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?
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?