I agree, but the people who actually received the codes are supposed to be carefully selected LW users, not totally random people. I would be quite impressed to learn that someone between those 100 users didn’t actually understand the context (on the other hand, I do expect random LW users who didn’t get codes to press the Red Button for the lulz without necessarily knowing the context, and I agree they shouldn’t be blamed for this).
That said, adding more things clarifying the context is probably good. Petrov himself surely didn’t have the context problem.
I was one of 270 last year and am one of 100 this year, I did not understand the context last year. Empirically, neither did Chris last year. Multiple people on the EA Forum have commented about not understanding the context
If it helps, here’s a comment I wrote last year trying to narrate my internal experience of reading the email (I then read the 2019 threads and eventually twigged how seriously people took it, but that was strongly not my prior—it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to ask the question ‘do people take this more seriously than a game?’)
I agree, but the people who actually received the codes are supposed to be carefully selected LW users, not totally random people. I would be quite impressed to learn that someone between those 100 users didn’t actually understand the context (on the other hand, I do expect random LW users who didn’t get codes to press the Red Button for the lulz without necessarily knowing the context, and I agree they shouldn’t be blamed for this).
That said, adding more things clarifying the context is probably good. Petrov himself surely didn’t have the context problem.
I was one of 270 last year and am one of 100 this year, I did not understand the context last year. Empirically, neither did Chris last year. Multiple people on the EA Forum have commented about not understanding the context
Ok, then I publicly declare to be quite impressed.
(I’ll treat this as further evidence that inferential distances tend to be longer than expected)
If it helps, here’s a comment I wrote last year trying to narrate my internal experience of reading the email (I then read the 2019 threads and eventually twigged how seriously people took it, but that was strongly not my prior—it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to ask the question ‘do people take this more seriously than a game?’)