Firm disagree. Second-order and third-order effects go limit->infinity here.
Also btw, I’m running a startup that’s now looking at — best case scenario — handling significant amounts of money over multiple years.
It makes me realize that “a lot of money” on the individual level is a terrible heuristic. Seriously, it’s hard to get one’s mind around it, but a million dollars is decidedly not a lot of money on the global scale.
For further elaboration, this is relevant and incredibly timely:
LW frontpage going down is also not particularly bad, so you don’t need much money to compensate for it.
If you wanted to convince me, you could make a case that destroying trust is really bad, and that in this particular case pressing the button would destroy a lot of trust, but that case hasn’t really been made.
LW frontpage going down is also not particularly bad [...] If you wanted to convince me, you could make a case that destroying trust is really bad
Umm, respectfully, I think this is extremely arrogant. Dangerously so.
Anyways, I’m being blunt here, but I think respectful and hopefully useful. Think about this. Reasoning follows —
The instructions if you got launch codes (also in the above post) were as such (emphasis added with underline) —
“Every Petrov Day, we practice not destroying the world. One particular way to do this is to practice the virtue of not taking unilateralist action.
It’s difficult to know who can be trusted, but today I have selected a group of LessWrong users who I think I can rely on in this way. You’ve all been given the opportunity to show yourselves capable and trustworthy.
[...]
This Petrov Day, between midnight and midnight PST, if you, {{username}}, enter the launch codes below on LessWrong, the Frontpage will go down for 24 hours.
I hope to see you on the other side of this, with our honor intact.”
So, to Ben Pace at least (the developer who put in a tremendous amount of hours and thought into putting this together), it represents...
*”practicing not destroying the world”
*”practicing the virtue of not taking unilateralist action”
*implications around his own uncertainty of who to trust
*de facto for Ben that he can’t rely on you personally, by his standards, if you do it
*showing yourself not “capable and trustworthy” by his standards
*having the total group’s “honor” “not be intact”, under Ben’s conception
And you want me to make a case for you on a single variable while ignoring the rather clear and straightforward written instructions for your own simple reductive understanding?
For Ben at least, the button thing was a symbolic exercise analogous to not nuking another country and he specifically asked you not to and said he’s trusting you.
So, no, I don’t want to “convince you” nor “make a case that destroying trust is really bad.” You’re literally stating you should set the burden of proof and others should “make a case.”
In an earlier comment you wrote,
You can in fact compare whether or not a particular trade is worth it if the situation calls for it, and a one-time situation that has an upside of $1672 for ~no work seems like such a situation.
“No work”? You mean aside from the work that Ben and the team did (a lot) and demonstrating to the world at large that the rationality community can’t press a “don’t destroy our own website” button to celebrate a Soviet soldier who chose restraint?
I mean, I don’t even want to put numbers on it, but if we gotta go to “least common denominator”, then $1672 is less than a week’s salary of the median developer in San Francisco. You’d be doing a hell of a lot more damage than that to morale and goodwill, I reckon, among the dev team here.
To be frank, I think the second-order and third-order effects of this project going well on Ben Pace alone is worth more than $1672 in “generative goodness” or whatever, and the potential disappointment and loss of faith in people he “thinks but is uncertain he can rely upon and trust” is… I mean, you know that one highly motivated person leading a community can make an immense difference right?
Just so you can get $1672 for charity (“upside”) with “~no work”?
And that’s just productivity, ignoring any potential negative affect or psychological distress, and being forced to reevaluate who he can trust. I mean, to pick a more taboo example, how many really nasty personal insults would you shout at a random software developer for $1672 to charity? That’s almost “no work” — it’s just you shouting some words, and whatever trivial psychological distress they feel, and I wager getting random insults from a stranger is much lower than having people you “are relying on and trusting” press a “don’t nuke the world simulator button.”
Like, if you just read what Ben wrote, you’d realize that risking destroying goodwill and faith in a single motivated innovative person alone should be priced well over $20k. I wouldn’t have done it for $100M going to charity. Seriously.
If you think that’s insane, stop and think why our numbers are four orders of magnitude apart — our priors must be obviously very different. And based on the comments, I’m taking into account more things than you, so you might be missing something really important.
(I could go on forever about this, but here’s one more: what’s the difference in your expected number of people discovering and getting into basic rationality, cognitive biases, and statistics with pressing the “failed at ‘not destroying the world day’ commemoration” vs not? Mine: high. What’s the value of more people thinking and acting rationally? Mine: high. So multiply the delta by the value. That’s just one more thing. There’s a lot you’re missing. I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but maybe think more instead of “doing you” on a quick timetable?)
(Here’s another one you didn’t think about: we’re celebrating a Soviet engineer. Run this headline in a Russian newspaper: “Americans try to celebrate Stanislav Petrov by not pressing ‘nuke their own website’ button, arrogant American pushes button because money isn’t donated to charity.”)
(Here’s another one you didn’t think about: I’ll give anyone 10:1 odds this is cited in a mainstream political science journal within 15 years, which are read by people who both set and advise on policy, and that “group of mostly American and European rationalists couldn’t not nuke their own site” absolutely is the type of thing to shape policy discussions ever-so-slightly.)
(Here’s another one you didn’t think about: some fraction of the people here are active-duty or reserve military in various countries. How does this going one way or another shape their kill/no-kill decisions in ambiguous warzones? Have you ever read any military memoirs about people who made to make those calls quickly, EX overwatch snipers in Mogadishu? No?)
(Not meant to be snarky — Please think more and trust your own intuition less.)
Thanks for writing this up. It’s pretty clear to me that you aren’t modeling me particularly well, and that it would take a very long time to resolve this, which I’m not particularly willing to do right now.
I’ll give anyone 10:1 odds this is cited in a mainstream political science journal within 15 years, which are read by people who both set and advise on policy
I’ll take that bet. Here’s a proposal: I send you $100 today, and in 15 years if you can’t show me an article in a reputable mainstream political science journal that mentions this event, then you send me an inflation-adjusted $1000. This is conditional on finding an arbiter I trust (perhaps Ben) who will:
Adjudicate whether it is an “article in a reputable mainstream political science journal that mentions this event”
Compute the inflation-adjusted amount, should that be necessary
Vouch that you are trustworthy and will in fact pay in 15 years if I win the bet.
If you wanted to convince me, you could make a case that destroying trust is really bad, and that in this particular case pressing the button would destroy a lot of trust, but that case hasn’t really been made.
That this particular case would destroy a lot of trust.
This seemed to me like a fun game with stakes of social disapproval on one side, and basically no stakes on the other. This doesn’t seem like it has much bearing on the trustworthiness of members of the rationality community in situations with real stakes, where there is a stronger temptation to defect, or it would have more of a cost on the community.
I guess implicit to what I’m saying is that the front page being down for 24 hours doesn’t seem that bad to me. I don’t come to Less Wrong most days anyway.
Firm disagree. Second-order and third-order effects go limit->infinity here.
Also btw, I’m running a startup that’s now looking at — best case scenario — handling significant amounts of money over multiple years.
It makes me realize that “a lot of money” on the individual level is a terrible heuristic. Seriously, it’s hard to get one’s mind around it, but a million dollars is decidedly not a lot of money on the global scale.
For further elaboration, this is relevant and incredibly timely:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
LW frontpage going down is also not particularly bad, so you don’t need much money to compensate for it.
If you wanted to convince me, you could make a case that destroying trust is really bad, and that in this particular case pressing the button would destroy a lot of trust, but that case hasn’t really been made.
Umm, respectfully, I think this is extremely arrogant. Dangerously so.
Anyways, I’m being blunt here, but I think respectful and hopefully useful. Think about this. Reasoning follows —
The instructions if you got launch codes (also in the above post) were as such (emphasis added with underline) —
“Every Petrov Day, we practice not destroying the world. One particular way to do this is to practice the virtue of not taking unilateralist action.
It’s difficult to know who can be trusted, but today I have selected a group of LessWrong users who I think I can rely on in this way. You’ve all been given the opportunity to show yourselves capable and trustworthy.
[...]
This Petrov Day, between midnight and midnight PST, if you, {{username}}, enter the launch codes below on LessWrong, the Frontpage will go down for 24 hours.
I hope to see you on the other side of this, with our honor intact.”
So, to Ben Pace at least (the developer who put in a tremendous amount of hours and thought into putting this together), it represents...
*”practicing not destroying the world”
*”practicing the virtue of not taking unilateralist action”
*implications around his own uncertainty of who to trust
*de facto for Ben that he can’t rely on you personally, by his standards, if you do it
*showing yourself not “capable and trustworthy” by his standards
*having the total group’s “honor” “not be intact”, under Ben’s conception
And you want me to make a case for you on a single variable while ignoring the rather clear and straightforward written instructions for your own simple reductive understanding?
For Ben at least, the button thing was a symbolic exercise analogous to not nuking another country and he specifically asked you not to and said he’s trusting you.
So, no, I don’t want to “convince you” nor “make a case that destroying trust is really bad.” You’re literally stating you should set the burden of proof and others should “make a case.”
In an earlier comment you wrote,
“No work”? You mean aside from the work that Ben and the team did (a lot) and demonstrating to the world at large that the rationality community can’t press a “don’t destroy our own website” button to celebrate a Soviet soldier who chose restraint?
I mean, I don’t even want to put numbers on it, but if we gotta go to “least common denominator”, then $1672 is less than a week’s salary of the median developer in San Francisco. You’d be doing a hell of a lot more damage than that to morale and goodwill, I reckon, among the dev team here.
To be frank, I think the second-order and third-order effects of this project going well on Ben Pace alone is worth more than $1672 in “generative goodness” or whatever, and the potential disappointment and loss of faith in people he “thinks but is uncertain he can rely upon and trust” is… I mean, you know that one highly motivated person leading a community can make an immense difference right?
Just so you can get $1672 for charity (“upside”) with “~no work”?
And that’s just productivity, ignoring any potential negative affect or psychological distress, and being forced to reevaluate who he can trust. I mean, to pick a more taboo example, how many really nasty personal insults would you shout at a random software developer for $1672 to charity? That’s almost “no work” — it’s just you shouting some words, and whatever trivial psychological distress they feel, and I wager getting random insults from a stranger is much lower than having people you “are relying on and trusting” press a “don’t nuke the world simulator button.”
Like, if you just read what Ben wrote, you’d realize that risking destroying goodwill and faith in a single motivated innovative person alone should be priced well over $20k. I wouldn’t have done it for $100M going to charity. Seriously.
If you think that’s insane, stop and think why our numbers are four orders of magnitude apart — our priors must be obviously very different. And based on the comments, I’m taking into account more things than you, so you might be missing something really important.
(I could go on forever about this, but here’s one more: what’s the difference in your expected number of people discovering and getting into basic rationality, cognitive biases, and statistics with pressing the “failed at ‘not destroying the world day’ commemoration” vs not? Mine: high. What’s the value of more people thinking and acting rationally? Mine: high. So multiply the delta by the value. That’s just one more thing. There’s a lot you’re missing. I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but maybe think more instead of “doing you” on a quick timetable?)
(Here’s another one you didn’t think about: we’re celebrating a Soviet engineer. Run this headline in a Russian newspaper: “Americans try to celebrate Stanislav Petrov by not pressing ‘nuke their own website’ button, arrogant American pushes button because money isn’t donated to charity.”)
(Here’s another one you didn’t think about: I’ll give anyone 10:1 odds this is cited in a mainstream political science journal within 15 years, which are read by people who both set and advise on policy, and that “group of mostly American and European rationalists couldn’t not nuke their own site” absolutely is the type of thing to shape policy discussions ever-so-slightly.)
(Here’s another one you didn’t think about: some fraction of the people here are active-duty or reserve military in various countries. How does this going one way or another shape their kill/no-kill decisions in ambiguous warzones? Have you ever read any military memoirs about people who made to make those calls quickly, EX overwatch snipers in Mogadishu? No?)
(Not meant to be snarky — Please think more and trust your own intuition less.)
Thanks for writing this up. It’s pretty clear to me that you aren’t modeling me particularly well, and that it would take a very long time to resolve this, which I’m not particularly willing to do right now.
I’ll take that bet. Here’s a proposal: I send you $100 today, and in 15 years if you can’t show me an article in a reputable mainstream political science journal that mentions this event, then you send me an inflation-adjusted $1000. This is conditional on finding an arbiter I trust (perhaps Ben) who will:
Adjudicate whether it is an “article in a reputable mainstream political science journal that mentions this event”
Compute the inflation-adjusted amount, should that be necessary
Vouch that you are trustworthy and will in fact pay in 15 years if I win the bet.
This basically seems right to me.
Which part of the two statements? That destroying trust is really bad, or that the case hasn’t been made?
That this particular case would destroy a lot of trust.
This seemed to me like a fun game with stakes of social disapproval on one side, and basically no stakes on the other. This doesn’t seem like it has much bearing on the trustworthiness of members of the rationality community in situations with real stakes, where there is a stronger temptation to defect, or it would have more of a cost on the community.
I guess implicit to what I’m saying is that the front page being down for 24 hours doesn’t seem that bad to me. I don’t come to Less Wrong most days anyway.