I want to be clear that it’s not having rituals and taking them seriously that I object to. It’s sending the keys to people who may or may not care about that ritual, and then castigating them for not playing by rules that you’ve assigned them. They didn’t ask for this. [...]
Nobody has any right to involve other people in a game like that without consulting them, given the emotional investment in this that people seem to have.
Cool. So, on the object level, there is a discussion to be had about this… but I want to point out the extent to which, if this was your concern, your initial comment entirely failed to convey it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is a stark difference between what you wrote here, and and what you wrote here:
Calling a website going down for a bit “destruction of real value” is technically true, but connotationally just so over the top. A website going down is just not that big a deal. I’m sorry, but it’s not. Go outside or something. It will make you feel good, I promise. [...]
As a trust building exercise, this reduces my confidence in the average lesswronger’s ability to have perspective about how important things are, and to be responsible for their own emotional wellbeing.
I think we can agree that even on the most generous of readings, the sentiment conveyed by the two quoted segments is very different, both connotationally and denotationally. At the very least, on reading the latter segment, one might be liable to get the impression that “having rituals and taking them seriously” is not something the author is okay with, considering the numerous exhortations to, you know, not do that.
And yes, I’m sympathetic to the idea that some posts can be written in the heat of the moment, and as such may not be a fully accurate/nuanced representation of the writer’s viewpoint—and yes, I’m fully in favor of allowing people to amend their (potentially) poorly worded statements. But I’m also in favor of norms that say things like “own what you write”, “acknowledge when you’ve communicated unclearly”, and “when you need to disendorse something you’ve previously written, do it explicitly”. I’m especially in favor of this in cases where (as in this case) the initial thing-in-question is creating a social pressure to do something, since that pressure can often linger without being explicitly defused.
I want to emphasize that this is not an attempt to upbraid you, or “take you to task”, or whatever. What this is is an attempt to establish common knowledge—either that (a) you agree that what you wrote in your initial comment does not convey the message you wanted to convey, and we’re on the same page about that, or (b) you continue to endorse both the phrasing and the message of your initial comment, in which case a standing disagreement remains—and we’re on the same page about that. I don’t think merely “clarifying” that you meant something else, when that something else is (to be frank) very different in both tone and content from the thing being “clarified”, suffices to achieve that level of common knowledge in this case; which in turn is why I’m being so stringent about this.
That’s it for the meta-level point. I still have things to say on the object level, but both in the interest of making it easier for readers to vote separately on the meta- and object-level issues, and in the interest of letting me post this without having first written up the other thing, I’ll include the object-level arguments in a comment response to this comment.
I want to be clear that it’s not having rituals and taking them seriously that I object to. It’s sending the keys to people who may or may not care about that ritual, and then castigating them for not playing by rules that you’ve assigned them. They didn’t ask for this. [...]
Nobody has any right to involve other people in a game like that without consulting them, given the emotional investment in this that people seem to have.
(with the disclaimer that—again—I am not strongly invested in the Petrov Day game as practiced, nor do I have a strong opinion on whether the mods are doing it right)
I think it is an entirely reasonable thing to do, if you are attempting to establish a high-trust community, to assume a certain level of “buy-in” among core members of said community. I think one of the things that having a high-trust community gives you, is precisely the ability to coordinate actions and activities in ways more subtle and less legible than “opt-in only” (and to be clear, I view this as a positive externality; I would like more communities to have this ability!). I think, to the extent that a community is not yet at the level where [it is common knowledge that] you can do things like this, then doing things like playing the Petrov Day game is one of the fastest (and potentially, one of the only) ways to get to that point.
I want to register that your complaint only sounds reasonable because it is applied in the abstract, divorced of any particular social context. I want to register the extent to which, if someone were to raise a similar complaint in the middle of e.g. a physical event, they would receive questioning looks at best—and that this would happen even if the complaint were in response to something along the lines of a surprise party game, something none of the participants were told would be occurring beforehand. I want to register that, even though there are elements of the above scenario that are potentially disanalogous (e.g. presumably everyone at the physical event chose to show up there) to what’s happening here, there are other elements that importantly are analogous (e.g. the mods did not send out launch codes to a random selection of members).
Or, to put it more directly:
In my opinion Chris Leong showed incredible patience in writing a thoughtful post in the face of people being upset at him for doing the wrong thing in a game he didn’t ask to be involved in. If I’d been in his position I would have told the people who were upset at me that this was their own problem and they could quite frankly fuck off.
I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong did not, in fact, do this thing you said you would have done in his place. Moreover, I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong was among those to whom the mods chose to send launch codes, and you were not. Finally, I think you should ponder on the fact that perhaps these two things—the difference between Chris Leong’s response and yours, and the fact that it was Chris Leong and not you to whom codes were entrusted—are not a coincidence.
In my personal estimation, I think the emails for the first Petrov Day game could probably have been clearer about the (implicit) social stakes being attached to the game. I think the mods probably sent mixed messages with their phrasing, in a way that probably did not contribute positively to the game’s debut. I think there are probably legitimate complaints to be had there; but if so they are purely with the event’s execution, rather than with the general idea of “playing games that aren’t necessarily opt-in”.
And with regards to the event’s execution—well, I’m inclined to give the mods a pass on that one. First-time executions of anything are going to be shaky; that’s (incidentally) part of why it’s valuable to conduct those first-run executions as part of a controlled, low-stakes scenario, as practice for when the stakes aren’t quite so low. Probably, if the mods had had an opportunity to iterate, to do it over again, and to learn from past attempts at doing the same thing, they would have done things differently...
Cool. So, on the object level, there is a discussion to be had about this… but I want to point out the extent to which, if this was your concern, your initial comment entirely failed to convey it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is a stark difference between what you wrote here, and and what you wrote here:
I think we can agree that even on the most generous of readings, the sentiment conveyed by the two quoted segments is very different, both connotationally and denotationally. At the very least, on reading the latter segment, one might be liable to get the impression that “having rituals and taking them seriously” is not something the author is okay with, considering the numerous exhortations to, you know, not do that.
And yes, I’m sympathetic to the idea that some posts can be written in the heat of the moment, and as such may not be a fully accurate/nuanced representation of the writer’s viewpoint—and yes, I’m fully in favor of allowing people to amend their (potentially) poorly worded statements. But I’m also in favor of norms that say things like “own what you write”, “acknowledge when you’ve communicated unclearly”, and “when you need to disendorse something you’ve previously written, do it explicitly”. I’m especially in favor of this in cases where (as in this case) the initial thing-in-question is creating a social pressure to do something, since that pressure can often linger without being explicitly defused.
I want to emphasize that this is not an attempt to upbraid you, or “take you to task”, or whatever. What this is is an attempt to establish common knowledge—either that (a) you agree that what you wrote in your initial comment does not convey the message you wanted to convey, and we’re on the same page about that, or (b) you continue to endorse both the phrasing and the message of your initial comment, in which case a standing disagreement remains—and we’re on the same page about that. I don’t think merely “clarifying” that you meant something else, when that something else is (to be frank) very different in both tone and content from the thing being “clarified”, suffices to achieve that level of common knowledge in this case; which in turn is why I’m being so stringent about this.
That’s it for the meta-level point. I still have things to say on the object level, but both in the interest of making it easier for readers to vote separately on the meta- and object-level issues, and in the interest of letting me post this without having first written up the other thing, I’ll include the object-level arguments in a comment response to this comment.
On to the object level:
(with the disclaimer that—again—I am not strongly invested in the Petrov Day game as practiced, nor do I have a strong opinion on whether the mods are doing it right)
I think it is an entirely reasonable thing to do, if you are attempting to establish a high-trust community, to assume a certain level of “buy-in” among core members of said community. I think one of the things that having a high-trust community gives you, is precisely the ability to coordinate actions and activities in ways more subtle and less legible than “opt-in only” (and to be clear, I view this as a positive externality; I would like more communities to have this ability!). I think, to the extent that a community is not yet at the level where [it is common knowledge that] you can do things like this, then doing things like playing the Petrov Day game is one of the fastest (and potentially, one of the only) ways to get to that point.
I want to register that your complaint only sounds reasonable because it is applied in the abstract, divorced of any particular social context. I want to register the extent to which, if someone were to raise a similar complaint in the middle of e.g. a physical event, they would receive questioning looks at best—and that this would happen even if the complaint were in response to something along the lines of a surprise party game, something none of the participants were told would be occurring beforehand. I want to register that, even though there are elements of the above scenario that are potentially disanalogous (e.g. presumably everyone at the physical event chose to show up there) to what’s happening here, there are other elements that importantly are analogous (e.g. the mods did not send out launch codes to a random selection of members).
Or, to put it more directly:
I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong did not, in fact, do this thing you said you would have done in his place. Moreover, I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong was among those to whom the mods chose to send launch codes, and you were not. Finally, I think you should ponder on the fact that perhaps these two things—the difference between Chris Leong’s response and yours, and the fact that it was Chris Leong and not you to whom codes were entrusted—are not a coincidence.
In my personal estimation, I think the emails for the first Petrov Day game could probably have been clearer about the (implicit) social stakes being attached to the game. I think the mods probably sent mixed messages with their phrasing, in a way that probably did not contribute positively to the game’s debut. I think there are probably legitimate complaints to be had there; but if so they are purely with the event’s execution, rather than with the general idea of “playing games that aren’t necessarily opt-in”.
And with regards to the event’s execution—well, I’m inclined to give the mods a pass on that one. First-time executions of anything are going to be shaky; that’s (incidentally) part of why it’s valuable to conduct those first-run executions as part of a controlled, low-stakes scenario, as practice for when the stakes aren’t quite so low. Probably, if the mods had had an opportunity to iterate, to do it over again, and to learn from past attempts at doing the same thing, they would have done things differently...
...oh, wait.
Sure, I don’t disagree.