Next year, we should give the Sneerclub reddit a big red button to destroy LW, and have a big red button here to destroy Sneerclub. Nuclear war is more fun when it’s not all like-minded people.
That is a cute idea but they’d do it right away [>95%]. Even if you just gave it to like five moderators. They are largely conflict theorists who believe rationalists are [insert the strongest politically derogatory terms imaginable] and LW being down is morally good.
Maybe if there were real stakes they would consider it, like an independent party making a donation to both MIRI and an organization of SC’s choice — except on second thought, I think they would find this too objectionable: “wow, you’ll donate to charity but only if you get to humiliate me by forcing me to play your idiotic game? that really shows that [insert further derogation]”)
So maybe with a different group. It would be particularly cool if it were a foreign entity, but that seems difficult to arrange.
Perhaps ironically/terrifyingly I think the LW/Sneerclub Petrov Day experiment is most interesting if it actually destroys the whole site forever, rather than symbolically taking down one page for a day. This is more analogous to the US/Soviets and their goals + level of hostility
(Although I expect that deal to still be heavily lopsided in favor of SneerClub, given that SneerClub’s main goal seems more like “fuck LW” than “have a functioning nice community”)
Great. I would be even happier if you explicitly thought it’s a bad idea.
Edit: this received many downvotes and I’m puzzled. Maybe it sounds snarky? That was unintentional; sorry Ray. Maybe it sounds pedantic and unnecessary? I dunno, explicitly and directly destroying value feels like Not A Game to me (related to but distinct from sacredness), analogous to if Ray had said “it would be interesting to see how many more people would die if we sabotaged the Against Malaria Foundation” though of course weaker than that.
It would be better if it was merely an organization that merely had contradictory goals (maybe a degrowth anarcho-socialist group? A hardcore anti-science christian organization?) but wasn’t organized around the dislike of our group specifically.
Lesswrong/sneerclub each have a button to take down the other for the day.
Once pressed the other site is taken down, after a 15 minute delay (so mutual destruction is possible if return fire happens within 15mins).
People would spend the whole day^[1] going back and forth between the two sites saying “look, one of them says they have already fired, we have to shoot NOW, before we go down.”
We don’t even need a mechanically introduced false alarm system, I think people getting hyped and misreading/misrepresenting comments on the other site would do enough.
[1] Or, at least the day until 00.15.01 am, when the inevitable first strike lands.
Something like that would be much more representative of real defection risks. It’s easy to cooperate with people we like; the hard part is cooperating with the outgroup.
(Good luck getting /r/sneerclub to agree to this though, since that itself would require cooperation.)
Next year, we should give the Sneerclub reddit a big red button to destroy LW, and have a big red button here to destroy Sneerclub. Nuclear war is more fun when it’s not all like-minded people.
I am not sure why,but this comment made me suddenly realize how close we used to be to doomsday(and still are)!
That is a cute idea but they’d do it right away [>95%]. Even if you just gave it to like five moderators. They are largely conflict theorists who believe rationalists are [insert the strongest politically derogatory terms imaginable] and LW being down is morally good.
Maybe if there were real stakes they would consider it, like an independent party making a donation to both MIRI and an organization of SC’s choice — except on second thought, I think they would find this too objectionable: “wow, you’ll donate to charity but only if you get to humiliate me by forcing me to play your idiotic game? that really shows that [insert further derogation]”)
So maybe with a different group. It would be particularly cool if it were a foreign entity, but that seems difficult to arrange.
Perhaps ironically/terrifyingly I think the LW/Sneerclub Petrov Day experiment is most interesting if it actually destroys the whole site forever, rather than symbolically taking down one page for a day. This is more analogous to the US/Soviets and their goals + level of hostility
(Although I expect that deal to still be heavily lopsided in favor of SneerClub, given that SneerClub’s main goal seems more like “fuck LW” than “have a functioning nice community”)
This is a bad idea. Don’t do it.
To be clear I was not even slightly implying this was a “good idea”. Just “interesting.”
Great. I would be even happier if you explicitly thought it’s a bad idea.
Edit: this received many downvotes and I’m puzzled. Maybe it sounds snarky? That was unintentional; sorry Ray. Maybe it sounds pedantic and unnecessary? I dunno, explicitly and directly destroying value feels like Not A Game to me (related to but distinct from sacredness), analogous to if Ray had said “it would be interesting to see how many more people would die if we sabotaged the Against Malaria Foundation” though of course weaker than that.
I do indeed explicitly think it is a bad idea.
It would be better if it was merely an organization that merely had contradictory goals (maybe a degrowth anarcho-socialist group? A hardcore anti-science christian organization?) but wasn’t organized around the dislike of our group specifically.
Maybe (to make it more similar to nuclear war):
Lesswrong/sneerclub each have a button to take down the other for the day.
Once pressed the other site is taken down, after a 15 minute delay (so mutual destruction is possible if return fire happens within 15mins).
People would spend the whole day^[1] going back and forth between the two sites saying “look, one of them says they have already fired, we have to shoot NOW, before we go down.”
We don’t even need a mechanically introduced false alarm system, I think people getting hyped and misreading/misrepresenting comments on the other site would do enough.
[1] Or, at least the day until 00.15.01 am, when the inevitable first strike lands.
Something like that would be much more representative of real defection risks. It’s easy to cooperate with people we like; the hard part is cooperating with the outgroup.
(Good luck getting /r/sneerclub to agree to this though, since that itself would require cooperation.)