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)
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 ;)