For what it’s worth, this game and the past reactions to losing it have burnt the last of my willingness to identify as a LW rationalist. 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.
Then getting upset at other people when they don’t a take strange ritual as seriously as you do? As you’ve decided to, seemingly arbitrarily? When you’ve deliberately given them the means to upset you? It’s tantamount to emotional blackmail. It’s just obnoxious and strange behaviour.
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 understand why this was downvoted and I think it is harsh, but I also think it might be good if people take the sentiment seriously rather than bury+ignore it.
If I received a code, I would do nothing, because it’s clear by now that pressing the button would seriously upset some people. (And the consequences seem potentially more significant this year than last.) And I think the parent commenter undervalues the efforts the pro-taking-it-seriously people made to keep their emotions in check and explain why they take the ritual seriously and would like others to do so too.
But I share the instinctive reaction that the whole thing is a bit overblown and pompous, and even on reflection I think it’s at least reasonable to hold that it was obnoxious to throw unconsenting people into a situation that looked like a game, where the stakes appeared (and IMO were) very low, only to reveal after the fact that playing the game—by taking an action explicitly enabled by the people who run and probably care most about the site—had apparently caused non-trivial distress to others and significant reputational harm to the player.
You make good points. I, for one, strong-downvoted OP because “emotional blackmail” seems not at all accurate, and the criticism itself was shaded “go outside, nerd”, when I would have been more interested in OP’s actual arguments.
Emotional blackmail would be if Ruby emailed me and said “TurnTrout, unless you participate in this ritual, I will be upset at you.” In this situation, if I do nothing, nothing happens to me, whereas Ruby may feel differently about me if I choose to participate in the game by entering launch codes.
It’s like if I built a sand castle, put some light explosives inside, and handed 100 people detonators. If someone blows it up, I could be mad at them. Sure, that might be foreseeable, and probably “my fault” in a sense.
but it seems unnatural to describe this kind of situation as “tantamount to emotional blackmail.”
I agree that “emotional blackmail” is inaccurate, but this exercise is pulling reader’s emotional strings in a bad way. The label was wrong but the overall criticism has merits. Would relabeling it into “gratuitous drama” be a good steelmaning?
“Gratuitous drama” sounds more plausible and appropriate, sure.
this exercise is pulling reader’s emotional strings in a bad way.
“Is”? But to me it just feels like an interesting yearly event, with some real thought put into it. I certainly appreciate it.
If you claim it’s “pulling strings”, I think that you should explain why, or link to an explanation, or at least acknowledge that you don’t have time to explain why you feel that way. If not, these simple “is” statements work to establish (the perception of) social agreement around the “fact” that “this exercise is pulling reader’s emotional strings in a bad way”, without that point actually having been established.
“Pulling strings” by exaggerating the importance of the stakes, by forcing some members to participate in a game where there is nothing to win personnally and a lot to lose (maybe not this year, but I remember previous year’s organisers suggesting to ban the culprit from some rationalist circles) and having all readership witness the totally artificially created drama.
But to me it just feels like an interesting yearly event, with some real thought put into it. I certainly appreciate it.
To me too, but my ‘interesting’ would be something like “I’m glad it exists even if it’s flawed”. The most important problem for me is that in its current shape it does not allow to draw useful conclusions from the outcome (thanks https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EW8yZYcu3Kff2qShS/?commentId=C97ngHSu6iHmdCjPc for clarifying that point for me)
I don’t want to have a ton of meta discussion on the day of the experiment, but I am pretty interested in ideas from people on how to reduce the bad parts of the social ritual. I think the benefits of doing a thing like this are pretty high, and I am pretty excited about the benefits of the trust exercise, but also don’t want to needlessly distress people. So if people have any ideas on wording or additional text we could add to the announcements or emails, I think that would be a productive use of time.
The obvious thing is to ask people to consent before entering the game? It’s weird to get an email, out of the blue, with launch codes, telling you that you are now part of this game. While an email that spells out some of the explicit norms, and asks people to opt-in, seems great.
A light-touch intervention could just be giving people a link to click to get the launch codes, that shows some text spelling out norms like this, and ask people to only click the link if they actually want to participate.
EDIT: To be clear, I am participating in this, and would have opted-in—I just think it’s a really bad norm to not ask for consent first, when we’re putting people in a situation with real risks and social consequences, and with wildly differing perceptions of the depth of meaning in this event.
Well, I agree that in general you should ask consent before pulling people into any game, but I suppose that part of the purpose was precisely to see how people react to random responsibilities (which can definitely happen in real life). I mean, the Soviet probably didn’t bother to get Petrov’s consent before putting him in the control room. And all that’s required in our case is basically “please do nothing”… I didn’t receive the email, but I don’t think I would be upset by one message just asking to be ignored (an email asking me to actively do something to prevent destruction would have been a different kettle of fish).
Full disclosure: I clicked the button. Actually, I misclicked the button while hovering on it. I suppose that’s the reason why GitHub and similar services are very careful to hide the “delete repository” button behind long page scrolls and also add an additional “are you absolutely sure?” popup.
For the next Petrov Day, I think we should at least add the blocking popup instead of just having an “Are you sure?” title over the button. Being tricked into pushing the button is one thing, but it should not be possible to push the button purely by accident.
The problem is that people are entered aa a situation where they don’t necessarily understand the context and cultural expectations other people may have, could very reasonably misunderstand things, but are exposed to dede real and meaningful social risks if they do misunderstand things. Framings lakelike “sometimes you get random responsibilities” ONLY make sense a mutual understanding that thesethe situation is taken seriously, which empirically was obviously ot universal here.
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 don’t know if this would defeat part of the purpose, but what about making it opt-in over a long time period, e.g. giving people all year to put themselves on the list of people who might be chosen to receive codes?
Other than that, I think it’s mostly a question of (to the extent possible without undermining what you’re trying to do) making it pretty clear to the recipients that people take this seriously and would genuinely like them to refrain from using the codes. As far as I can tell, that has already improved from last year. (It seems like there might have been some tonal ambiguity last year, with phrasing intended to be heightened but mostly serious coming across to some readers as playful and mostly joking.)
I am pretty interested in ideas from people on how to reduce the bad parts of the social ritual.
One way to make it seem more serious (to me) would be to make the effects bigger. E.g. taking down the frontpage (or the whole site?) for a whole week rather than just a day.
Calling a website going down for a bit “destruction of real value” is technically true, but connotationally just so over the top
I wonder if you are anchoring at the wrong point of comparison here. The point is that it is technically true, as distinct from button-whose-only-function-is-to-disable-the-button. Your post reads like you worry that we are all comparing this to actual nuclear destruction, which I agree would be deeply absurd.
In my view, the stakes are being a bit of a dick. The standard is: can we all agree to not to be a bit of a dick? It’s a goofy sort of game, but we have it because of its similarity to the nuclear case: the winning move is not to play.
This is an interesting comment! There are a number of things that could be said in response to this, but perhaps the best place to start is with this part:
Then getting upset at other people when they don’t a take strange ritual as seriously as you do? As you’ve decided to, seemingly arbitrarily? When you’ve deliberately given them the means to upset you? It’s tantamount to emotional blackmail. It’s just obnoxious and strange behaviour.
I would like to register that this description, as written, could equally be applied to any norm or set of norms, including such basic ones as making and keeping promises (!!).
Now, perhaps your intent is to imply that e.g. the act of making and following through on commitments (and expecting others to do likewise) is a “strange ritual” by which humans “seeming arbitrarily” decide to “give [others] the means to upset [them]”; such an interpretation would at the very least be consistent with your rhetoric and tone. But if this is your position, I submit that you are in the extreme minority, and that your position requires more (and better!) defending before you are licensed to behave in a way that supposes it as the default.
Conversely, if your intent was not to imply that this (rather enormous) class of universal human practices is “obnoxious and strange behavior”, then perhaps it would behoove you to explain the seeming inconsistency between that and what you wrote. If there is more nuance to your position than I am perceiving, I would love to know about it!
Unfortunately, however, in this case I suspect that things are in fact as they first appear—that your comment constitutes little more than a naked attempt at a put-down, and that there is no further nuance to be found. This impression is strengthened by lines such as the following
For what it’s worth, this game and the past reactions to losing it have burnt the last of my willingness to identify as a LW rationalist.
which attempt to convey ingroup membership while simultaneously signaling disdain and disappointment (but which are unfortunately undercut by the fact that the second-most recent comment on your account is upwards of 4 years old).
You’re right, I haven’t been active in a long time. I’m mostly a lurker on this site. That’s always been partly the case, but as I mentioned, it was the last of my willingness to identify as a LWer that was burnt, not the entire thing. I was already hanging by a thread.
My last comment was a while ago, but my first comment is from 8 years ago. I’ve been a Lesswronger for a long time. HPMOR and the sequences were pretty profound influences on my development. I bought the sequence compendiums. I still go to local LW meetups regularly, because I have a lot of friends there.
So, you can dismiss me as some random who has just come here to hate if you want to, I guess, but I don’t think that makes much sense. Definitely the fact that I was a bit obnoxious with my criticism probably makes it tempting to. You can tell I’m here in bad faith from all the downvotes, right?
I think the audience seeing this comment is heavily self selected to care about the Petrov day celebration and think it’s good and important. 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. These people, unlike me, mostly don’t care enough to rock up and criticize.
The reason I was rude was because I am frustrated at feeling like I have to abandon my identification as an LW rat, because I just don’t want to be associated with it anymore. I got so much value from less wrong, and it feels so unnecessary.
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.
my willingness to identify as a LWer that was burnt [...] HPMOR and the sequences were pretty profound influences on my development [...] frustrated at feeling like I have to abandon my identifaction as an LW rat
I don’t think I’ve been very successful; multiple years after my alienation from “the community”, I’m still hanging around leaving bitter comments about how terrible they/we are. It’s very dysfunctional! Why can’t I just write it off as a loss and move on?
I guess the main difficulty is that, for humans, knowledge actually isn’t easily separable from a community of other people with shared vocabulary. I can’t just ignore what the central rat social hierarchy is doing, because the central hierarchy nodes exert a lot of control over everyone in the world who I can really talk to.
this description, as written, could equally be applied to any norm or set of norms, including such basic ones as making and keeping promises (!!).
What? No, it can’t be applied equally. The norm of “Keep your promises” serves the function of making it possible for people to plan around each other’s behavior. (When I say, “I’ll be there,” you can confidently predict that I’ll be there.) It’s a very general and powerful social technology.
The norm of “Take the Petrov Day game on our website very seriously” is a lot more arbitrary because it doesn’t serve that general function. If people had to proactively sign up for the game and sign a sworn statement saying that they promise not to press the button, then someone who subsequently pressed the button could be busted on the grounds of violating the more basic norm of breaking a promise that they proactively and voluntarily made—but that would be a different, and much less interesting, game. In the actual game, the mods unilaterally send out codes to users whom they predict will take the game seriously. If the mods guess wrong about that, many observers would say that’s “on them.”
attempt to convey ingroup membership while simultaneously signaling disdain and disappointment
I mean, to be fair, the ingroup is a massive disappointment that is genuinely worthy of disdain.
On a purely factual level: note that what I wrote was that the description as written could be applied equally to such things as “keeping promises”. Once more, the quoted description:
Then getting upset at other people when they don’t a take strange ritual as seriously as you do? As you’ve decided to, seemingly arbitrarily? When you’ve deliberately given them the means to upset you? It’s tantamount to emotional blackmail. It’s just obnoxious and strange behaviour.
This description indeed does nothing to distinguish between different norms like “keeping promises” or “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” (or, in fact, other, stupider norms such as “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day”). Every norm involves expecting people to choose to do something they are not [counterfactually] constrained to do, meaning every norm involves “giving someone else the means to upset you”. Every norm carries with it the expectation that people will comply with it without explicit enforcement, meaning every norm is a “ritual that needs to be taken seriously”. And every norm starts out being “seemingly arbitrary”, until and unless it is adopted more generally, at which point it becomes “the way things are”.
In other words, the OP’s description is a list of conditions that always returns true, regardless of input. And as an argument that does not produce differing outputs given different inputs provides no discriminatory power, such an argument should be highlighted as bad regardless of whether you happen to agree or disagree with its target in any particular case.
(This much you know, because this much you have argued yourself elsewhere. If we are to speak of “disappointment”, then I am indeed dismayed and disappointed that you in particular appear to be applying significantly less of a critical eye to comments with which you happen to share a premise, given what you’ve written in the past.)
Regarding the (separate and additional) argument that the Petrov Day game, and the norms surrounding it, are perhaps ill-thought-out: I don’t necessarily have a strong opinion on that argument. It is plausible to me that the mods did not properly communicate the level of seriousness they expected participants to attach to the game, the last time it was played; but conversely, if their initial communications caused participants to systematically underestimate the seriousness of the game, then it is also plausible to me their response to the outcome (the website getting taken down) was a reasonable way to correct that misestimation.
There are also separate arguments to be had about whether the game ought to be treated so seriously, about its potential reputational effects and whether they are worth it, etc. etc. I am open to hearing any of those arguments. What I am not open to is the suggestion that the OP’s initial description was anything but what it was: a list of conditions that apply equally to any norm, regardless of what it is, and hence an invalid line of argumentation.
This description indeed does nothing to distinguish between different norms like “keeping promises” or “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” (or, in fact, other, stupider norms such as “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day”)
Okay, I think I’m reading a lot more into Sullyj3′s use of the phrase “seemingly arbitrarily” than you are.
Very specific things like “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” or “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day” are the kind of cognitive content that we expect to come with attached justifications: depending on the game and the community, I could see either of “Take this game seriously; it’s a ritual” or “Don’t take this game seriously; it’s just a game” being the norm. On encountering a community with such a norm, I would expect to be able to ask why they do things that way and receive a non-circular answer other than an appeal to “the way things are” (here).
In contrast, the very concept of a “promise” seems to have an inherent asymmetry to it; I’m not sure what making a “promise” would mean in a world where the norm is “You shouldn’t keep promises.” (This feels like the enactive analogue of the asymmetry between truth and lies, where you need a convention grounding the “true” meaning of a signal in order to even contemplate sending the signal “falsely”.)
While I agree with both the letter and the sentiment, I’d temper it by adding that this year feels like a step in the right direction compared to last year, by introducing an ‘opposing’ groupe to mimick a MAD situation more closely. And I like that this exercise exists just for its uniqueness, and because I agree with the premise that existential risk preparedness is important.
For what it’s worth, this game and the past reactions to losing it have burnt the last of my willingness to identify as a LW rationalist. 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.
Then getting upset at other people when they don’t a take strange ritual as seriously as you do? As you’ve decided to, seemingly arbitrarily? When you’ve deliberately given them the means to upset you? It’s tantamount to emotional blackmail. It’s just obnoxious and strange behaviour.
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 understand why this was downvoted and I think it is harsh, but I also think it might be good if people take the sentiment seriously rather than bury+ignore it.
If I received a code, I would do nothing, because it’s clear by now that pressing the button would seriously upset some people. (And the consequences seem potentially more significant this year than last.) And I think the parent commenter undervalues the efforts the pro-taking-it-seriously people made to keep their emotions in check and explain why they take the ritual seriously and would like others to do so too.
But I share the instinctive reaction that the whole thing is a bit overblown and pompous, and even on reflection I think it’s at least reasonable to hold that it was obnoxious to throw unconsenting people into a situation that looked like a game, where the stakes appeared (and IMO were) very low, only to reveal after the fact that playing the game—by taking an action explicitly enabled by the people who run and probably care most about the site—had apparently caused non-trivial distress to others and significant reputational harm to the player.
You make good points. I, for one, strong-downvoted OP because “emotional blackmail” seems not at all accurate, and the criticism itself was shaded “go outside, nerd”, when I would have been more interested in OP’s actual arguments.
Emotional blackmail would be if Ruby emailed me and said “TurnTrout, unless you participate in this ritual, I will be upset at you.” In this situation, if I do nothing, nothing happens to me, whereas Ruby may feel differently about me if I choose to participate in the game by entering launch codes.
It’s like if I built a sand castle, put some light explosives inside, and handed 100 people detonators. If someone blows it up, I could be mad at them. Sure, that might be foreseeable, and probably “my fault” in a sense.
but it seems unnatural to describe this kind of situation as “tantamount to emotional blackmail.”
I agree that “emotional blackmail” is inaccurate, but this exercise is pulling reader’s emotional strings in a bad way. The label was wrong but the overall criticism has merits. Would relabeling it into “gratuitous drama” be a good steelmaning?
“Gratuitous drama” sounds more plausible and appropriate, sure.
“Is”? But to me it just feels like an interesting yearly event, with some real thought put into it. I certainly appreciate it.
If you claim it’s “pulling strings”, I think that you should explain why, or link to an explanation, or at least acknowledge that you don’t have time to explain why you feel that way. If not, these simple “is” statements work to establish (the perception of) social agreement around the “fact” that “this exercise is pulling reader’s emotional strings in a bad way”, without that point actually having been established.
“Pulling strings” by exaggerating the importance of the stakes, by forcing some members to participate in a game where there is nothing to win personnally and a lot to lose (maybe not this year, but I remember previous year’s organisers suggesting to ban the culprit from some rationalist circles) and having all readership witness the totally artificially created drama.
To me too, but my ‘interesting’ would be something like “I’m glad it exists even if it’s flawed”. The most important problem for me is that in its current shape it does not allow to draw useful conclusions from the outcome (thanks https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EW8yZYcu3Kff2qShS/?commentId=C97ngHSu6iHmdCjPc for clarifying that point for me)
I don’t want to have a ton of meta discussion on the day of the experiment, but I am pretty interested in ideas from people on how to reduce the bad parts of the social ritual. I think the benefits of doing a thing like this are pretty high, and I am pretty excited about the benefits of the trust exercise, but also don’t want to needlessly distress people. So if people have any ideas on wording or additional text we could add to the announcements or emails, I think that would be a productive use of time.
The obvious thing is to ask people to consent before entering the game? It’s weird to get an email, out of the blue, with launch codes, telling you that you are now part of this game. While an email that spells out some of the explicit norms, and asks people to opt-in, seems great.
A light-touch intervention could just be giving people a link to click to get the launch codes, that shows some text spelling out norms like this, and ask people to only click the link if they actually want to participate.
EDIT: To be clear, I am participating in this, and would have opted-in—I just think it’s a really bad norm to not ask for consent first, when we’re putting people in a situation with real risks and social consequences, and with wildly differing perceptions of the depth of meaning in this event.
Well, I agree that in general you should ask consent before pulling people into any game, but I suppose that part of the purpose was precisely to see how people react to random responsibilities (which can definitely happen in real life). I mean, the Soviet probably didn’t bother to get Petrov’s consent before putting him in the control room. And all that’s required in our case is basically “please do nothing”… I didn’t receive the email, but I don’t think I would be upset by one message just asking to be ignored (an email asking me to actively do something to prevent destruction would have been a different kettle of fish).
Full disclosure: I clicked the button. Actually, I misclicked the button while hovering on it. I suppose that’s the reason why GitHub and similar services are very careful to hide the “delete repository” button behind long page scrolls and also add an additional “are you absolutely sure?” popup.
For the next Petrov Day, I think we should at least add the blocking popup instead of just having an “Are you sure?” title over the button. Being tricked into pushing the button is one thing, but it should not be possible to push the button purely by accident.
The problem is that people are entered aa a situation where they don’t necessarily understand the context and cultural expectations other people may have, could very reasonably misunderstand things, but are exposed to dede real and meaningful social risks if they do misunderstand things. Framings lakelike “sometimes you get random responsibilities” ONLY make sense a mutual understanding that thesethe situation is taken seriously, which empirically was obviously ot universal here.
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?’)
I don’t know if this would defeat part of the purpose, but what about making it opt-in over a long time period, e.g. giving people all year to put themselves on the list of people who might be chosen to receive codes?
Other than that, I think it’s mostly a question of (to the extent possible without undermining what you’re trying to do) making it pretty clear to the recipients that people take this seriously and would genuinely like them to refrain from using the codes. As far as I can tell, that has already improved from last year. (It seems like there might have been some tonal ambiguity last year, with phrasing intended to be heightened but mostly serious coming across to some readers as playful and mostly joking.)
One way to make it seem more serious (to me) would be to make the effects bigger. E.g. taking down the frontpage (or the whole site?) for a whole week rather than just a day.
I wonder if you are anchoring at the wrong point of comparison here. The point is that it is technically true, as distinct from button-whose-only-function-is-to-disable-the-button. Your post reads like you worry that we are all comparing this to actual nuclear destruction, which I agree would be deeply absurd.
In my view, the stakes are being a bit of a dick. The standard is: can we all agree to not to be a bit of a dick? It’s a goofy sort of game, but we have it because of its similarity to the nuclear case: the winning move is not to play.
It took me a while to grasp how people see LW in the rationalist community, but after grokking it I get the exercise better.
This is an interesting comment! There are a number of things that could be said in response to this, but perhaps the best place to start is with this part:
I would like to register that this description, as written, could equally be applied to any norm or set of norms, including such basic ones as making and keeping promises (!!).
Now, perhaps your intent is to imply that e.g. the act of making and following through on commitments (and expecting others to do likewise) is a “strange ritual” by which humans “seeming arbitrarily” decide to “give [others] the means to upset [them]”; such an interpretation would at the very least be consistent with your rhetoric and tone. But if this is your position, I submit that you are in the extreme minority, and that your position requires more (and better!) defending before you are licensed to behave in a way that supposes it as the default.
Conversely, if your intent was not to imply that this (rather enormous) class of universal human practices is “obnoxious and strange behavior”, then perhaps it would behoove you to explain the seeming inconsistency between that and what you wrote. If there is more nuance to your position than I am perceiving, I would love to know about it!
Unfortunately, however, in this case I suspect that things are in fact as they first appear—that your comment constitutes little more than a naked attempt at a put-down, and that there is no further nuance to be found. This impression is strengthened by lines such as the following
which attempt to convey ingroup membership while simultaneously signaling disdain and disappointment (but which are unfortunately undercut by the fact that the second-most recent comment on your account is upwards of 4 years old).
You’re right, I haven’t been active in a long time. I’m mostly a lurker on this site. That’s always been partly the case, but as I mentioned, it was the last of my willingness to identify as a LWer that was burnt, not the entire thing. I was already hanging by a thread.
My last comment was a while ago, but my first comment is from 8 years ago. I’ve been a Lesswronger for a long time. HPMOR and the sequences were pretty profound influences on my development. I bought the sequence compendiums. I still go to local LW meetups regularly, because I have a lot of friends there.
So, you can dismiss me as some random who has just come here to hate if you want to, I guess, but I don’t think that makes much sense. Definitely the fact that I was a bit obnoxious with my criticism probably makes it tempting to. You can tell I’m here in bad faith from all the downvotes, right?
I think the audience seeing this comment is heavily self selected to care about the Petrov day celebration and think it’s good and important. 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. These people, unlike me, mostly don’t care enough to rock up and criticize.
The reason I was rude was because I am frustrated at feeling like I have to abandon my identification as an LW rat, because I just don’t want to be associated with it anymore. I got so much value from less wrong, and it feels so unnecessary.
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.
I’ve struggled a lot with this, too. The thing I keep trying to remember is that identification with the social group “shouldn’t matter”: you can still cherish the knowledge you gained from the group’s core texts, without having to be loyal to the group as a collective (as contrasted to your loyalty to individual friends).
I don’t think I’ve been very successful; multiple years after my alienation from “the community”, I’m still hanging around leaving bitter comments about how terrible they/we are. It’s very dysfunctional! Why can’t I just write it off as a loss and move on?
I guess the main difficulty is that, for humans, knowledge actually isn’t easily separable from a community of other people with shared vocabulary. I can’t just ignore what the central rat social hierarchy is doing, because the central hierarchy nodes exert a lot of control over everyone in the world who I can really talk to.
What’s the value you get from it, and how does this once-a-year event affect the value you get from LW?
What? No, it can’t be applied equally. The norm of “Keep your promises” serves the function of making it possible for people to plan around each other’s behavior. (When I say, “I’ll be there,” you can confidently predict that I’ll be there.) It’s a very general and powerful social technology.
The norm of “Take the Petrov Day game on our website very seriously” is a lot more arbitrary because it doesn’t serve that general function. If people had to proactively sign up for the game and sign a sworn statement saying that they promise not to press the button, then someone who subsequently pressed the button could be busted on the grounds of violating the more basic norm of breaking a promise that they proactively and voluntarily made—but that would be a different, and much less interesting, game. In the actual game, the mods unilaterally send out codes to users whom they predict will take the game seriously. If the mods guess wrong about that, many observers would say that’s “on them.”
I mean, to be fair, the ingroup is a massive disappointment that is genuinely worthy of disdain.
On a purely factual level: note that what I wrote was that the description as written could be applied equally to such things as “keeping promises”. Once more, the quoted description:
This description indeed does nothing to distinguish between different norms like “keeping promises” or “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” (or, in fact, other, stupider norms such as “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day”). Every norm involves expecting people to choose to do something they are not [counterfactually] constrained to do, meaning every norm involves “giving someone else the means to upset you”. Every norm carries with it the expectation that people will comply with it without explicit enforcement, meaning every norm is a “ritual that needs to be taken seriously”. And every norm starts out being “seemingly arbitrary”, until and unless it is adopted more generally, at which point it becomes “the way things are”.
In other words, the OP’s description is a list of conditions that always returns
true, regardless of input. And as an argument that does not produce differing outputs given different inputs provides no discriminatory power, such an argument should be highlighted as bad regardless of whether you happen to agree or disagree with its target in any particular case.(This much you know, because this much you have argued yourself elsewhere. If we are to speak of “disappointment”, then I am indeed dismayed and disappointed that you in particular appear to be applying significantly less of a critical eye to comments with which you happen to share a premise, given what you’ve written in the past.)
Regarding the (separate and additional) argument that the Petrov Day game, and the norms surrounding it, are perhaps ill-thought-out: I don’t necessarily have a strong opinion on that argument. It is plausible to me that the mods did not properly communicate the level of seriousness they expected participants to attach to the game, the last time it was played; but conversely, if their initial communications caused participants to systematically underestimate the seriousness of the game, then it is also plausible to me their response to the outcome (the website getting taken down) was a reasonable way to correct that misestimation.
There are also separate arguments to be had about whether the game ought to be treated so seriously, about its potential reputational effects and whether they are worth it, etc. etc. I am open to hearing any of those arguments. What I am not open to is the suggestion that the OP’s initial description was anything but what it was: a list of conditions that apply equally to any norm, regardless of what it is, and hence an invalid line of argumentation.
Okay, I think I’m reading a lot more into Sullyj3′s use of the phrase “seemingly arbitrarily” than you are.
Very specific things like “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” or “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day” are the kind of cognitive content that we expect to come with attached justifications: depending on the game and the community, I could see either of “Take this game seriously; it’s a ritual” or “Don’t take this game seriously; it’s just a game” being the norm. On encountering a community with such a norm, I would expect to be able to ask why they do things that way and receive a non-circular answer other than an appeal to “the way things are” (here).
In contrast, the very concept of a “promise” seems to have an inherent asymmetry to it; I’m not sure what making a “promise” would mean in a world where the norm is “You shouldn’t keep promises.” (This feels like the enactive analogue of the asymmetry between truth and lies, where you need a convention grounding the “true” meaning of a signal in order to even contemplate sending the signal “falsely”.)
While I agree with both the letter and the sentiment, I’d temper it by adding that this year feels like a step in the right direction compared to last year, by introducing an ‘opposing’ groupe to mimick a MAD situation more closely. And I like that this exercise exists just for its uniqueness, and because I agree with the premise that existential risk preparedness is important.