You seem to have put a lot of thought into this ritual and I appreciate the consideration you, Ben, and others are giving it. Anyway, here’s some raw unfiltered (potentially overly-harsh) criticism/commentary on Petrov Day—take what you need from it:
In addition to Lethriloth’s criticism of LW Petrov Day failing to match the incentives/dynamics associated with Petrov (an important consideration indeed given the importance of incentive consideration in the LW cannon), it is also important to consider that Community Rituals may serve ends wildly disparate from their stated purposes, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Yes requires the possibility of no. If you are under the impression (as I am), that this Ritual deliberately curates an anonymous subset of the population likely to produce a desired outcome, that people who transgress on this outcome are socially shamed, and that the maximally obvious way to express distaste of a Ritual is to transgress upon it… then this Ritual as it stands systematically attacks the feasibility of “no.”
To elaborate, it does the following things:
The Ritual misrepresents the true opinion of the community, by selecting those who would take it seriously and erasing those who wouldn’t[1].
If the Ritual fails to sufficiently filter out people who don’t want to take it seriously, it preemptively punishes their actions with social shaming.
From the lens of someone who thinks LW Petrov Day fails to meaningfully reflect Petrov’s decision, this creates the impression that subsets of rationalist community can concoct arbitrary rituals (as long as they have some plausible justification) and declare them to be community rituals all-the-while excluding members who have strong reasons for disagreement. Moreover, it establishes that this subset can use social-shaming strategies to coerce disagreeing members from protesting in obvious (but materially mild) ways[2].
I’d imagine that these considerations where present in the people you alluded to who preferred to self-exclude from The Ritual but I could be wrong.
Given recent criticism of the rationalist community, I consider course-correcting away from these types of dynamics as pretty crucial.
[1] There is a second criticism here, which is that the existing Ritual prioritizes the impression/illusion of coordination in the community over the actual level of coordination in the community—which is both epistemically disadvantageous and meta-level disadvantageous as one would not expect a community like LW to prefer symbolic coordination over actual coordination.
[2] There is an argument that protesting in this way corresponds to a Unilateralist Veto and, on a meta-level, the community should disincentive this means of protesting and that social shaming is an acceptable way to do this. But this is a pretty roundabout way of handling that and I think the first-order social effects swamp the import of this argument.
Forgive me if engage with only part of this, I believe that the OP already acknowledges most of the problem you’ve described. speaks to half of this.
To engage with the point that is novel (epistemic status, haven’t thought that hard about this):
The Ritual misrepresents the true opinion of the community, by selecting those who would take it seriously and erasing those who wouldn’t[1].
This makes me realize that there are different frames you could approach the ritual creation with:
It’s a ritual for the “the” community and therefore the entire community should be involved in it
This seems very reasonable to me. If nothing else, the ritual design to do date hasn’t allowed for much active participation by the general community. Ben Pace sketched out an alternative more communal ritual we could do next year.
I’m not really sure what you mean about “true opinion of the community”, you mean true opinion as to whether the ritual is any good? Or as to what action should be taken?
2. The ritual is for identifying a [sub]community who are willing to rally around a flag of “cooperate” and “do not destroy”
I care about the entire LessWrong community. I’m not sure where the exact boundaries lie–it’s more than posters/commenters and probably short of anyone who’s ever read a LW post–but I’m especially interested in the group who I feel like I can trust to work with me when the stakes are real and high. The Petrov Day ritual to date was designed to show that this group exists and trust each other, and I think that’s a powerful and valuable thing to do, if you can do it.
Naturally, an ideal Petrov Day design would be both something for the ideal community and perhaps also be something that strengthens the trust between an especially devoted community core.
Forgive me if engage with only part of this, I believe that the OP already acknowledges most of the problem you’ve described.
No forgiveness needed! I agree that the OP addresses this portion—I read the OP somewhat quickly the first time and didn’t fully process that part of it. And, as I’ve said, I do appreciate the thought you’ve put into all this.
I think I differ from the text of the OP in that social-shaming/lack-of-protest-method in rituals is often an okay and sensible thing. It is only when this property is combined with a serious problem with the ritual itself that I get worried—but I have a hunch that you’d agree with this.
I care about the entire LessWrong community. I’m not sure where the exact boundaries lie–it’s more than posters/commenters and probably short of anyone who’s ever read a LW post–but I’m especially interested in the group who I feel like I can trust to work with me when the stakes are real and high. The Petrov Day ritual to date was designed to show that this group exists and trust each other, and I think that’s a powerful and valuable thing to do, if you can do it.
I agree that having/establishing a group of people you can work with/trust is a good thing, and I think that rituals about this can be beneficial. However I have two main objections to this perspective:
#1. It is not obvious to me that identifying a group unlikely to press the button in a Petrov Day ritual is one capable of coordinating generally when stakes are real and high. As commenters have noted, social pressure incentives stack pressure against defecting. Moreover, if you are selecting for people who you know well enough to speculate on behavior in these circumstances, you are probably also selecting for people more deeply connected for the community for whom these pressures matter a lot.
#2. I don’t think an existence proof for a 100-strong set of LWers who don’t press the button in a Petrov’s Day ritual is particularly useful or surprising to me. If 50% of LWers would press the button and 50% wouldn’t, its mathematically obvious that such a group exists. The actually arguably impressive/surprising part of the Ritual is not “does this group exist?”—its “hey look! we have a selection process with strong enough discriminatory power to find one-hundred people who will act in a certain way.”
This could mean something important symbolically—about how so many people in the community are trustworthy that we can assemble a group with even our imperfect judgement. But it could also mean the following things:
We have 10,000 people to select from and the top-one-percentile of people ranked by unwillingness to press the button is very unwilling to press the button
We are just very good at predicting people’s behavior in this circumstance and at least 10% of the community won’t press the button.
Note that this also strongly interacts with point #1 because then you can select both for people you’re confident are trustworthy and for people who will who’d submit under strong social pressure (not that I think you’d do that deliberately)
So its hard for me to find much symbolic importance in the thing that the current Petrov Day Ritual is establishing.
But, social pressure aside, the establishment of high-stakes trust group is not obviously useful/relevant information to a typical community member. The capacity for distinguishing a high-trust group in a given community is only relevant to me if I can also distinguish a high-trust group that I can work with. In other words, knowing that such a group exists theoretically does not mean much to me if I happen to be in a branch of the community that I can’t/shouldn’t trust. My impression is that people who receive the code and choose not to press the button are basically anonymous, so this is the case here.[1]
If one knew for sure that this group delineated trustworthy people capable of coordinating effectively in high-stakes scenarios, it may be useful for ritualized (optional) self-reveals after the fact. However, I would actually caution against this as it could have a reverse/harmful effect if any participant does anything harmful ever—since it could establish a coalitional Schelling Point of mutual protection or the perception of one—creating real or perceived complicitness in harm.
Naturally, an ideal Petrov Day design would be both something for the ideal community and perhaps also be something that strengthens the trust between an especially devoted community core.
Yep! In practice, I don’t think Petrov Day needs to everything though—and its probably easiest to create a really strong ritual that captures one theme and then explore secondary activities/processes that don’t interfere with the core.
Strengthening trust of the community core is a good thing—and I don’t think every ritual has to be about the entire community or vice-versa. I’m more concerned about what the selection-process+ritual-combi itself signals (both to the core and everyone else) about the kind of compliance behaviors expected by the core (the current process sort of confounds them). For contrast, if the selection process credibly demonstrated that it was just selecting Core Members, dropped the social-pressure incentives, and then demonstrating that core can trust each other not to blow things up then it would be a lot more meaningful in the sense you are gesturing at.
Perhaps there’s also a minor frame difference here where you already see the process as basically something like “pick core members” based on your experience while that wasn’t my default assumption.
[1] To be fair, I doubt that actually affiliating oneself with this group/parts-of-it would be overwhelmingly difficult—given the obvious affiliations and the of people who have stated that they’ve received codes.
You seem to have put a lot of thought into this ritual and I appreciate the consideration you, Ben, and others are giving it. Anyway, here’s some raw unfiltered (potentially overly-harsh) criticism/commentary on Petrov Day—take what you need from it:
In addition to Lethriloth’s criticism of LW Petrov Day failing to match the incentives/dynamics associated with Petrov (an important consideration indeed given the importance of incentive consideration in the LW cannon), it is also important to consider that Community Rituals may serve ends wildly disparate from their stated purposes, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Yes requires the possibility of no. If you are under the impression (as I am), that this Ritual deliberately curates an anonymous subset of the population likely to produce a desired outcome, that people who transgress on this outcome are socially shamed, and that the maximally obvious way to express distaste of a Ritual is to transgress upon it… then this Ritual as it stands systematically attacks the feasibility of “no.”
To elaborate, it does the following things:
The Ritual misrepresents the true opinion of the community, by selecting those who would take it seriously and erasing those who wouldn’t[1].
If the Ritual fails to sufficiently filter out people who don’t want to take it seriously, it preemptively punishes their actions with social shaming.
From the lens of someone who thinks LW Petrov Day fails to meaningfully reflect Petrov’s decision, this creates the impression that subsets of rationalist community can concoct arbitrary rituals (as long as they have some plausible justification) and declare them to be community rituals all-the-while excluding members who have strong reasons for disagreement. Moreover, it establishes that this subset can use social-shaming strategies to coerce disagreeing members from protesting in obvious (but materially mild) ways[2].
I’d imagine that these considerations where present in the people you alluded to who preferred to self-exclude from The Ritual but I could be wrong.
Given recent criticism of the rationalist community, I consider course-correcting away from these types of dynamics as pretty crucial.
[1] There is a second criticism here, which is that the existing Ritual prioritizes the impression/illusion of coordination in the community over the actual level of coordination in the community—which is both epistemically disadvantageous and meta-level disadvantageous as one would not expect a community like LW to prefer symbolic coordination over actual coordination.
[2] There is an argument that protesting in this way corresponds to a Unilateralist Veto and, on a meta-level, the community should disincentive this means of protesting and that social shaming is an acceptable way to do this. But this is a pretty roundabout way of handling that and I think the first-order social effects swamp the import of this argument.
Forgive me if engage with only part of this, I believe that the OP already acknowledges most of the problem you’ve described. speaks to half of this.
To engage with the point that is novel (epistemic status, haven’t thought that hard about this):
This makes me realize that there are different frames you could approach the ritual creation with:
It’s a ritual for the “the” community and therefore the entire community should be involved in it
This seems very reasonable to me. If nothing else, the ritual design to do date hasn’t allowed for much active participation by the general community. Ben Pace sketched out an alternative more communal ritual we could do next year.
I’m not really sure what you mean about “true opinion of the community”, you mean true opinion as to whether the ritual is any good? Or as to what action should be taken?
2. The ritual is for identifying a [sub]community who are willing to rally around a flag of “cooperate” and “do not destroy”
I care about the entire LessWrong community. I’m not sure where the exact boundaries lie–it’s more than posters/commenters and probably short of anyone who’s ever read a LW post–but I’m especially interested in the group who I feel like I can trust to work with me when the stakes are real and high. The Petrov Day ritual to date was designed to show that this group exists and trust each other, and I think that’s a powerful and valuable thing to do, if you can do it.
Naturally, an ideal Petrov Day design would be both something for the ideal community and perhaps also be something that strengthens the trust between an especially devoted community core.
No forgiveness needed! I agree that the OP addresses this portion—I read the OP somewhat quickly the first time and didn’t fully process that part of it. And, as I’ve said, I do appreciate the thought you’ve put into all this.
I think I differ from the text of the OP in that social-shaming/lack-of-protest-method in rituals is often an okay and sensible thing. It is only when this property is combined with a serious problem with the ritual itself that I get worried—but I have a hunch that you’d agree with this.
I agree that having/establishing a group of people you can work with/trust is a good thing, and I think that rituals about this can be beneficial. However I have two main objections to this perspective:
#1.
It is not obvious to me that identifying a group unlikely to press the button in a Petrov Day ritual is one capable of coordinating generally when stakes are real and high. As commenters have noted, social pressure incentives stack pressure against defecting. Moreover, if you are selecting for people who you know well enough to speculate on behavior in these circumstances, you are probably also selecting for people more deeply connected for the community for whom these pressures matter a lot.
#2.
I don’t think an existence proof for a 100-strong set of LWers who don’t press the button in a Petrov’s Day ritual is particularly useful or surprising to me. If 50% of LWers would press the button and 50% wouldn’t, its mathematically obvious that such a group exists. The actually arguably impressive/surprising part of the Ritual is not “does this group exist?”—its “hey look! we have a selection process with strong enough discriminatory power to find one-hundred people who will act in a certain way.”
This could mean something important symbolically—about how so many people in the community are trustworthy that we can assemble a group with even our imperfect judgement. But it could also mean the following things:
We have 10,000 people to select from and the top-one-percentile of people ranked by unwillingness to press the button is very unwilling to press the button
We are just very good at predicting people’s behavior in this circumstance and at least 10% of the community won’t press the button.
Note that this also strongly interacts with point #1 because then you can select both for people you’re confident are trustworthy and for people who will who’d submit under strong social pressure (not that I think you’d do that deliberately)
So its hard for me to find much symbolic importance in the thing that the current Petrov Day Ritual is establishing.
But, social pressure aside, the establishment of high-stakes trust group is not obviously useful/relevant information to a typical community member. The capacity for distinguishing a high-trust group in a given community is only relevant to me if I can also distinguish a high-trust group that I can work with. In other words, knowing that such a group exists theoretically does not mean much to me if I happen to be in a branch of the community that I can’t/shouldn’t trust. My impression is that people who receive the code and choose not to press the button are basically anonymous, so this is the case here.[1]
If one knew for sure that this group delineated trustworthy people capable of coordinating effectively in high-stakes scenarios, it may be useful for ritualized (optional) self-reveals after the fact. However, I would actually caution against this as it could have a reverse/harmful effect if any participant does anything harmful ever—since it could establish a coalitional Schelling Point of mutual protection or the perception of one—creating real or perceived complicitness in harm.
Yep! In practice, I don’t think Petrov Day needs to everything though—and its probably easiest to create a really strong ritual that captures one theme and then explore secondary activities/processes that don’t interfere with the core.
Strengthening trust of the community core is a good thing—and I don’t think every ritual has to be about the entire community or vice-versa. I’m more concerned about what the selection-process+ritual-combi itself signals (both to the core and everyone else) about the kind of compliance behaviors expected by the core (the current process sort of confounds them). For contrast, if the selection process credibly demonstrated that it was just selecting Core Members, dropped the social-pressure incentives, and then demonstrating that core can trust each other not to blow things up then it would be a lot more meaningful in the sense you are gesturing at.
Perhaps there’s also a minor frame difference here where you already see the process as basically something like “pick core members” based on your experience while that wasn’t my default assumption.
[1] To be fair, I doubt that actually affiliating oneself with this group/parts-of-it would be overwhelmingly difficult—given the obvious affiliations and the of people who have stated that they’ve received codes.