Thanks, I’m glad to hear that. :) Also, very thankful that the LW community took this really well.
Beyond that, as for my motivations, aside from curiosity as to whether it would work, etc. I considered that it would be an interesting learning opportunity for the community as well. With actual nukes, random untrusted people also have a part to play. Selecting a small group of people tasked with trying to bring down the site might even be a good addition to future instances of Petrov Day.
For what it’s worth, I took care to ensure that the damage from taking the site down would not be too great. The site was archived elsewhere, and the admins themselves accepted the risk of the site going down by starting this game. If this could have hurt people, I wouldn’t have done it.
Beyond that, loyalty and trust are also very important to me. If the admins had trusted me with the launch codes, I wouldn’t have nuked the site (intentionally).
After thinking more about this experiment, it has got me thinking about the payoff matrices. Is there anyone that would have pressed the button if there was guaranteed anonymity, and thus no personal cost? If so, make a second account—I’d be curious to hear your reasoning. Also, in this case there is no tangible benefit that anyone could get by nuking the site. How do we adapt this to situations where there is a benefit that can be gained by pressing the button?
P.S.: My offer still holds! Admins, if you’re feeling adventurous, give me the codes next year and I’ll prove that I won’t use them!
Is there anyone that would have pressed the button if there was guaranteed anonymity, and thus no personal cost? If so, make a second account
If I understand you correctly, that won’t work. The identity of the button-presser is not determined by which account pressed the button. It’s determined by the launch code string itself—everyone got a personalised launch code. (Which means that if someone stole and used your personalised code, you’d also get blamed—but that seems fair.)
I think maybe 6-8, not sure. I was going to go further but the site went down too quickly. Users were selected based on having a large number of posts.
I wanted something to make it sound realistic. And rationalist/EA culture loves surveys and collecting data. :)
Part of me wants to say you plonker for falling for it (as you said, there were plenty of clues, plus the fact that the launch codes weren’t repeated in the second message) but another part of me remembers that I fell victim to a Trojan once so I have some sympathy for you.
I’m trying to think if we ever prank each other or socially engineer each other in my social circle, and the answer is yes but it’s always by doing something really cool — like, an ambiguous package shows up but there’s a thoughtful gift inside.
(Not necessarily expensive — a friend found a textbook on Soviet accounting for me, I got him a hardcover copy of Junichi Saga’s Memories of Silk and Straw. Getting each other nice tea, coffee, soap, sometimes putting it in a funny box so it doesn’t look like what it is. Stuff like that. Sometimes nicer stuff, but it’s not about the money.)
Then I’m trying to think how my circle in general would respond to no-permission-given out-of-scope pranking of someone’s real life community that they’re member of — and yeah, there’d be pretty severe consequences in my social circle if someone did that. If I heard someone did what your buddy did who was currently a friend or acquaintance, they’d be marked as someone incredibly discourteous and much less trustworthy. It would just get marked as… pointless rude destructive behavior.
And it’s pretty tech heavy btw, we do joke around a lot, it’s just when we do pranks it’s almost always at the end a gift or something uplifting.
I don’t mean this to be blunt btw, I just re-read it before posting and it reads more blunt than I meant it to — I was just running through whether this would happen in my social circle, I ran it out mentally, and this is what I came up with.
Obviously, everyone’s different. And that’s of course one of the reasons it’s hard for people to get along. Some sort of meta-lesson, I suppose.
I think this case is fairly different to what you describe. The community organised for this to potentially happen and Chris publicised this fact to his friends. The community decided that it was worth the risk so the damage could be assumed not to be large and having the frontpage going down for 24 hours really isn’t a huge deal.
The actual damage is realisitically the fact that the experiment (and associated metaphor) didn’t work but I feel like the lessons learnt should more than make up for that.
Umm. Grudgingly upvoted.
(For real though, respect for taking the time to write an after-action report of your thinking.)
Serious question—will there be any consequences for your friendship, you think?
Why would there be? I’m sure they saw it as just a game too and it would be extremely hypocritical for me to be annoyed at anyone for that.
Thanks, I’m glad to hear that. :) Also, very thankful that the LW community took this really well.
Beyond that, as for my motivations, aside from curiosity as to whether it would work, etc. I considered that it would be an interesting learning opportunity for the community as well. With actual nukes, random untrusted people also have a part to play. Selecting a small group of people tasked with trying to bring down the site might even be a good addition to future instances of Petrov Day.
For what it’s worth, I took care to ensure that the damage from taking the site down would not be too great. The site was archived elsewhere, and the admins themselves accepted the risk of the site going down by starting this game. If this could have hurt people, I wouldn’t have done it.
Beyond that, loyalty and trust are also very important to me. If the admins had trusted me with the launch codes, I wouldn’t have nuked the site (intentionally).
After thinking more about this experiment, it has got me thinking about the payoff matrices. Is there anyone that would have pressed the button if there was guaranteed anonymity, and thus no personal cost? If so, make a second account—I’d be curious to hear your reasoning. Also, in this case there is no tangible benefit that anyone could get by nuking the site. How do we adapt this to situations where there is a benefit that can be gained by pressing the button?
P.S.: My offer still holds! Admins, if you’re feeling adventurous, give me the codes next year and I’ll prove that I won’t use them!
If I understand you correctly, that won’t work. The identity of the button-presser is not determined by which account pressed the button. It’s determined by the launch code string itself—everyone got a personalised launch code. (Which means that if someone stole and used your personalised code, you’d also get blamed—but that seems fair.)
I read that as “make a second account to say anonymously why you would have done it”.
In the spirit of learning from this, I’d be interested to know how many people you sent the message to and how you chose them etc.
I particularly liked the “You will be asked to complete a short survey afterward” touch—what made you think to include it?
I think maybe 6-8, not sure. I was going to go further but the site went down too quickly. Users were selected based on having a large number of posts.
I wanted something to make it sound realistic. And rationalist/EA culture loves surveys and collecting data. :)
Yeah, that honestly made it feel so real.
Part of me wants to say you plonker for falling for it (as you said, there were plenty of clues, plus the fact that the launch codes weren’t repeated in the second message) but another part of me remembers that I fell victim to a Trojan once so I have some sympathy for you.
Different social norms, I suppose.
I’m trying to think if we ever prank each other or socially engineer each other in my social circle, and the answer is yes but it’s always by doing something really cool — like, an ambiguous package shows up but there’s a thoughtful gift inside.
(Not necessarily expensive — a friend found a textbook on Soviet accounting for me, I got him a hardcover copy of Junichi Saga’s Memories of Silk and Straw. Getting each other nice tea, coffee, soap, sometimes putting it in a funny box so it doesn’t look like what it is. Stuff like that. Sometimes nicer stuff, but it’s not about the money.)
Then I’m trying to think how my circle in general would respond to no-permission-given out-of-scope pranking of someone’s real life community that they’re member of — and yeah, there’d be pretty severe consequences in my social circle if someone did that. If I heard someone did what your buddy did who was currently a friend or acquaintance, they’d be marked as someone incredibly discourteous and much less trustworthy. It would just get marked as… pointless rude destructive behavior.
And it’s pretty tech heavy btw, we do joke around a lot, it’s just when we do pranks it’s almost always at the end a gift or something uplifting.
I don’t mean this to be blunt btw, I just re-read it before posting and it reads more blunt than I meant it to — I was just running through whether this would happen in my social circle, I ran it out mentally, and this is what I came up with.
Obviously, everyone’s different. And that’s of course one of the reasons it’s hard for people to get along. Some sort of meta-lesson, I suppose.
I think this case is fairly different to what you describe. The community organised for this to potentially happen and Chris publicised this fact to his friends. The community decided that it was worth the risk so the damage could be assumed not to be large and having the frontpage going down for 24 hours really isn’t a huge deal.
The actual damage is realisitically the fact that the experiment (and associated metaphor) didn’t work but I feel like the lessons learnt should more than make up for that.
You’re being very kind in far-mode consequentialism here, but come on now.
Making your friend look foolish in front of thousands of people is bad etiquette in most social circles.
I’d kinda assumed that one wouldn’t do this unless they were confident their friend would be ok with it, as indeed seems to be the case.