It seems like you’re anchoring too much on the “pressing a button” element of the decision. To me the core features of Petrov’s story are that he: - Overcame local social pressure - And tribalism/us-vs-them mentality - To take a unilateral action - Which he thought had highly beneficial consequences
Right now I think “not pressing the button” on LW doesn’t have any of these features. After this thread, I’m personally highly uncertain about whether the effects of LW going down are good or bad; I’m guessing that if someone had pressed the button and then defended their decision as an example of defying social pressure, that would probably have been net good.
The LessWrong frontpage is a big deal to the LessWrong team, and putting it on the line was a way of buying some gravitas for the ritual.
In general I’d encourage you to account, in the future, for the fact that the LW team is strongly selected for believing that the LW frontpage is much more important than almost everyone else thinks. And so your object-level arguments about why the LW frontpage going down for a day matters are likely to seem much more persuasive to you than they do to most other people. (They don’t persuade me.)
We set out to build culture, including ritual and tradition, but it’s another matter to start defining the boundaries of good and bad.
I’m wondering whether the LW team’s implicit theory of community and cooperation is currently leaning too heavily on the role of ritual. It’s not clear to me how important they actually are in other groups (perhaps with the exception of coming-of-age rituals), compared with more prosaic stuff like “spending lots of time together” and “overcoming hard challenges as a team” and so on. Not confident about this, but might be worth explicitly articulating the underlying assumptions about the role of ritual when thinking about future community-building events.
Although I do want to celebrate and encourage you doing this community-building at all!
if we give them the chance to be a troll or a conscientious objector or a something–they don’t take it
If a process of reasoning produces “conscientious objectors” as an example of the thing we don’t want, then I take that as strong evidence that the reasoning is flawed in some way.
It seems like you’re anchoring too much on the “pressing a button” element of the decision. To me the core features of Petrov’s story are that he:
- Overcame local social pressure
- And tribalism/us-vs-them mentality
- To take a unilateral action
- Which he thought had highly beneficial consequences
Right now I think “not pressing the button” on LW doesn’t have any of these features. After this thread, I’m personally highly uncertain about whether the effects of LW going down are good or bad; I’m guessing that if someone had pressed the button and then defended their decision as an example of defying social pressure, that would probably have been net good.
In general I’d encourage you to account, in the future, for the fact that the LW team is strongly selected for believing that the LW frontpage is much more important than almost everyone else thinks. And so your object-level arguments about why the LW frontpage going down for a day matters are likely to seem much more persuasive to you than they do to most other people. (They don’t persuade me.)
I’m wondering whether the LW team’s implicit theory of community and cooperation is currently leaning too heavily on the role of ritual. It’s not clear to me how important they actually are in other groups (perhaps with the exception of coming-of-age rituals), compared with more prosaic stuff like “spending lots of time together” and “overcoming hard challenges as a team” and so on. Not confident about this, but might be worth explicitly articulating the underlying assumptions about the role of ritual when thinking about future community-building events.
Although I do want to celebrate and encourage you doing this community-building at all!
If a process of reasoning produces “conscientious objectors” as an example of the thing we don’t want, then I take that as strong evidence that the reasoning is flawed in some way.