The Seattle and UK groups apparently celebrated today, but with a somewhat different scenario (instead of going home quietly, they each had cakes, and if they got nuked they had to burn their cake instead of eating it. At least this is my present understanding).
There was a web thing with a Big Red Button, running in Seattle, Oxford (and I think Boston also).
Each group had a cake and if they got nuked, they wouldn’t get to eat the cake.
At the time when the Seattle counter said that the game was over for 1 second, someone there puched the button for the lulz, but the Oxford counter was not at zero yet and so they got nuked, then they decided to burn the cake instead of just not eating it.
I still don’t understand, in the context of the ceremony, what would cause anyone to push the button. Whether or not it would incinerate a cake, which would pretty much make you history’s greatest monster.
Ben Pace summarized this as “You know how, sometimes, you just find yourself having invented a terrible technology with the potential to easily destroy everything for no reason and you sort of wish you hadn’t but, well, here you are though?”
The point isn’t that anyone sane would push the button. It’s that we as a civilisation are just going around building buttons (cf. nukes, AGI, etc) and so it’s good practice to put ourselves in the situation where any unilateralist can destroy something we all truly value. When I said the above, I was justifying why it was useful to have a ritual around Petrov Day, not why you would press the button. I can’t think of any good reason to press the button, and would be angry at anyone who did—they’re just decreasing trust and increasing fear of unilateralists. We still should have a ceremony where we all practice the art of sitting together and not pressing the button.
Hm. I’d been thinking the whole thing would work better if each party could perform some small negative-sum defection against the other. Along the likes of, each party commits to destroy $10, and has the ability to restore $1 to themselves while increasing the other party’s obligation by $2 up to a max of $30. (And after either party gets nuked, the money values remain fixed.)
I think that would be a good thing for us to practice, but I agree the “just don’t press the button that you have no reason to press anyway” variant is also good to practice.
Adding money to the mix for some reason just makes it more salient to me that pushing the button straight up makes you a jerk. (Although your setup here is… somewhat better than the variant someone else proposed, where you more directly give each other money. By virtue of being a weird setup that I have to think about before having opinions about)
The idea I came up with yesterday which I actually like is something like “if you push the button, there’s a cool ceremonial bottle rocket to launch or sparkler or effigy you burn or something”, that’s cool enough to look exciting and tempting, but whose value is entirely symbolic and fun.
Because of the nature of the holiday, a prize that involves harming the other group actually feels worse-than-nothing (making me definitely not want to press anything), whereas a prize that involves a cool symbolic thing for ourselves is more tempting.
You know, upon reflection it is a bit alarming that I didn’t even notice I had substituted an entirely different question for the one Zvi asked.
(Although in my defense I think in the original context I think you also gave the answer in response to someone asking ‘why would I press the button?’, although I’m not sure)
The Seattle and UK groups apparently celebrated today, but with a somewhat different scenario (instead of going home quietly, they each had cakes, and if they got nuked they had to burn their cake instead of eating it. At least this is my present understanding).
There was a web thing with a Big Red Button, running in Seattle, Oxford (and I think Boston also).
Each group had a cake and if they got nuked, they wouldn’t get to eat the cake.
At the time when the Seattle counter said that the game was over for 1 second, someone there puched the button for the lulz, but the Oxford counter was not at zero yet and so they got nuked, then they decided to burn the cake instead of just not eating it.
I hope we all learned a valuable lesson here today.
This is both hilarious and horrifying.
“We have a positive singularity, let’s launch nukes for fun”
No, we didn’t participate in this in Boston. Our Petrov Day is this Wednesday, the actual anniversary of the Petrov incident.
I still don’t understand, in the context of the ceremony, what would cause anyone to push the button. Whether or not it would incinerate a cake, which would pretty much make you history’s greatest monster.
Ben Pace summarized this as “You know how, sometimes, you just find yourself having invented a terrible technology with the potential to easily destroy everything for no reason and you sort of wish you hadn’t but, well, here you are though?”
Actually, the emphasis is a little off.
The point isn’t that anyone sane would push the button. It’s that we as a civilisation are just going around building buttons (cf. nukes, AGI, etc) and so it’s good practice to put ourselves in the situation where any unilateralist can destroy something we all truly value. When I said the above, I was justifying why it was useful to have a ritual around Petrov Day, not why you would press the button. I can’t think of any good reason to press the button, and would be angry at anyone who did—they’re just decreasing trust and increasing fear of unilateralists. We still should have a ceremony where we all practice the art of sitting together and not pressing the button.
Hm. I’d been thinking the whole thing would work better if each party could perform some small negative-sum defection against the other. Along the likes of, each party commits to destroy $10, and has the ability to restore $1 to themselves while increasing the other party’s obligation by $2 up to a max of $30. (And after either party gets nuked, the money values remain fixed.)
I think that would be a good thing for us to practice, but I agree the “just don’t press the button that you have no reason to press anyway” variant is also good to practice.
Adding money to the mix for some reason just makes it more salient to me that pushing the button straight up makes you a jerk. (Although your setup here is… somewhat better than the variant someone else proposed, where you more directly give each other money. By virtue of being a weird setup that I have to think about before having opinions about)
The idea I came up with yesterday which I actually like is something like “if you push the button, there’s a cool ceremonial bottle rocket to launch or sparkler or effigy you burn or something”, that’s cool enough to look exciting and tempting, but whose value is entirely symbolic and fun.
Because of the nature of the holiday, a prize that involves harming the other group actually feels worse-than-nothing (making me definitely not want to press anything), whereas a prize that involves a cool symbolic thing for ourselves is more tempting.
You know, upon reflection it is a bit alarming that I didn’t even notice I had substituted an entirely different question for the one Zvi asked.
(Although in my defense I think in the original context I think you also gave the answer in response to someone asking ‘why would I press the button?’, although I’m not sure)
Lol, seems fine ;)