An attempted non-mystical justification for Petrov day sensitivity, for those who think it’s ridiculous:
If the LW home page were ‘nuked’, my day would be slightly worse: there would be interesting posts and comments I wouldn’t as easily find out about (e.g. this one by Katja about literal and metaphorical fire alarms). So it makes sense for me to feel a bit bummed if it gets taken down. In addition, if someone else takes the page down, I should feel more bummed: not only did this slightly bad thing happen, but I just learned that someone will make my life a bit worse for no good reason. Maybe they’d make my life significantly worse for no good reason!
Are some people taking things a bit too seriously? Maybe, or maybe they derive much more value from LessWrong than I do, I don’t know. But I think the basic stance of “hoping people don’t ‘nuke’ the sites, and being upset at people who do” makes sense.
As a counter-point, my day was made significantly better by the front page being nuked in 2020 - it was exciting, novel, hilarious (by my lights—clearly not to some people), made some excellent points about phishing and security, and gave me opportunities to dissect why people oriented to this event differently from me. I expect my experience would have been less good last year had the phishing attempt not happened, and we all simply coordinated. More generally, when a website does something unusual and novel like this, I feel like the value of novelty and interestingness can outweigh the costs of a single day of disrupted use?
I’d further argue that the people highly invested in this seem much more invested in the abstract ideas of trust, community, shared ritual and cohesion, more so than the object level of the frontpage being down (besides, people can always use greaterwrong.com )
I note that the feelings you describe are the underlying assumption which makes the risk real: if no one thought the consequences of pushing the button was entertaining or a learning opportunity, then no one would push the button, and the tension goes away.
An attempted non-mystical justification for Petrov day sensitivity, for those who think it’s ridiculous:
If the LW home page were ‘nuked’, my day would be slightly worse: there would be interesting posts and comments I wouldn’t as easily find out about (e.g. this one by Katja about literal and metaphorical fire alarms). So it makes sense for me to feel a bit bummed if it gets taken down. In addition, if someone else takes the page down, I should feel more bummed: not only did this slightly bad thing happen, but I just learned that someone will make my life a bit worse for no good reason. Maybe they’d make my life significantly worse for no good reason!
Are some people taking things a bit too seriously? Maybe, or maybe they derive much more value from LessWrong than I do, I don’t know. But I think the basic stance of “hoping people don’t ‘nuke’ the sites, and being upset at people who do” makes sense.
As a counter-point, my day was made significantly better by the front page being nuked in 2020 - it was exciting, novel, hilarious (by my lights—clearly not to some people), made some excellent points about phishing and security, and gave me opportunities to dissect why people oriented to this event differently from me. I expect my experience would have been less good last year had the phishing attempt not happened, and we all simply coordinated. More generally, when a website does something unusual and novel like this, I feel like the value of novelty and interestingness can outweigh the costs of a single day of disrupted use?
I’d further argue that the people highly invested in this seem much more invested in the abstract ideas of trust, community, shared ritual and cohesion, more so than the object level of the frontpage being down (besides, people can always use greaterwrong.com )
I note that the feelings you describe are the underlying assumption which makes the risk real: if no one thought the consequences of pushing the button was entertaining or a learning opportunity, then no one would push the button, and the tension goes away.