My first thought was that this could be avoided by—if the button was pressed—giving it to a “rare diseases in cute puppies” type charity, rather than destroying it. I’d suspect the intersection of “people who care strongly enough about effective altruism to be angry”, “people who don’t understand the point of Petrov Day”, and “people who have the power to generate large amounts of negative publicity” is very small.
But I think a lot of LWers who are less onboard with Petrov Day in general would be just as (or almost as) turned off by this concept as the idea of burning the money. Perhaps something akin to the one landfish did would be better? At least in that case I would guess most LWers are OK enough with either MIRI or AMF (or maybe substitute other charities?) receiving money at the expense of one another for it to work OK.
Very good point. Perhaps there just intrinsically is no way of doing something that this community perceives as “burning” money, without upsetting people.
My first thought was that this could be avoided by—if the button was pressed—giving it to a “rare diseases in cute puppies” type charity, rather than destroying it. I’d suspect the intersection of “people who care strongly enough about effective altruism to be angry”, “people who don’t understand the point of Petrov Day”, and “people who have the power to generate large amounts of negative publicity” is very small.
But I think a lot of LWers who are less onboard with Petrov Day in general would be just as (or almost as) turned off by this concept as the idea of burning the money. Perhaps something akin to the one landfish did would be better? At least in that case I would guess most LWers are OK enough with either MIRI or AMF (or maybe substitute other charities?) receiving money at the expense of one another for it to work OK.
Very good point. Perhaps there just intrinsically is no way of doing something that this community perceives as “burning” money, without upsetting people.