I’m quite scared by some of the responses I’m seeing to this year’s Petrov Day. Yes, it is symbolic. Yes, it is a fun thing we do. But it’s not “purely symbolic”, it’s not “just a game”. Taking things that are meant to be serious is important, even if you can’t see why they’re serious.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the truly valuable thing a rogue agent destroys by failing to live up to expectations on Petrov day, isn’t just whatever has been put at stake for the day’s celebrations, but the very valuable chance to build a type of trust that can only be built by playing games with non-trivial outcomes at stake.
Maybe there could be a better job in the future of communicating the essence of what this celebration is intended to achieve, but to my eyes, it was fairly obvious what was going on, and I’m seeing a lot of comments by people (whose other contributions to LW I respect) who seemed to completely fail to see what I thought was obviously the spirit of this exercise
I’m quite scared by some of the responses I’m seeing to this year’s Petrov Day. Yes, it is symbolic. Yes, it is a fun thing we do. But it’s not “purely symbolic”, it’s not “just a game”. Taking things that are meant to be serious is important, even if you can’t see why they’re serious.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the truly valuable thing a rogue agent destroys by failing to live up to expectations on Petrov day, isn’t just whatever has been put at stake for the day’s celebrations, but the very valuable chance to build a type of trust that can only be built by playing games with non-trivial outcomes at stake.
Maybe there could be a better job in the future of communicating the essence of what this celebration is intended to achieve, but to my eyes, it was fairly obvious what was going on, and I’m seeing a lot of comments by people (whose other contributions to LW I respect) who seemed to completely fail to see what I thought was obviously the spirit of this exercise