I think we can celebrate that Petrov didn’t want to destroy the world and this was a good impulse on his part. I think if we think it’s doubtful that he made the correct decision, or that it’s complicated, then we should be very, very upfront about that (your comment is upfront, the OP didn’t make this fact stick with me). The fact the holiday is named after him made me think (implicitly if not explicitly) that people (including you, Ben) generally endorsed Petrov’s reasoning/actions/etc. and so I did take the whole celebration as a claim about his reasoning. I mean, if Petrov reasoned poorly but happened to get a good result, we should celebrate the result yet condemn Petrov (or at least his reasoning). If Petrov reasoned poorly and took actions there were poor in expectation, doesn’t that mean something like in the majority of world’s Petrov caused bad stuff to happen (or at the algorithm which is Petrov generally would)?
. . .
I think it is extremely extremely weird to make a holiday about avoiding unilateralist’s curse and name it after who did exactly that. I hadn’t thought about it, but if Quanticle is right, then Petrov was taking unilateralist action. (We could celebrate that he his unilateralist action was good, but then the way Petrov day is being themed is here is weird.)
As an aside for those at home, I actually objected to Ben about the “unilateralist”/”unilateralist’s curse” framing separately because our button seemed a very non-obvious instance of Bostrom’s original meaning* to apply this to Petrov. Unilateralist’s curse (Bostrom, 2013) is about when a group of people all have the same goals but have different estimates whether an action which effects them all would be beneficial goal. The curse is that the more people in the group, the more likely someone is to have a bad estimate of the value of the goal that they act separate from everyone else. In the case of US vs Russia, this is an adversarial/enemy situation. If two people are enemies and one decides to attack the other, while it is perhaps correct to say they do so “unilaterally” but it’s not the phenomenon Bostrom was trying to point out with his paper/introduction of that term and I’m the kind of person who dislike when people’s introduced terminology gets eroded.
I was thinking this at the time I objected, but we could say Petrov had the same values as the rest of the military command but had different estimate of the value of a particular action (what to report), in which case we’re back to the above where he was taking unilateralist action.
Our button scenario is another question. I initially thought that someone would only press it if they were a troll (typical mind fallacy, you know?) in which case I’d call it more “defection” than “unilateralist” action and so it wasn’t a good fit for the framing either. If we consider that some people might actually believe the correct thing (by our true, joint underlying values) is to press the button, e.g. to save a life via donation, then that actually does fit the original intended meaning.
There other lessons of:
Practice not pressing big red buttons that would have bad effects, and
Isn’t it terrible that the world is making it easier and easier to do great harm, let’s point this out by doing the same . . . (ironically, I guess)
*I somewhat dislike that the OP has the section header “unilateralist action”, a term taken from Bostrom in one place, but then quotes something he said elsewhere maybe implying that the “building technologies that could destroy the world” was part of the original context for unilateralist’s curse.
. . .
Okay, those be the objections/comments I had brewing beneath the surface. Overall, I think our celebration of Petrov was pretty damn good with good effects and a lot of fun (although maybe it was supposed to be serious...). Ben did a tonne of work to make it happen (so did the rest of the team, especially Ray working hard to make the button).
Agree that it was a significant historical event and case study. My comments are limited to the “unilateralist” angle mostly and a bit the we should be clear which behavior/reasoning we’re endorsing. I look forward to doing the overall thing again.
I think we can celebrate that Petrov didn’t want to destroy the world and this was a good impulse on his part. I think if we think it’s doubtful that he made the correct decision, or that it’s complicated, then we should be very, very upfront about that (your comment is upfront, the OP didn’t make this fact stick with me). The fact the holiday is named after him made me think (implicitly if not explicitly) that people (including you, Ben) generally endorsed Petrov’s reasoning/actions/etc. and so I did take the whole celebration as a claim about his reasoning. I mean, if Petrov reasoned poorly but happened to get a good result, we should celebrate the result yet condemn Petrov (or at least his reasoning). If Petrov reasoned poorly and took actions there were poor in expectation, doesn’t that mean something like in the majority of world’s Petrov caused bad stuff to happen (or at the algorithm which is Petrov generally would)?
. . .
I think it is extremely extremely weird to make a holiday about avoiding unilateralist’s curse and name it after who did exactly that. I hadn’t thought about it, but if Quanticle is right, then Petrov was taking unilateralist action. (We could celebrate that he his unilateralist action was good, but then the way Petrov day is being themed is here is weird.)
As an aside for those at home, I actually objected to Ben about the “unilateralist”/”unilateralist’s curse” framing separately because our button seemed a very non-obvious instance of Bostrom’s original meaning* to apply this to Petrov. Unilateralist’s curse (Bostrom, 2013) is about when a group of people all have the same goals but have different estimates whether an action which effects them all would be beneficial goal. The curse is that the more people in the group, the more likely someone is to have a bad estimate of the value of the goal that they act separate from everyone else. In the case of US vs Russia, this is an adversarial/enemy situation. If two people are enemies and one decides to attack the other, while it is perhaps correct to say they do so “unilaterally” but it’s not the phenomenon Bostrom was trying to point out with his paper/introduction of that term and I’m the kind of person who dislike when people’s introduced terminology gets eroded.
I was thinking this at the time I objected, but we could say Petrov had the same values as the rest of the military command but had different estimate of the value of a particular action (what to report), in which case we’re back to the above where he was taking unilateralist action.
Our button scenario is another question. I initially thought that someone would only press it if they were a troll (typical mind fallacy, you know?) in which case I’d call it more “defection” than “unilateralist” action and so it wasn’t a good fit for the framing either. If we consider that some people might actually believe the correct thing (by our true, joint underlying values) is to press the button, e.g. to save a life via donation, then that actually does fit the original intended meaning.
There other lessons of:
Practice not pressing big red buttons that would have bad effects, and
Isn’t it terrible that the world is making it easier and easier to do great harm, let’s point this out by doing the same . . . (ironically, I guess)
*I somewhat dislike that the OP has the section header “unilateralist action”, a term taken from Bostrom in one place, but then quotes something he said elsewhere maybe implying that the “building technologies that could destroy the world” was part of the original context for unilateralist’s curse.
. . .
Okay, those be the objections/comments I had brewing beneath the surface. Overall, I think our celebration of Petrov was pretty damn good with good effects and a lot of fun (although maybe it was supposed to be serious...). Ben did a tonne of work to make it happen (so did the rest of the team, especially Ray working hard to make the button).
Agree that it was a significant historical event and case study. My comments are limited to the “unilateralist” angle mostly and a bit the we should be clear which behavior/reasoning we’re endorsing. I look forward to doing the overall thing again.