Yeah, I think this is a reasonable reaction, and I really appreciate you going in-depth on your reaction here. And maybe the right call is to basically not have any shared rituals and traditions that have a shared sense of importance, which feels to me like the western secular default.
But, I don’t know, that does leave me feeling pretty empty and sad, and I notice that if I don’t have an active and strong culture around me, that I just default to whatever other random culture around me does have any content, even if I don’t really like the ideas of that culture, and it feels like a pretty major loss to me. I do think that culture is really important, and shared rituals and traditions and games like these feel like how you actually build a culture that has any substantial content. And I really like Petrov Day. I consider it and Solstice to be the two primary holidays we have that we get to shape to reinforce our shared values and ideals, and want us to make use of them.
Like, I do think it’s important that we try our best to only send the invites to people who are up for taking this seriously, and it should be easy to opt-out. I think we should improve the communication to make it clearer that “yes, I do think this is a serious challenge. It’s easy for you to opt out by just ignoring this message, but please don’t destroy what I care about because you just want to have some fun. Building trust that I can have things I care about without other people destroying them just for fun, or because they dislike me or want to actively hurt me, is like half of the point of the whole exercise”.
Like, I don’t want this to be a somber serious thing. I think traditions need some fun to stay alive and not be super draining for everyone. But I also don’t want it to just be a thing that people don’t take seriously at all. Getting the communication for that right is difficult. Like, I want it to be serious play. A bunch of people who do actually try to do the right thing and win, but with an understanding that yes, this isn’t fully the real thing, this is practice, and the stakes are lower, but also not nothing, because we are doing this because we care about the bigger thing. It feels to me that most competitive sports get a substantial part of this tone right, and wargaming also has some of this feeling.
Like, I was really proud when last year we successfully didn’t blow up the site. I was proud when people considered blowing it up, and then people talked about it, and made arguments, and overall the, what seemed to me, right considerations prevailed. I think it was a pretty real and substantial achievement, and it gave me a sense of trust that everyone we sent the codes to shared at least some values and virtues with me, or at the very least wasn’t trying to actively hurt me. That trust was worth a lot. I would likely give you $5k of my own money for that trust.
And like, maybe other people don’t care much about that trust, but overall, I feel like I am in a world where trust is very scarce. Most people don’t take anything seriously and live life in what feels to me like a postmodernist careless perspective on the world, or alternatively are mindkilled and overwhelmed with values I don’t share and feel scary to me. And I when I think of a world where we successfully have 500 people over the course of 10 years, who every year successfully not blow up the site, and use it as an opportunity to remember the fragility of civilization, then that makes me pretty happy, and makes me more excited to invest in LessWrong and all the associated communities.
And like, I don’t know, what is authority for if not for coordinating exactly this kind of cultural institution? Of course, we should lose some of that authority as we do things that people don’t like, and if we repeatedly do stuff that lots of people don’t like, the authority we have should be taken away from us. But, I think, overall, my sense is that the community is happier if we use our authority to sometimes try to establish traditions like this. It is of course important that what we do isn’t a catch-22, nobody wants that. But I don’t think what happened here is a catch-22. Some of what happened here is a misunderstanding, and some of what happened here is simply the cost that you sometimes pay if you try to send a costly signal, but can’t quite get it right.
Like, I do think we should have done better at communicating the degree of seriousness of this thing. I have some ideas of how we can do that better in the future. I also sure really think Chris should have done a better job at reading the intention that was behind the email, and I did lose some trust in him and others that they will take things I care about seriously, and that they won’t just fall prey to relatively low-effort phishing attacks when it actually matters that they don’t.
Hey, I’m relieved and grateful that you took this so well. :) I hesitated for a while before posting my comment. I get that this ritual was important for you and didn’t want to disrespect that; probably also didn’t speak up last year because I wasn’t sure I could communicate it in a good way.
I totally get the desire for rituals, and think it’s an important one; I haven’t been to a Solstice but I appreciate what they’re doing. I also don’t have a problem with them, maybe because they don’t feel like they are trying to claim anything that they’re not.
Generally most of my problem with this ritual was a) some aspects of its execution, such as the communication, which is fixable, and b) the feeling that it’s actually not very analogous to the dilemma it’s trying to be symbolic for, and which it claims to be training people in. (I said a few words about that in the final paragraph of my response to lionhearted.) I think that if it really felt to me like it was teaching people to be more trustworthy and coordinate better in situations-like-the-one-Petrov faced, then I’d probably be very happy to have it around. I just don’t feel like it’s there… yet. :)
Yeah, I do think we are definitely still figuring out a bunch of rough edges around this tradition.
I do think that what we set up is reasonably analogous of what I think happened to Petrov, and the aims I have for it, though of course I would think that, but here is maybe one more attempt at synthesizing what values I care about reinforcing with Petrov Day:
Remembering that humanity is fragile, and that we have come close to destruction in the past, and will likely come close to destruction in the future.
This feels like it really straightforwardly resonates with the setup. You need to have some chance that things will go wrong to create a real sense of tension, but of course you don’t actually want to have stakes that are so high that they destroy lots of value if you mess it up, in particular while you are still dealing with a lot of uncertainty about the setup.
Practicing the virtue of not taking unilateral action and being mindful that your actions can have large negative consequences, and that you will act responsibly with the power you are given
I think this is just a really valuable virtue for a community of people to have, and I do think it’s what distinguished Petrov from most people in similar reference classes to him. Like, as I said in the other comment, he could have just been a bureaucrat who didn’t care about his job, didn’t pay much attention to what was happening, and just accidentally contributed to destroying the world. And similarly, I want the people around me to take responsibility for their actions, in particular if they have a large potential downside.
I think of these two as the core virtues of Petrov day, and I think our current ritual does a pretty decent job at reinforcing them. Like, last year when the LessWrong frontpage had a chance to go down any minute, it really felt very analogous to how I imagine people must have felt like during the cold war, where a catastrophe could have happened any minute, and suddenly destroy something I really care about. This year, the way it failed did actually really make me think that there were probably at least a couple of nearby counterfactual worlds where the cold war happened because some opsec protocols weren’t good enough, and some third party in the cold war just did some social engineering to cause a major war between the U.S. and Russia, hoping that they would end up on top in the resulting chaos.
On a meta level, I think next year’s email and post should link pretty prominently to a post just titled “Why LessWrong Petrov Day?” that explains the reasoning here pretty straightforwardly.
Remembering that humanity is fragile, and that we have come close to destruction in the past, and will likely come close to destruction in the future.
This sounds like it’s pretty well captured by current Petrov Day ritual, yeah, though I feel like it only being the front page rather than all of LW makes it feel much less serious.
Practicing the virtue of not taking unilateral action
Doesn’t Petrov’s choice actually get closer to taking than not taking unilateral action, though? The current ritual captures “think carefully about your actions”, yes, but as I understand it Petrov was supposed to report a missile launch to his superiors. who could in principle also have used their judgment to dismiss it as a false alarm.
He did the right choice, no doubt, but it feels weird to use “saw an event that could have led to the end of the world, made a choice that involved going against his standing orders and the previous planning that many others had participated in, ultimately making the decision purely himself rather than communicating it to the people with the pre-designated authority to deal with it” as a symbol of coordination and avoiding unilateral action.
Sorry, after thinking about this, I basically think that “unilateral action” is just a confusing choice of words. Let’s replace it with “being given substantial purely destructive power, and wielding that power responsibly,”, because I think while there was a substantial unilateral component to the cold war, I don’t think Petrov’s choice in particular was that reliant on unilateral considerations.
This sounds like it’s pretty well captured by current Petrov Day ritual, yeah, though I feel like it only being the front page rather than all of LW makes it feel much less serious.
I mean, I think taking all of LessWrong down would be a bit of a dick move. Like, the frontpage is what matters most to the people who participate and is a resource that feels fair and reasonably to destroy, because it being down mostly just costs the people who participate in the ritual.
But I feel like as a developer on LessWrong I have a pretty serious responsibility to be a good shepherd of content, and to make sure that you can reliably link to LessWrong content, and that you can reliably read the sequences, without it breaking. Most of the people who read that content aren’t regular users, they are people who got linked here from some other blogpost on the internet, and I don’t want to externalize our bad decisions into giving them a bad experience.
I think in general, I wouldn’t want to run rituals like this that randomly damage some public infrastructure. Like, I wouldn’t want to make it so that when someone presses a button, we barricade a random road in Berkeley. Making all the content on LessWrong inaccessible feels similar to that. It’s not my right to remove people’s access to that.
I don’t have a strong opinion on how serious Petrov Day should be. Just that if you wanted it to be taken more seriously then it should have been set up differently.
Yeah, I think this is a reasonable reaction, and I really appreciate you going in-depth on your reaction here. And maybe the right call is to basically not have any shared rituals and traditions that have a shared sense of importance, which feels to me like the western secular default.
But, I don’t know, that does leave me feeling pretty empty and sad, and I notice that if I don’t have an active and strong culture around me, that I just default to whatever other random culture around me does have any content, even if I don’t really like the ideas of that culture, and it feels like a pretty major loss to me. I do think that culture is really important, and shared rituals and traditions and games like these feel like how you actually build a culture that has any substantial content. And I really like Petrov Day. I consider it and Solstice to be the two primary holidays we have that we get to shape to reinforce our shared values and ideals, and want us to make use of them.
Like, I do think it’s important that we try our best to only send the invites to people who are up for taking this seriously, and it should be easy to opt-out. I think we should improve the communication to make it clearer that “yes, I do think this is a serious challenge. It’s easy for you to opt out by just ignoring this message, but please don’t destroy what I care about because you just want to have some fun. Building trust that I can have things I care about without other people destroying them just for fun, or because they dislike me or want to actively hurt me, is like half of the point of the whole exercise”.
Like, I don’t want this to be a somber serious thing. I think traditions need some fun to stay alive and not be super draining for everyone. But I also don’t want it to just be a thing that people don’t take seriously at all. Getting the communication for that right is difficult. Like, I want it to be serious play. A bunch of people who do actually try to do the right thing and win, but with an understanding that yes, this isn’t fully the real thing, this is practice, and the stakes are lower, but also not nothing, because we are doing this because we care about the bigger thing. It feels to me that most competitive sports get a substantial part of this tone right, and wargaming also has some of this feeling.
Like, I was really proud when last year we successfully didn’t blow up the site. I was proud when people considered blowing it up, and then people talked about it, and made arguments, and overall the, what seemed to me, right considerations prevailed. I think it was a pretty real and substantial achievement, and it gave me a sense of trust that everyone we sent the codes to shared at least some values and virtues with me, or at the very least wasn’t trying to actively hurt me. That trust was worth a lot. I would likely give you $5k of my own money for that trust.
And like, maybe other people don’t care much about that trust, but overall, I feel like I am in a world where trust is very scarce. Most people don’t take anything seriously and live life in what feels to me like a postmodernist careless perspective on the world, or alternatively are mindkilled and overwhelmed with values I don’t share and feel scary to me. And I when I think of a world where we successfully have 500 people over the course of 10 years, who every year successfully not blow up the site, and use it as an opportunity to remember the fragility of civilization, then that makes me pretty happy, and makes me more excited to invest in LessWrong and all the associated communities.
And like, I don’t know, what is authority for if not for coordinating exactly this kind of cultural institution? Of course, we should lose some of that authority as we do things that people don’t like, and if we repeatedly do stuff that lots of people don’t like, the authority we have should be taken away from us. But, I think, overall, my sense is that the community is happier if we use our authority to sometimes try to establish traditions like this. It is of course important that what we do isn’t a catch-22, nobody wants that. But I don’t think what happened here is a catch-22. Some of what happened here is a misunderstanding, and some of what happened here is simply the cost that you sometimes pay if you try to send a costly signal, but can’t quite get it right.
Like, I do think we should have done better at communicating the degree of seriousness of this thing. I have some ideas of how we can do that better in the future. I also sure really think Chris should have done a better job at reading the intention that was behind the email, and I did lose some trust in him and others that they will take things I care about seriously, and that they won’t just fall prey to relatively low-effort phishing attacks when it actually matters that they don’t.
Hey, I’m relieved and grateful that you took this so well. :) I hesitated for a while before posting my comment. I get that this ritual was important for you and didn’t want to disrespect that; probably also didn’t speak up last year because I wasn’t sure I could communicate it in a good way.
I totally get the desire for rituals, and think it’s an important one; I haven’t been to a Solstice but I appreciate what they’re doing. I also don’t have a problem with them, maybe because they don’t feel like they are trying to claim anything that they’re not.
Generally most of my problem with this ritual was a) some aspects of its execution, such as the communication, which is fixable, and b) the feeling that it’s actually not very analogous to the dilemma it’s trying to be symbolic for, and which it claims to be training people in. (I said a few words about that in the final paragraph of my response to lionhearted.) I think that if it really felt to me like it was teaching people to be more trustworthy and coordinate better in situations-like-the-one-Petrov faced, then I’d probably be very happy to have it around. I just don’t feel like it’s there… yet. :)
Yeah, I do think we are definitely still figuring out a bunch of rough edges around this tradition.
I do think that what we set up is reasonably analogous of what I think happened to Petrov, and the aims I have for it, though of course I would think that, but here is maybe one more attempt at synthesizing what values I care about reinforcing with Petrov Day:
Remembering that humanity is fragile, and that we have come close to destruction in the past, and will likely come close to destruction in the future.
This feels like it really straightforwardly resonates with the setup. You need to have some chance that things will go wrong to create a real sense of tension, but of course you don’t actually want to have stakes that are so high that they destroy lots of value if you mess it up, in particular while you are still dealing with a lot of uncertainty about the setup.
Practicing the virtue of not taking unilateral action and being mindful that your actions can have large negative consequences, and that you will act responsibly with the power you are given
I think this is just a really valuable virtue for a community of people to have, and I do think it’s what distinguished Petrov from most people in similar reference classes to him. Like, as I said in the other comment, he could have just been a bureaucrat who didn’t care about his job, didn’t pay much attention to what was happening, and just accidentally contributed to destroying the world. And similarly, I want the people around me to take responsibility for their actions, in particular if they have a large potential downside.
I think of these two as the core virtues of Petrov day, and I think our current ritual does a pretty decent job at reinforcing them. Like, last year when the LessWrong frontpage had a chance to go down any minute, it really felt very analogous to how I imagine people must have felt like during the cold war, where a catastrophe could have happened any minute, and suddenly destroy something I really care about. This year, the way it failed did actually really make me think that there were probably at least a couple of nearby counterfactual worlds where the cold war happened because some opsec protocols weren’t good enough, and some third party in the cold war just did some social engineering to cause a major war between the U.S. and Russia, hoping that they would end up on top in the resulting chaos.
On a meta level, I think next year’s email and post should link pretty prominently to a post just titled “Why LessWrong Petrov Day?” that explains the reasoning here pretty straightforwardly.
This sounds like it’s pretty well captured by current Petrov Day ritual, yeah, though I feel like it only being the front page rather than all of LW makes it feel much less serious.
Doesn’t Petrov’s choice actually get closer to taking than not taking unilateral action, though? The current ritual captures “think carefully about your actions”, yes, but as I understand it Petrov was supposed to report a missile launch to his superiors. who could in principle also have used their judgment to dismiss it as a false alarm.
He did the right choice, no doubt, but it feels weird to use “saw an event that could have led to the end of the world, made a choice that involved going against his standing orders and the previous planning that many others had participated in, ultimately making the decision purely himself rather than communicating it to the people with the pre-designated authority to deal with it” as a symbol of coordination and avoiding unilateral action.
Sorry, after thinking about this, I basically think that “unilateral action” is just a confusing choice of words. Let’s replace it with “being given substantial purely destructive power, and wielding that power responsibly,”, because I think while there was a substantial unilateral component to the cold war, I don’t think Petrov’s choice in particular was that reliant on unilateral considerations.
I mean, I think taking all of LessWrong down would be a bit of a dick move. Like, the frontpage is what matters most to the people who participate and is a resource that feels fair and reasonably to destroy, because it being down mostly just costs the people who participate in the ritual.
But I feel like as a developer on LessWrong I have a pretty serious responsibility to be a good shepherd of content, and to make sure that you can reliably link to LessWrong content, and that you can reliably read the sequences, without it breaking. Most of the people who read that content aren’t regular users, they are people who got linked here from some other blogpost on the internet, and I don’t want to externalize our bad decisions into giving them a bad experience.
I think in general, I wouldn’t want to run rituals like this that randomly damage some public infrastructure. Like, I wouldn’t want to make it so that when someone presses a button, we barricade a random road in Berkeley. Making all the content on LessWrong inaccessible feels similar to that. It’s not my right to remove people’s access to that.
I don’t have a strong opinion on how serious Petrov Day should be. Just that if you wanted it to be taken more seriously then it should have been set up differently.