The estimate also misses the mark because the stakes were not disabling LessWrong for a day. When the button is pressed, only the front page goes down. RSS feed is unaffected, search engine results are unaffected, etc. Eg, see Slider, Measure.
A Fermi estimate: given the investment of time and money in LessWrong, I estimate that it creates $10M/yr in rationalist value. Not bad. But for a one day front page outage I apply a 90% discount due to diminishing returns and a further 90% due to only the front page going down. That gets me to $300 of value lost. Not nothing, but a different scale.
If I didn’t apply those discounts, and genuinely thought that $30,000 of rationalist value was at stake, I’d think that the Petrov Day ritual was a terrible idea! Given the 33% observed chance of launching “nukes”, that’s only justified if the ritual creates more than $10,000 of value. The claim is that the ritual increases overall trust, so this increased trust has to lead to at least a 0.1% increase in productivity. That’s a large effect size for (a bit more than) sending a bulk email that 100 people opened.
I appreciate the Fermi. It’s a fair point that only the frontpage is taken down.
I think that a well-designed ritual ought to create $10,000 of value if it’s to justify the amount of time spent on it (1-2 person-weeks). Or at least if I didn’t think it would create that much value, I wouldn’t choose to do it.
I don’t see why sending a 100 emails and announcing that generally couldn’t have a very large effect size. All depends on the email.
The estimate also misses the mark because the stakes were not disabling LessWrong for a day. When the button is pressed, only the front page goes down. RSS feed is unaffected, search engine results are unaffected, etc. Eg, see Slider, Measure.
A Fermi estimate: given the investment of time and money in LessWrong, I estimate that it creates $10M/yr in rationalist value. Not bad. But for a one day front page outage I apply a 90% discount due to diminishing returns and a further 90% due to only the front page going down. That gets me to $300 of value lost. Not nothing, but a different scale.
If I didn’t apply those discounts, and genuinely thought that $30,000 of rationalist value was at stake, I’d think that the Petrov Day ritual was a terrible idea! Given the 33% observed chance of launching “nukes”, that’s only justified if the ritual creates more than $10,000 of value. The claim is that the ritual increases overall trust, so this increased trust has to lead to at least a 0.1% increase in productivity. That’s a large effect size for (a bit more than) sending a bulk email that 100 people opened.
I appreciate the Fermi. It’s a fair point that only the frontpage is taken down.
I think that a well-designed ritual ought to create $10,000 of value if it’s to justify the amount of time spent on it (1-2 person-weeks). Or at least if I didn’t think it would create that much value, I wouldn’t choose to do it.
I don’t see why sending a 100 emails and announcing that generally couldn’t have a very large effect size. All depends on the email.