Thank you for clarifying. I think your stance is a reasonable one, and (although I maintain that your initial comment was a poor vehicle for conveying them) I am largely sympathetic to your frustrations. Knowing that your initial comment came from a place of frustration also helps to recontextualize it, which in turn helps to look past some of the rougher wording.
Having said that: while I can’t claim to speak for the mods or the admins of LW, or what they want to accomplish with the site and larger community surrounding it, I think that I personally would like to offer some further pushback. In particular, I think that there is a tension between what you term “making the vibes a little less weird”, and something that I might term “being able to visibly, publicly care about things most people haven’t thought about”.
There is an argument, perhaps, to be had about whether the Petrov Day game is something “worth” caring about, even for a group of people with a history of caring about strange things. As I wrote in a separate comment response, I don’t necessarily have a strong opinion about this. I am less involved in the “rationalist community” than many members of this site; I have not attended any LW meetups in person, have not interfaced IRL with any outstanding members of the rationalist community, and am not particularly involved in the inner circles of either the rationalist or the EA community. (Needless to say, I do not possess the launch codes for either site.)
So as far as the “community” is concerned, and the ability of its members to coordinate with themselves, I am less directly impacted than many here. Insofar as I would like the community to be able to coordinate with itself better, it is purely in the abstract—because I believe that coordination is an important resource, and communities with more of it do better in the long run. Insofar as I believe that coordination is an important resource, it’s unclear to me whether the Petrov Day game is actually useful in enhancing coordination; that would depend on many specifics, some of which I am not privy to.
However, what is clear enough to me is that there are a substantial fraction of LWers who do take the game seriously, or at least seriously enough to post comments like these:
Attention LessWrong—I am a chosen user of EA Forum and I have the codes needed to destroy LessWrong. I hereby make a no first use pledge and I will not enter my codes for any reason, even if asked to do so. I also hereby pledge to second strike—if the EA Forum is taken down, I will retaliate. [...]
Regarding your second strike pledge: it would of course be wildly disingenuous to remember Petrov’s action, which was not jumping to retaliation, by doing the opposite and jumping to retaliation. I believe you know this, and would guess that if in fact one of the sites went down, you’d do nothing but instead later post about your moral choice of not retaliating. [...]
I had one of the EA Forum’s launch codes, but I decided to permanently delete it as an arms-reduction measure. I no longer have access to my launch code, though I admit that I cannot convincingly demonstrate this.
Independently of whether I personally put any stock in this game, I strongly approve of the ability of users to do things like this—to act in ways that treat this game with far more seriousness than the objective consequences it has, to speak and behave the same way they would if the game actually had far more serious consequences—and, moreover, to be able to do so without being concerned about any “weird vibes” they may or may not be putting out in the process.
Caring about things is hard. Caring about things publicly, in a space where you can be judged for it, is more than hard: it’s uncool. There is, by default, an omnipresent pressure in social spaces to conform; and since caring is uncool, people who acquiesce to such pressures will often end up caring less.
I think this is VERY BAD. As such I am EXTREMELY STRONGLY OPPOSED to any attempts to increase this pressure in spaces that are lucky enough to have (relatively) little of it to begin with; especially attempts that use rude and inflammatory language as a social hammer to increase their force. In other words, I am extremely wary of the (often invisible) incentives behind sentences like this,
These present core LWers risk severely underestimating how off-putting this stuff is. How many people would be interested in participating in this community, constructively, if the vibes were a little less weird. [...]
I have to abandon my identification as an LW rat, because I just don’t want to be associated with it anymore.
and downright allergic to the blatantly visible incentives behind sentences like this:
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.
Sentences like these pressure those who read them to reshape themselves to be less unusual, and insofar as “usual” is net-negative, that corresponding pressure is also net-negative. I would like to decrease the magnitude of said pressure, and as such I will continue to push back if and when I see it.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Life is like that. You will be tested on things that you never prepared for and could never foresee, things that you must handle even if you can’t. The tests will come without warning. There is no-one to complain to that it is not fair. There are no retakes. And everyone fails in the end.
This is just such a bizarre tack to take. You can go down the “toughen up” route if you want to, but it’s then not looking good for the people who have strong emotional reactions to people not playing along with their little game. I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make here. It seems like this is a fully general argument for treating people however the hell you want. After all, it’s not worse than the vagaries of life, right? Is this really the argument you’re going with, that if something is a good simulation of life, we should just unilaterally inflict it on people?
The Petrov Day event is a trivial to nonexistent burden to place on those who received the launch code. They were told the background and the launch code and told what it would do if they used it. They were not even asked to do or not do anything in particular. Similar events have been run in the past, and those selected are likely to have been around long enough to have seen at least the last such event.
The obvious way to not participate is to ignore the whole matter.
I don’t think there is any violation of consent here.
I think it’s reasonable to take the position that there’s no violation of consent, but it’s unreasonable to then socially censure someone for participating in the wrong way.
I agree that life is like that. However, the game still violates consent, the same way as if I assaulted you on the street because I think it’s good preparation for being assaulted “for real”.
To me, this game falls in the same category as gift giving, surprise parties, pranks, rude/aggressive jokes etc. There needs to be a meta-level agreement that this kind of thing is ok, even though “being a surprise” is an essential part of the thing itself.
Thank you for clarifying. I think your stance is a reasonable one, and (although I maintain that your initial comment was a poor vehicle for conveying them) I am largely sympathetic to your frustrations. Knowing that your initial comment came from a place of frustration also helps to recontextualize it, which in turn helps to look past some of the rougher wording.
Having said that: while I can’t claim to speak for the mods or the admins of LW, or what they want to accomplish with the site and larger community surrounding it, I think that I personally would like to offer some further pushback. In particular, I think that there is a tension between what you term “making the vibes a little less weird”, and something that I might term “being able to visibly, publicly care about things most people haven’t thought about”.
There is an argument, perhaps, to be had about whether the Petrov Day game is something “worth” caring about, even for a group of people with a history of caring about strange things. As I wrote in a separate comment response, I don’t necessarily have a strong opinion about this. I am less involved in the “rationalist community” than many members of this site; I have not attended any LW meetups in person, have not interfaced IRL with any outstanding members of the rationalist community, and am not particularly involved in the inner circles of either the rationalist or the EA community. (Needless to say, I do not possess the launch codes for either site.)
So as far as the “community” is concerned, and the ability of its members to coordinate with themselves, I am less directly impacted than many here. Insofar as I would like the community to be able to coordinate with itself better, it is purely in the abstract—because I believe that coordination is an important resource, and communities with more of it do better in the long run. Insofar as I believe that coordination is an important resource, it’s unclear to me whether the Petrov Day game is actually useful in enhancing coordination; that would depend on many specifics, some of which I am not privy to.
However, what is clear enough to me is that there are a substantial fraction of LWers who do take the game seriously, or at least seriously enough to post comments like these:
Independently of whether I personally put any stock in this game, I strongly approve of the ability of users to do things like this—to act in ways that treat this game with far more seriousness than the objective consequences it has, to speak and behave the same way they would if the game actually had far more serious consequences—and, moreover, to be able to do so without being concerned about any “weird vibes” they may or may not be putting out in the process.
Caring about things is hard. Caring about things publicly, in a space where you can be judged for it, is more than hard: it’s uncool. There is, by default, an omnipresent pressure in social spaces to conform; and since caring is uncool, people who acquiesce to such pressures will often end up caring less.
I think this is VERY BAD. As such I am EXTREMELY STRONGLY OPPOSED to any attempts to increase this pressure in spaces that are lucky enough to have (relatively) little of it to begin with; especially attempts that use rude and inflammatory language as a social hammer to increase their force. In other words, I am extremely wary of the (often invisible) incentives behind sentences like this,
and downright allergic to the blatantly visible incentives behind sentences like this:
Sentences like these pressure those who read them to reshape themselves to be less unusual, and insofar as “usual” is net-negative, that corresponding pressure is also net-negative. I would like to decrease the magnitude of said pressure, and as such I will continue to push back if and when I see it.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Life is like that. You will be tested on things that you never prepared for and could never foresee, things that you must handle even if you can’t. The tests will come without warning. There is no-one to complain to that it is not fair. There are no retakes. And everyone fails in the end.
The Petrov Day button is a doddle in comparison.
This is just such a bizarre tack to take. You can go down the “toughen up” route if you want to, but it’s then not looking good for the people who have strong emotional reactions to people not playing along with their little game. I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make here. It seems like this is a fully general argument for treating people however the hell you want. After all, it’s not worse than the vagaries of life, right? Is this really the argument you’re going with, that if something is a good simulation of life, we should just unilaterally inflict it on people?
The Petrov Day event is a trivial to nonexistent burden to place on those who received the launch code. They were told the background and the launch code and told what it would do if they used it. They were not even asked to do or not do anything in particular. Similar events have been run in the past, and those selected are likely to have been around long enough to have seen at least the last such event.
The obvious way to not participate is to ignore the whole matter.
I don’t think there is any violation of consent here.
I think it’s reasonable to take the position that there’s no violation of consent, but it’s unreasonable to then socially censure someone for participating in the wrong way.
I agree that life is like that. However, the game still violates consent, the same way as if I assaulted you on the street because I think it’s good preparation for being assaulted “for real”.
To me, this game falls in the same category as gift giving, surprise parties, pranks, rude/aggressive jokes etc. There needs to be a meta-level agreement that this kind of thing is ok, even though “being a surprise” is an essential part of the thing itself.