I (and I suspect I am not alone here) believe that the current structure of the Petrov day ritual misses what is admirable about Petrov by about a mile. You write that the goal of the ritual is to eventually be able to demonstrate that:
we have 1000 people that if we give them the chance to be a troll or a conscientious objector or a something–they don’t take it
but Petrov himself was a conscientious objector (of a sort) and that’s why we admire him. He—in defiance of social pressure, risk of professional consequences, and danger to his life—abandoned his duty and prevented nuclear war. The ritual as currently structured shows that when faced with social pressure and threats of professional consequences the people in this community… fall in line and do what they are told.
Strong upvote for the comment. I think the situation is even worse than what you say: the fact is that had Petrov simply reported the inaccurate information in his possession up the chain of command as he was being pressured to do by his own subordinates, nobody would have heard of his name and nobody would have blamed him for doing his job. He could have even informed his superiors of his personal opinion that the information he was passing to them was inaccurate and left them to make the final decision about what to do. Not only would he have not been blamed for doing that, but he would have been just one anonymous official among dozens or hundreds who had some input in the process leading up to nuclear war.
We know who Petrov is because he refused to do that, and that’s also why he faced professional sanctions for his decision. This ritual turns that on its head by sending people personalized “launch codes” and publicly announcing the name of the person who chose to “press the button” and shaming them for doing so. It’s absurd and I don’t understand why so many people in the comments see it only as a “minor problem”.
Yeah I think this is a pretty important point. I pointed out this before here, here, and here (2 years ago). I personally still enjoyed the game as is. However I’m open to the idea that future Petrov Days should look radically different, and wouldn’t have a gamefying element at all. But I think if we want a game that reflects the structure of Petrov’s decision that day well in an honest way, I personally would probably want something that accounts for the following features:
1. Petrov clearly has strong incentives and social pressures to push the button.
2. Petrov is not solely responsible for the world ending, a reasonable person could motivatedly say that it was “someone else’s problem”
It was a dirty job, he thought to himself, but somebody had to do it.
As he walked away, he wondered who that somebody will be.
3. Everything is a little stressful.
The thing I will enjoy, which may not be to everybody’s taste, would include:
Informed consent before being put in the game (either opt-in or a clear opt-out)
Some probability of false alarms (if we do a retaliatory game)
No individual is “responsible” for ending the world
An example setup is if we had 4-person pods, and everybody in the group must launch
I’m actually ok with the social pressures inherent in the activity. It’s a subtle reminder of the real influence of this community. The fact that this community would enforce a certain norm makes me more likely to be a conscientious objector in contexts with the opposite norm. (This is true of historical C.O.s, who often come from religious communities).
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.
If you single out that line, you’re correct that it leaves the wrong impression, but definitions elsewhere in the piece are exactly in line with what you describe:
1. Choosing actions that don’t destroy the world
2. Even in the face of pressures otherwise, using one’s judgment to not destroy the world
...The default principle might be like “use your own judgment to avoid destructive actions; don’t rely only on your judgment alone to take [potentially] destructive actions.”
I did see those points. I think the ritual as designed does not do a good job of supporting those points because, again, all the pressures are being lined up against pressing the button. I will acknowledge that there is probably no good way to design a ritual to celebrate the virtue of ignoring social pressure and career consequences to do the right thing (At least not one as participatory as this one) but that doesn’t mean we should build a ritual with the exact opposite message.
The Less Wrong team could undertake to pay (say) $500 to the first person to launch the missiles, if anyone does. Perhaps also, since not everyone shares their view of how valuable the LW front page is, undertake to give (say) $2000 to some cause widely regarded as deserving, if the missiles are not launched.
It seems likely that for most people this would make the direction of the personal-gain incentives be the same as Petrov’s actually were. Not the exact same sort of incentives as Petrov’s, of course, but it would surely reduce the extent to which all the incentives are exactly backwards compared to those that Petrov himself faced.
If Petrov pressing the button would have led to a decent chance of him being incinerated by American nukes, and if he valued his life much more than he valued avoiding the consequences he could expect to face for not pressing, then he had no reason to press the button even from a purely selfish perspective, and pressing it would have been a purely destructive act, like in past LW Petrov Days, or maybe a kind of Russian roulette.
I (and I suspect I am not alone here) believe that the current structure of the Petrov day ritual misses what is admirable about Petrov by about a mile. You write that the goal of the ritual is to eventually be able to demonstrate that:
but Petrov himself was a conscientious objector (of a sort) and that’s why we admire him. He—in defiance of social pressure, risk of professional consequences, and danger to his life—abandoned his duty and prevented nuclear war. The ritual as currently structured shows that when faced with social pressure and threats of professional consequences the people in this community… fall in line and do what they are told.
Strong upvote for the comment. I think the situation is even worse than what you say: the fact is that had Petrov simply reported the inaccurate information in his possession up the chain of command as he was being pressured to do by his own subordinates, nobody would have heard of his name and nobody would have blamed him for doing his job. He could have even informed his superiors of his personal opinion that the information he was passing to them was inaccurate and left them to make the final decision about what to do. Not only would he have not been blamed for doing that, but he would have been just one anonymous official among dozens or hundreds who had some input in the process leading up to nuclear war.
We know who Petrov is because he refused to do that, and that’s also why he faced professional sanctions for his decision. This ritual turns that on its head by sending people personalized “launch codes” and publicly announcing the name of the person who chose to “press the button” and shaming them for doing so. It’s absurd and I don’t understand why so many people in the comments see it only as a “minor problem”.
Yeah I think this is a pretty important point. I pointed out this before here, here, and here (2 years ago). I personally still enjoyed the game as is. However I’m open to the idea that future Petrov Days should look radically different, and wouldn’t have a gamefying element at all. But I think if we want a game that reflects the structure of Petrov’s decision that day well in an honest way, I personally would probably want something that accounts for the following features:
1. Petrov clearly has strong incentives and social pressures to push the button.
2. Petrov is not solely responsible for the world ending, a reasonable person could motivatedly say that it was “someone else’s problem”
3. Everything is a little stressful.
The thing I will enjoy, which may not be to everybody’s taste, would include:
I’m actually ok with the social pressures inherent in the activity. It’s a subtle reminder of the real influence of this community. The fact that this community would enforce a certain norm makes me more likely to be a conscientious objector in contexts with the opposite norm. (This is true of historical C.O.s, who often come from religious communities).
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.
If you single out that line, you’re correct that it leaves the wrong impression, but definitions elsewhere in the piece are exactly in line with what you describe:
I did see those points. I think the ritual as designed does not do a good job of supporting those points because, again, all the pressures are being lined up against pressing the button. I will acknowledge that there is probably no good way to design a ritual to celebrate the virtue of ignoring social pressure and career consequences to do the right thing (At least not one as participatory as this one) but that doesn’t mean we should build a ritual with the exact opposite message.
The Less Wrong team could undertake to pay (say) $500 to the first person to launch the missiles, if anyone does. Perhaps also, since not everyone shares their view of how valuable the LW front page is, undertake to give (say) $2000 to some cause widely regarded as deserving, if the missiles are not launched.
It seems likely that for most people this would make the direction of the personal-gain incentives be the same as Petrov’s actually were. Not the exact same sort of incentives as Petrov’s, of course, but it would surely reduce the extent to which all the incentives are exactly backwards compared to those that Petrov himself faced.
If Petrov pressing the button would have led to a decent chance of him being incinerated by American nukes, and if he valued his life much more than he valued avoiding the consequences he could expect to face for not pressing, then he had no reason to press the button even from a purely selfish perspective, and pressing it would have been a purely destructive act, like in past LW Petrov Days, or maybe a kind of Russian roulette.
lol