That’s… a bit surprising. If I were behind this, I wouldn’t have sent a message to you because you’re likely to know the plan. Anyone who receives the message but doesn’t fall for it is an extra chance for the scheme to fail, because if nothing else they can post in this thread where someone is most likely to see it before entering codes. (Chris, I’m curious if you did look in this thread before you put them in?) In your case you could react with admin powers too, though I dunno if you would have considered that fair game.
I feel like this gives us a small amount of evidence about the identity of the adversary, but not enough to do any real speculation with.
EDIT: I now believe the below contains substantial errors, after reading this message from the attacker.
Maybe you want to do sleuthing on your own, if so don’t read below. (It uses LessWrong’s spoiler feature.)
I believe the adversary was a person outside of the EA and rationality communities. They had not planned this, and they did not think very hard about who they sent the messages to (and didn’t realise Habryka and Raemon were admins). Rather, they saw a spur-of-the-moment opportunity to attack this system after seeing a Facebook post by Chris Leong (which solicited reasons for and against pressing the button). I believe this because they commented on that Chris Leong posted and say they sent the message.
I looked at the thread and considered commenting here, but not many people had commented, so I figured there wasn’t that much chance of getting a response if I posted here.
FYI I also got this message and to the best of my knowledge it was not sent by an admin
I can confirm that this message was not sent by any admin.
That’s… a bit surprising. If I were behind this, I wouldn’t have sent a message to you because you’re likely to know the plan. Anyone who receives the message but doesn’t fall for it is an extra chance for the scheme to fail, because if nothing else they can post in this thread where someone is most likely to see it before entering codes. (Chris, I’m curious if you did look in this thread before you put them in?) In your case you could react with admin powers too, though I dunno if you would have considered that fair game.
I feel like this gives us a small amount of evidence about the identity of the adversary, but not enough to do any real speculation with.
EDIT: I now believe the below contains substantial errors, after reading this message from the attacker.
Maybe you want to do sleuthing on your own, if so don’t read below. (It uses LessWrong’s spoiler feature.)
I believe the adversary was a person outside of the EA and rationality communities. They had not planned this, and they did not think very hard about who they sent the messages to (and didn’t realise Habryka and Raemon were admins). Rather, they saw a spur-of-the-moment opportunity to attack this system after seeing a Facebook post by Chris Leong (which solicited reasons for and against pressing the button). I believe this because they commented on that Chris Leong posted and say they sent the message.
I looked at the thread and considered commenting here, but not many people had commented, so I figured there wasn’t that much chance of getting a response if I posted here.