“The enemy knew perfectly well that you’d check whose launch codes were entered, especially since the nukes being set off at all tells us that someone can appear falsely trustworthy.” Ben shut his eyes, thinking harder, trying to put himself into the enemy’s shoes. Why would he, or his dark side, have done something like—“We’re meant to conclude that the enemy has the launch codes. But that’s actually something the enemy can only do with difficulty, or under special conditions; they’re trying to create a false appearance of omnipotence.” Like I would. “Later, hypothetically, the nukes actually get fired. We think it was Quirinus_Quirrell firing it, but really, it was just someone firing it independently.”
“Unless that is precisely what Quirinus_Quirrell expects us to think,” said Jim Babcock, his brow furrowed in concentration. “In which case he does have the launch codes, as well as the other person.”
“Does Quirinus_Quirrell really use plots with that many levels of meta—”
“Yes,” said Habryka and Jim.
Ben nodded distantly. “Then this could be a setup to either make us think the personalised launch codes are telling the truth about his identity when they’re lying, or a setup to make us think the codes are lying when they’re telling the truth, depending on what level the enemy expects us to reason at. But if the enemy is planning to make us trust the personalised codes—we would have trusted the personalised codes anyway, if we’d been given no reason to distrust them. So there’s no need to go to all the work of framing another user in a way that we would realize we were intended to discover, just to trick us into going meta—”
Ben Pace comments on Honoring Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019