I think ‘Improving the Incentives’ misses the point of Petrov day. The point of Stanislav Petrov is that he made his decision despite all his personal incentives being aligned the opposite way. It was a very hard thing to do, and creating incentives to not press the button cheapens the decision and takes away the difficulty of the decision—especially when in this circumstance the incentive to press the button is already a weak one (basically just “for the lulz” as far as I can tell), much weaker than the potential dangers to his career and his country that he had to deal with.
I see this Petrov day event as a chance to think about the difficulty of getting multiple people to do the “right thing” despite having little incentive to do so, about creating an environment that nurtures and nourishes such independent decision-making, and about the fragile balance of trust. Creating explicit incentives breaks away from this difficult problem and turns it into a different, often easier one.
On the other hand, if we develop a culture of retroactively punishing and rewarding people (ex.: Robin Hanson sent money to Stanislav Petrov), then maybe it will indeed create such incentives across the board (ie. in the real world as well).
I think ‘Improving the Incentives’ misses the point of Petrov day. The point of Stanislav Petrov is that he made his decision despite all his personal incentives being aligned the opposite way. It was a very hard thing to do, and creating incentives to not press the button cheapens the decision and takes away the difficulty of the decision—especially when in this circumstance the incentive to press the button is already a weak one (basically just “for the lulz” as far as I can tell), much weaker than the potential dangers to his career and his country that he had to deal with.
I see this Petrov day event as a chance to think about the difficulty of getting multiple people to do the “right thing” despite having little incentive to do so, about creating an environment that nurtures and nourishes such independent decision-making, and about the fragile balance of trust. Creating explicit incentives breaks away from this difficult problem and turns it into a different, often easier one.
That’s a reasonable point.
On the other hand, if we develop a culture of retroactively punishing and rewarding people (ex.: Robin Hanson sent money to Stanislav Petrov), then maybe it will indeed create such incentives across the board (ie. in the real world as well).