the current structure of the Petrov day ritual misses what is admirable about Petrov by about a mile.
In my opinion, the most important thing about Petrov is that he didn’t press the metaphorical button even though it was an option. The incentive structure and pressures make those decisions more admirable, but the core of the thing is not pressing the button and the ritual celebrated to date let’s us reenact that element.
Also, it’s possibly the name “Petrov Day” anchors us too much but I don’t actually think the entire focus should narrowly be around Petrov and his specific actions, such that all the symbolism needs to around his specific actions. The holiday can and should generalize to the things we learned and were challenged by in the Cold War. I probably should have said something to this effect in the retrospective.
(I think this is what was on the mind of the team when they created the ritual.)
I disagree. The fact that Petrov didn’t press the metaphorical button puts him in the company of Stalin, Mao, and every other leader of a nuclear power since 1945. The vast, vast majority of people won’t start a nuclear war when it doesn’t benefit them. The things that make Petrov special are a) that he was operating under conditions of genuine uncertainty and b) he faced real, severe consequences for not reporting the alert up his chain of command. Even in those adverse circumstances, he made the right call. I’m not totally sure how to structure a ritual that mimics those circumstances, but I do think they represent the core virtues we should be celebrating. Not pressing a button is easy; reasoning towards the right thing in a confusing situation where your community pressures you in the wrong direction is hard.
The vast, vast majority of people won’t start a nuclear war when it doesn’t benefit them
But there are more people than Petrov who faced incentives to push us into [nuclear] war do so but didn’t. Say, the Cuban missile crisis. There were pressures to escalate and I think we should also be celebrating the virtues of leaders who didn’t choose to escalate in those circumstances. E.g. people who deescalate even when there’s a force pushing in the direction of “better strike first before they day do”.
Even if in all those cases deescalation was the only sane move, I think we should celebrate the sanity.
Maybe “Petrov Day” anchors us too narrowly, but i don’t think the holiday should be that narrow.
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.
In my opinion, the most important thing about Petrov is that he didn’t press the metaphorical button even though it was an option. The incentive structure and pressures make those decisions more admirable, but the core of the thing is not pressing the button and the ritual celebrated to date let’s us reenact that element.
Also, it’s possibly the name “Petrov Day” anchors us too much but I don’t actually think the entire focus should narrowly be around Petrov and his specific actions, such that all the symbolism needs to around his specific actions. The holiday can and should generalize to the things we learned and were challenged by in the Cold War. I probably should have said something to this effect in the retrospective.
(I think this is what was on the mind of the team when they created the ritual.)
I disagree. The fact that Petrov didn’t press the metaphorical button puts him in the company of Stalin, Mao, and every other leader of a nuclear power since 1945. The vast, vast majority of people won’t start a nuclear war when it doesn’t benefit them. The things that make Petrov special are a) that he was operating under conditions of genuine uncertainty and b) he faced real, severe consequences for not reporting the alert up his chain of command. Even in those adverse circumstances, he made the right call. I’m not totally sure how to structure a ritual that mimics those circumstances, but I do think they represent the core virtues we should be celebrating. Not pressing a button is easy; reasoning towards the right thing in a confusing situation where your community pressures you in the wrong direction is hard.
But there are more people than Petrov who faced incentives to push us into [nuclear] war do so but didn’t. Say, the Cuban missile crisis. There were pressures to escalate and I think we should also be celebrating the virtues of leaders who didn’t choose to escalate in those circumstances. E.g. people who deescalate even when there’s a force pushing in the direction of “better strike first before they day do”.
Even if in all those cases deescalation was the only sane move, I think we should celebrate the sanity.
Maybe “Petrov Day” anchors us too narrowly, but i don’t think the holiday should be that narrow.
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.