At one year the Petrov Day button was pressed because a direct message had the word “admin” in the sending users name. The challenge is not that the threats are especially bad but that there are many kinds of them. Claims like “nothing bad happens to the website” are extremely disjunctive. If even one of the things I would be worried about had a 3% chance of happening and if it happened it would spell doom then that would be enough. If there were 1000 things that threatened then on average they would only need a 0.003% chance to happen on average. There are so many more failure modes for a civilization than a website.
This analogy seems kind of silly. Dath ilan isn’t giving people a “destroy the cryonics facilities” button. I agree the 3% probably consists of a lot of small things that add up, but I don’t think there’s obviously >1000 black swans with a >3/1000 probability of happening.
At one year the Petrov Day button was pressed because a direct message had the word “admin” in the sending users name. The challenge is not that the threats are especially bad but that there are many kinds of them. Claims like “nothing bad happens to the website” are extremely disjunctive. If even one of the things I would be worried about had a 3% chance of happening and if it happened it would spell doom then that would be enough. If there were 1000 things that threatened then on average they would only need a 0.003% chance to happen on average. There are so many more failure modes for a civilization than a website.
This analogy seems kind of silly. Dath ilan isn’t giving people a “destroy the cryonics facilities” button. I agree the 3% probably consists of a lot of small things that add up, but I don’t think there’s obviously >1000 black swans with a >3/1000 probability of happening.