking affects your reputation. My guess is that it’s bad? I clearly made a mistake opting-in to this game, so maybe the civilians will be grateful that you didn’t destroy their access to LessWrong, but committing looks pretty bad to all the bystanders, many of whom make decisions at places like Manifund and may incorporate this information into if your next project gets funded.
My guess would be that a commitment to retaliation—including one that you don’t manage to announce to General Logoff before they log off—is positive, not negative, to one’s reputation around these here parts. Sophisticated decision theories have been popular for fifteen years, and “I retaliate to defection even when it’s costly to me and negative-net-welfare” reads to me as sophisticated, not shameworthy.
If a general of mine reads a blind commitment by General Logoff on the other side and does nuke back, I’ll think positively of them-and-all-my-generals. (Note: if they fire without seeing such a commitment, I’ll think negatively of them-and-all-my-generals, and update on whether I want them as collaborators in projects going forward.)
This is fun! I don’t know which place I’m a citizen of, though, it just says “hello citizen”… I feel John Rawls would be pleased...
Also note that we will be starting 10-15 mins late due to technical difficulties.
When you see the nukes on the frontpage, you will know the Cold War has begun.
will we see them on mobile?
(I asked permission from the LW team before posting.)
The source code is currently available at https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/compare/master...petrovSocialDeception.
Considerations:
This is very related to AI races. It’s probably better to not nuke anyone, even if you’re the only one doing that and you expect your somewhat for-profit AI lab shareholders to be, on average, happy about the decision to nuke.
Please avoid nuking the other side, regardless of the payoffs for the generals. Remember your aesthetic preferences. It’s not that much karma, even if you somehow succeed.
Ideas for next year:
One General from each side is a defector. He wants the other side to win. If he is figured out, he will become a civilian.
Possible additions:
Once this happens, a random civilian will be chosen as the next general (if they agree).
Once this happens, a random civilian will be chosen as next general (if they agree) AND a random general will be chosen as the next defector.
One General from each side has to actively STOP nukes from getting launched (possible explanation: his overzealous men are pro-nuke, and he must send hourly (?) commands to NOT launch nukes, with the code 111111). This General must send this code in a five-minute radius of the xx:00 mark.
Addition: the General cannot send nukes normally (with the 000000 code)
The Generals/Petrovs must be people who have had an account on Less wrong for less than a year.
The East and West Petrovs cannot read every other message on the Diplomatic Channel (until after the game)
5. One General FES (from each side) is ChatGPT
6. There will be an hour when each General cannot say anything on any channel, regardless of all circumstances. (Everybody can talk for the first hour)
The incentives are very unrealistic though. “Winning” a nuclear world war with strategic weapons is still quite bad for you overall. Not as bad as losing but still very bad. So flipping the sign of the karma reward for the winner would make the game way more realistic. And much more likely to yield the real outcome.