Indeed, last year I know of a user (not Chris Leong) who visited the site, clicked the red button, and entered and submitted codes, before finding out what the button did.
As a result of that user, this year we changed the red button to the following, so that mistake would not happen again.
If I showed up cold (not as a person who’d actually been issued codes and not having advance knowledge of the event), and saw even the 2020 button with “Click here to destroy Less Wrong”, it would never cross my mind that clicking it would actually have any effect on the site, regardless of what it says.
I’d assume it was some kind of joke or an opportunity to play some kind of game. My response would be to ignore it as a waste of time… but if I did click on it for some reason, and was asked for a code, I’d probably type some random garbage to see what would happen. Still with zero expectation of actually affecting the site.
Who would believe what it says? It’s not even actually true; “destroy” doesn’t mean “shut down for a day”.
The Web is full of jokey “red buttons”, and used to have more, so the obvious assumption is that any one you see is just another one of those.
This point is important. LW is the type of website I would expect to do some quirky applet that gives an object lesson in iterated game theory, or something, and as a person still trying to learn on LW’s key concepts, I would be inclined to try to play. Thus, the fact that chris pressed the button last year and entered fake codes is neutral evidence to me. It’s what I would have done if I were playing what I thought was an instructive game.
By contrast, Petrov believed (I assume correctly or at least justifiably) that all of the “buttons” available to him were real buttons that would cause the Soviets to launch at least one nuke and probably hundreds.
I don’t have a good solution for the problem of “Convince a relative newcomer to the site, solely via the button, that the button is real and will do what it says it does”. For me, as such a newcomer, this is because HPMOR and SSC (my entrees into the community) have such a screwball sense of humor.
Thus, the more times you try to say, “For real, clicking this button will actually cause the front page to go down for 24 hours,” or “Lots of people are going to be annoyed by this,” or “Clicking this button will tend to show the community that its xrisk calculations are not unreasonably high,” or even “Petrov would be ashamed of you (epistemic status: confident),” the more it looks like a game, because most of the Internet is so seamless that multiple caveats come off as satire.
Maybe you could add links to the postmortems for Petrov Day 2019 and 2020 in the button?
If I showed up cold (not as a person who’d actually been issued codes and not having advance knowledge of the event), and saw even the 2020 button with “Click here to destroy Less Wrong”, it would never cross my mind that clicking it would actually have any effect on the site, regardless of what it says.
I’d assume it was some kind of joke or an opportunity to play some kind of game. My response would be to ignore it as a waste of time… but if I did click on it for some reason, and was asked for a code, I’d probably type some random garbage to see what would happen. Still with zero expectation of actually affecting the site.
Who would believe what it says? It’s not even actually true; “destroy” doesn’t mean “shut down for a day”.
The Web is full of jokey “red buttons”, and used to have more, so the obvious assumption is that any one you see is just another one of those.
This point is important. LW is the type of website I would expect to do some quirky applet that gives an object lesson in iterated game theory, or something, and as a person still trying to learn on LW’s key concepts, I would be inclined to try to play. Thus, the fact that chris pressed the button last year and entered fake codes is neutral evidence to me. It’s what I would have done if I were playing what I thought was an instructive game.
By contrast, Petrov believed (I assume correctly or at least justifiably) that all of the “buttons” available to him were real buttons that would cause the Soviets to launch at least one nuke and probably hundreds.
I don’t have a good solution for the problem of “Convince a relative newcomer to the site, solely via the button, that the button is real and will do what it says it does”. For me, as such a newcomer, this is because HPMOR and SSC (my entrees into the community) have such a screwball sense of humor.
Thus, the more times you try to say, “For real, clicking this button will actually cause the front page to go down for 24 hours,” or “Lots of people are going to be annoyed by this,” or “Clicking this button will tend to show the community that its xrisk calculations are not unreasonably high,” or even “Petrov would be ashamed of you (epistemic status: confident),” the more it looks like a game, because most of the Internet is so seamless that multiple caveats come off as satire.
Maybe you could add links to the postmortems for Petrov Day 2019 and 2020 in the button?