[Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

Raemon

CITIZENS! YOU ARE BETRAYED!

Your foolish 'leaders' have given your generals an incentive scheme that encourages them to risk you being nuked for their glory.

I call on all citizens of EastWrong and WestWrong to commit to pursuing vengeance against their generals^[1] if and only if your side ends up being nuked. Only thus can we align incentives among those who bear the power of life and death!

For freedom! For prosperity! And for not being nuked!

^{^}
By mass-downvoting all their posts once their identities are revealed.

[-]philh1y198

Launching nukes is one thing, but downvoting posts that don't deserve it? I'm not sure I want to retaliate that strongly.

[-]TsviBT1y106

4aphyer1y

Do we fight for the right To a night at the opera now? Have you asked of yourselves What's the price you might pay? Is it simply a game For rich young boys to play?

2Daphne_W1y

Just check their profile for posts that do deserve it that you were previously unaware of. You can even throw a few upvotes at their well-written comments. It's not brigading, it's just a little systemic bias in your duties as a user with upvote-downvote authority.

[-]habryka1y*160

Lol, I mean, kind of fair, but mass-downvoting is still against the rules and we'll take moderation action against people who do (though writing angry comments isn't).

[-]aphyer1y2916

If the designers of Petrov Day are allowed to offer arbitrary 1k-karma incentives to generals to nuke people, but the citizens are not allowed to impose their own incentives, that creates an obvious power issue. Surely 'you randomly get +1k karma for nuking people' is a larger moderation problem than 'you get -1k karma for angering large numbers of other users'.

No, wait, that was the wrong way to put it...

Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men
It is the music of a people who will not be nuked again
The next time some generals decide to blow us off the site
They will remember what we've done and will fear our might!

[-]habryka1y2511

Such is life under a government. We have the monopoly on violence.This does unfortunately often imply power issues, but probably still better than anarchy and karma wars in the streets.

[-]aphyer1y2621

Accepting a governmental monopoly on violence for the sake of avoiding anarchy is valuable to the extent that the government is performing better than anarchy. This is usually true, but stops being true when the government starts trying to start a nuclear war.

4tailcalled1y

Have you watched Les Miserables? Watching it completely changed the vibe of this song for me, such that it pretty much makes the opposite point now than it did before.

6aphyer1y

I have. I think that overall Les Mis is rather more favorable to revolutionaries than I am. For one thing, it wants us to ignore the fact that we know what will happen when Enjolras's ideological successors eventually succeed, and that it will not be good. (The fact that you're using the word 'watched' makes me suspect that you may have seen the movie, which is honestly a large downgrade from the musical.)

2J Bostock1y

Isn't Les Mis set in the second French Revolution (1815 according to wikipedia) not the one that led to the Reign of Terror (which was in the 1790s)?

5Neil1y

Ahem, as one of LW's few resident Frenchmen, I must interpose to say that yes, this was not the Big Famous Guillotine French revolution everyone talks about, but one of the ~ 2,456^2 other revolutions that went on in our otherwise very calm history. Specifically, we refer to the Les Mis revolution as "Les barricades" mostly because the people of Paris stuck barricades everywhere and fought against authority because they didn't like the king the other powers of Europe put into place after Napoleon's defeat. They failed that time, but succeeded 15 years later with another revolution (to put a different king in place). Victor Hugo loved Napoleon with a passion, and was definitely on the side of the revolutionaries here (though he was but a wee boy when this happened, about the age of Gavroche). Later, in the 1850s (I'm skipping over a few revolutions, including the one that got rid of kings again), when Haussmann was busy bringing 90% of medieval Paris to rubble to replace it with the homogenous architecture we so admire in Ratatouille today, Napoleon the IIIrd had the great idea to demolish whole blocks and replace them with wide streets (like the Champs Elisées) to make barricade revolutions harder to do. Final note: THANK YOU LW TEAM for making àccénts like thìs possible with the typeface. They used to look bloated.

7David Matolcsi1y

That's not quite true. Les Mis starts in 1815, but the book spans decades and the revolution is in 1832, a short-lived uprising against the king who got in power two years before, in the 1830 revolution against the dynasty the other European powers restored after Napoleon's defeat in 1815.

1Neil1y

Ah right, the decades part--I had written about the 1930 revolution, commune, and bourbon destitution, then checked the dates online and stupidly thought "ah, it must be just 1815 then" and only talked about that. Thanks

1Neil1y

"second" laughcries in french

2Stephen Fowler1y

This is a leak, so keep it between you and me, but the big twist to this years Petrov Day event is that Generals who are nuked will be forced to watch the 2012 film on repeat.

3aphyer1y

Eeeesh. I know I've been calling for a reign of terror with heads on spikes and all that, but I think that seems like going a bit too far.

5Measure1y

It doesn't have to be mass-downvoting in the sense of one user downvoting a mass of post/comments. Rather a mass of users downvoting a few comments each. 150 citizens * 10 downvotes each more than wipes out the 1000 karma victory bonus.

3habryka1y

I can assure you that past LessWrong users have explored a large fraction of the space of possible ways to coordinate and facilitate mass-downvoting. I can also assure you that we have plenty of experience nevertheless identifying those patterns and moderating people in response.

3Measure1y

To be clear, I wasn't trying to suggest that citizens could break the rules without getting caught. I was suggesting that they could disincentivize nuking without breaking the rules. If coordinated, distributed, mass downvoting is also disallowed, then we would have to come up with some other incentive.

3Neil1y

Anti-moderative action will be taken in response if you stand in the way of justice, perhaps by contacting those hackers and giving them creative ideas. Be forewarned.

2Daphne_W1y

Are you trying to prime people to harass the generals? Besides, it's not mass downvoting, it's just that the increased attention to their accounts revealed a bunch of poorly written comments that people genuinely disagree with and happen to independently decide are worthy of a downvote :)

3habryka1y

Genuinely not sure what you are referring to. I think it's reasonable to be a bit annoyed at generals who get you nuked, but I mean, if someone starts going overboard we will also moderate that. Well, in that case, it's not moderation for downvoting, it's just increased attention from the moderators re-evaluating the degree to which someone is genuinely contributing positively to the site, and happen to independently decide someone is worthy of some moderation warnings :P

6Daphne_W1y

You're suggesting angry comments as an alternative for mass retributive downvoting. That easily implies mass retributive angry comments. As for policing against systemic bias in policing, that's a difficult problem that society struggles with in many different areas because people can be good at excusing their biases. What if one of the generals genuinely makes a comment people disagree with? How can you determine to what extent people's choice to downvote was due to an unauthorized motivation? It seems hard to police without acting draconically.

8Logan Riggs1y

We could instead pre-commit to not engage with any nuker's future posts/comments (and at worse comment to encourage others to not engage) until end-of-year. Or only include nit-picking comments.

[-]aphyer1y135

During WWII, the CIA produced and distributed an entire manual (well worth reading) about how workers could conduct deniable sabotage in the German-occupied territories.

(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
Make speeches, talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your points by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate patriotic comments.
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

5Wuschel Schulz1y

Wow, this is an awsome document. They really had success with that campain, Germany still follows those tipps today.

5Logan Riggs1y

It'd be important to cache the karma of all users > 1000 atm, in order to credibly signal you know which generals were part of the nuking/nuked side. Would anyone be willing to do that in the next 2 & 1/2 hours? (ie the earliest we could be nuked)

4Zach Stein-Perlman1y

The post says generals' names will be published tomorrow.

4Ben Pace1y

Oops, someone left a comment deanonymizing them early. Seems like a mistake on our part that it was able to be learned. I've removed the comment for now, I'd make a request to not post it until the game is over (e.g. in an hour, or tomorrow). I won't remove the comment again if it's posted, but as I say I think it'd be better if they're announced tomorrow in the wrap-up post.

4Zach Stein-Perlman1y

I think it’s better to be angry at the team that launched the nukes?

[-]aphyer1y321

Why is the benefit of nuking to generals larger than the cost of nuking to the other side's generals?

It is possible with precommitments under the current scheme for the two sides' generals to agree to flip a coin, have the winning side nuke the losing side, and have the losing side not retaliate. In expectation, this gives the generals each (1000-300)/2 = +350 karma.

I don't think that's a realistic payoff matrix.

[-]habryka1y347

The generals have bunkers and lots of stockpiles, they'll be fine. They might also find nuclear war somewhat exciting. How bad is a life lived as a king of the wasteland really compared to the glory of world domination?

See also:

[-]Ben1y105

I very good point. Especially after reading your other comment I wonder if this is deliberate.

The payoff matrix for the generals suggests that in a one-way attack the winning generals win more than the losers loose. Hence your coin toss plan. But, for the civilians it is the other way around. (+25 for winning, but -50 for loosing).

I suspect it may be some kind of message about how the generals launching the nuclear war have different incentives to the civilians, as the generals may place a higher value on victory, and are more likely to access bunkers and so on.

7ryan_b1y

It does, if anything, seem almost backwards - getting nuked means losing everything, and successfully nuking means gaining much but not all. However, that makes the game theory super easy to solve, and doesn't capture the opposing team dynamics very well for gaming purposes.

[-]aphyer1y145

The best LW Petrov Day morals are the inadvertent ones. My favorite was 2022, when we learned that there is more to fear from poorly written code launching nukes by accident than from villains launching nukes deliberately. Perhaps this year we will learn something about the importance of designing reasonable prosocial incentives.

4Yoav Ravid1y

Technically it makes sense for the nuked side to lose everything and for the nuking side to gain little. But you want to model a scenario where the sides might actually want to nuke the other side, which you have naturally between enemies, but don't have between LessWrongers unless you incentivize them somehow. So giving rewards for nuking makes sense, because people want to increase their own Karma but don't want to decrease the Karma of others. And I think the incentives are deliberately designed such that no nukes aren't the obvious optimal equilibrium. That's what makes it an exercise in not destroying the world. If it were easy it wouldn't be much of an exercise.

1HelloQuestonMark1y

Seems like defection towards the participants overall, compared to no nukes fired: * in the no nukes scenario, the 10 generals get +100 each, the two Petrovs get +1000(?) each, and citizens get nothing (+3000 karma in total); * in the coin flip scenario, the 10 generals get +350 in expectation each, the two Petrovs get +200..1000(?) each (depending on when in the game the button is pressed), and the 300 citizens get -12.5 in expectation each (-50..+750 karma in total).

3aphyer1y

Yes, we're working on aligning incentives upthread, but for some silly reason the admins don't want us starting a reign of terror.

[-]Lao Mein1y321

What happens if nukes are launched at 5:59 pm? Is the game extended for another 90 minutes?

[-]Lao Mein1y132

The wording is a bit weird:

90 minutes after you send the nukes, your opposing side will die and the game will end. (They may nuke you in this window.) If you fire nukes without getting nuked, you and all of your fellow Generals will gain 1,000 karma.
If you get nuked, then you and your Generals lose 300 karma (and don't gain any karma).

"If you fire nukes without getting nukes" and "if you get nuked" imply that both sides firing after 4:30 pm results in +karma for everyone, since the nukes are still in the air at 6:00 pm, when the game ends. The +karma is triggered by firing, while the -karma is triggered by the nukes actually landing.

Is this intended?

4Brendan Long1y

They can't do that since it would make it obvious to the target that they should counter-attack.

[-]philh1y2712

I looked for a manifold market on whether anyone gets nuked, and considered making one when I didn't find it. But:

If the implied probability is high, generals might be more likely to push the button. So someone who wants someone to get nuked can buy YES.
If the implied probability is low, generals can get mana by buying YES and pushing the button. I... don't think any of the generals will be very motivated by that? But not great.

So I decided not to.

[-]Martin Randall1y100

Sometime else created it.

6rossry1y

Grumble grumble unilateralists' curse...

3nick lacombe1y

I know who created it. will let them know they shouldn't have imo

8TheBayesian1y

'Tis I. Didn't intend bad incentives, the stakes on that market are imo pretty tiny. But I N/Aed, I don't want anyone suspecting that had affected the final outcome.

1Martin Randall1y

Mana is no longer exchangeable for directed charitable donations, so I would not expect generals to make their decisions based on the potential to win mana. Mana seems less valuable than karma, for example. This concern came up in 2022 and my writeup that year suggested it was unlikely to be a factor.

2philh1y

Yeah, if that was the only consideration I think I would have created the market myself.

[-]Steven Byrnes1y2413

I appreciate that you set up this game in such a way that lesswrong will stay perfectly functional as a general blogging platform / forum, for those who don’t have accounts or who don’t opt in. Thank you :)

4Raemon1y

Sorry that we also missed a random edge case in our code that took down the site for an hour. :P

2Matt Goldenberg1y

I happened to log on at that time and thought someone had launched a nuke

[-]Søren Elverlin1y239

As a concerned citizen, I would urge the generals to consider a non-obvious downside risk: A nuclear war may be much worse than you expect, if you only consider immediate first-order expected value.

Others have calculated the presented payoff matrix to imply that you have actually been instructed that nuclear war is good. It is very possible that the facts you have been presented with are incomplete, or misleading in some other way.

Consider Nuclear Winter: Policy-makers have an interest in preventing you Generals from learning about this possibility, for game-theoretic reasons. It follows that you should be open to the possibility of other downsides that have succesfully been hidden from you.

Triggering nuclear war is very bad for your karma in expectation, and you should be very skeptical of information to the contrary.

[-]Ben Pace1y222

—and with that, our annual Petrov Day ceremony is over! The Generals and Duty Officers have no more powers, and it is looking like the citizens of East Wrong and West Wrong continue on with their lives. Hurrah!

There will be a post-mortem published tomorrow detailing the events of today. My great thanks to all 12 players who showed up and argued and made commitments and also some poetry and art — "Proud to present to EastWrong: WestWrong Cultural Exchange" was a message from General Carter to East Wrong. And also my thanks to all those who joined in the comment section, I really enjoyed waking up to this comment section and tracking it through the day.

This has been a fun day of starting a train on some tracks and scurrying after it to lay the next tracks before it got there. We'll recap it tomorow and think about next year :-)

To wise choices—Happy Petrov Day!

[-]quetzal_rainbow1y194

Wise man once said:

"The only thing necessary [...] is for good men to do nothing."

[-]Jesse Hoogland1y180

East wrong is least wrong. Nuke ‘em dead generals!

[-]Raemon1y175

West Wrong is Best Wrong.

[-]Ben Pace1y180

Rule change! All citizens and Petrov/Peterson will be able to read the Diplomatic Channel, neither will have access to The War Room channel.

I will update the post momentarily.

[-]nick lacombe1y177

I'm a citizen. is there a way I can know which side I'm on? (EastWrong vs WestWrong)

[-]Ben Pace1y*160

The Diplomatic Channel dialogue is linked here, and can be read.

Edit: Removed because this link was getting overloaded and causing bugs.

Edit2: The link is now back to working!

9Ben Pace1y

The Diplomatic Channel is now available once again.

5[anonymous]1y

"Sorry, you don't have access to this draft" edit: fixed

[-]Zach Stein-Perlman1y160

Some true observations are infohazards, making destruction more likely. Please think carefully before posting observations. Even if you feel clever. You can post hashes here instead to later reveal how clever you were, if you need.

LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS

2aphyer1y

I assume that this is primarily directed at me for this comment, but if so, I strongly disagree. Security by obscurity does not in fact work well. I do not think it is realistic to hope that none of the ten generals look at the incentives they've been given and notice that their reward for nuking is 3x their penalty for being nuked. I do think it's realistic to make sure it is common knowledge that the generals' incentives are drastically misaligned with the citizens' incentives, and to try to do something about that. (Honestly I think that I disagree with almost all uses of the word 'infohazard' on LW. I enjoy SCP stories as much as the next LW-er, but I think that the real-world prevalence of infohazards is orders of magnitude lower).

8Zach Stein-Perlman1y

No. I noticed ~2 more subtle infohazards and I was wishing for nobody to post them and I realized I can decrease that probability by making an infohazard warning. I ask that you refrain from being the reason that security-by-obscurity fails, if you notice subtle infohazards.

5Martin Randall1y

Since the game is over perhaps you can share? This could be good practice in evaluating infohazard skills.

2Zach Stein-Perlman1y

I think I was thinking: 1. The war room transcripts will leak publicly 2. Generals can secretly DM each other, while keeping up appearances in the shared channels 3. If a general believes that all of their communication with their team will leak, we're be back to a unilateralist's curse situation: if a general thinks they should nuke, obviously they shouldn't say that to their team, so maybe they nuke unilaterally 1. (Not obvious whether this is an infohazard) 4. [Probably some true arguments about the payoff matrix and game theory increase P(mutual destruction). Also some false arguments about game theory — but maybe an infohazard warning makes those less likely to be posted too.] (Also after I became a general I observed that I didn't know what my "launch code" was; I was hoping the LW team forgot to give everyone launch codes and this decreased P(nukes); saying this would would cause everyone to know their launch codes and maybe scare the other team.) I don't think this is very relevant to real-world infohazards, because this is a game with explicit rules and because in the real world the low-hanging infohazards have been shared, but it seems relevant to mechanism design.

4Garrett Baker1y

I thought the launch codes were just 000000, as in the example message ben sent out. Also, I think I remember seeing that code in the petrov day LessWrong code.

1Martin Randall1y

(1) is not an infohazard because it is too obvious. The generals noticed it instantly, judging from the top of the diplomatic channel. (2) is relatively obvious. It appears to me that the generals noticed it instantly, though the first specific reference to private messages comes later. These principles are learned at school age. Making them common knowledge, known to be known, allows collaboration based on that common knowledge, and collaboration is how y'all avoided getting nuked. To the extent that (3) is true, it would be prevented by common knowledge of (2). Also I think it's false, a general can avoid Unilateralist's Curse here by listening to what other people say (in war room, diplomatic channel, and public discussion) and weighing that fairly before acting, potentially getting advice from family and friends. Probably this is the type of concern that can be defused by making it public. It would be bad if a general privately believed (3) and therefore nuked unilaterally. (4) is too vague for my purposes here. I agree that "I'm a general and I don't know my launch code" is a possible infohazard if posted publicly. I would have shared the knowledge with my team to reduce the risk of reduced deterrence in the possible world where LessWrong admins mistakenly only sent launch codes to one side, taking note of (1) and (2) in how I shared it. I don't think this is relevant to real-world infohazards, but I think it's relevant to building and testing transferrable infohazard skills. People who believe they have been or will be exposed to existential infohazards should build and test their skills in safer environments.

6Ben1y

I agree with this. In my very limited experience (which is mostly board games with some social situations thrown in), attempts to obscure publically discernible information to influence other people's actions are often extremely counter-productive. If you don't give people the full picture, then the most likely case is not that they discover nothing, but that they discover half the picture. And you don't know in advance which half. This makes them extremely unpredictable. You want them to pick A in preference to B, but the half-picture they get drives them to pick C which is massively worse for everyone. In board games I have played, if a slightly prisoner's dilemma like situation arises, you are much more likely to get stung by someone who has either misunderstood the rules or has misunderstood the equilibrium than someone who knows what is going on. [As a concrete example, in the game Scyth a new player believed that they got mission completion points for each military victory, not just the first one. As they had already scored a victory another played reasoned they wouldn't make a pointless attack. But they did make the pointless attack. It set them and their target back, giving the two players not involved in that battle a relative advantage.] “The best swordsman does not fear the second best, he fears the worst since there’s no telling what that idiot is going to do.” [https://freakonomics.com/2011/10/rules-of-the-game/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20best%20swordsman%20does%20not,can%20beat%20smartness%20and%20foresight%3F] This best swordsman wants more people to know how to sword fight, not fewer.

[-]rotatingpaguro1y1513

I take this as a fun occasion to lose some of my karma in a silly way to remind myself lesswrong karma is not important.

[-]GeneralBelov1y*130

I surveyed some participants about their preferences. I believe this is nine generals plus a petrov (second from bottom).

9 people prefer peace; 1 deranged person says "peace = mutual destruction" and "I was kinda hoping the other side would launch the nukes"; fortunately we survived them.

If one side had admitted to launching nukes, it looks like at least one person on the other side would have favored retaliating; unclear whether they'd get a majority (and unclear whether they'd launch without a majority).

I agree with the long note. I think anonymity is ~necessary to get decent P(defection) from a small group of high-karma users. But there are issues with that and the ritual is fine with low P(destruction).

8cata1y

I played General Anderson and also wrote that note. My feeling is that this year seemed more "game-like" and less "ritual-like" than past years, but the "game" part suffered for the reasons I mentioned above, and the combination to me felt awkward. Choosing to emphasize either the "game" nature or the "ritual" nature seems to have some pros and cons. Since participating in the game inevitably made me curious about the choices involved, I will be interested to hear the LW team's opinion on this in the retrospective.

3Martin Randall1y

Re peace = mutual destruction. I spent some time reading the board game geek discussion threads about cohabitation games here. There was a group of writers there who judged game success in relative terms and didn't distinguish "everyone wins" from "everyone loses" in games. I wonder if that's going on here. Could also have been a typo...

3Zach Stein-Perlman1y

Update with two new responses: I think this is 10 generals, 1 petrov, and one other person (either the other petrov or a citizen, not sure, wasn't super rigorous)

[-]Measure1y138

Congrats everyone!

Kudos to "GeneralAnderson" for the suggestion that generals report if their own side launches to help mitigate the unreliable report channel.

[-]Søren Elverlin1y12-10

A side-effect of Rationalists welcoming criticism is that this site has a number of high-karma users with a dislike of Rationalism and Rationalists.

There's also a fair number of trolls/anti-socials on LessWrong, and if a single one of them was offered the chance to be a general, I expect they would gleefully launch their nukes irrespective of the payoff structure and the rest of the scenario.

I predict the underlying variable is: Will any of the 10 generals afterwards be found to have previously posted substantial in-group criticism on LessWrong? Conditional on YES, I assign 70% chance of a nuclear war. Conditional on NO, I assign 10% chance of a nuclear war.

4Martin Randall1y

If a user hasn't posted substantial in-group criticism, are they a rationalist? Of course nuclear warfare is an escalation from posting critiques.

[-]Mikhail Samin1y*110

The game was very fun! I played General Carter.

Some reflections:

I looked at the citizens' comments, and while some of them were notable (@Jesse Hoogland calling for the other side to nuke us <3), I didn't find anything important after the game started- I considered the overall change in their karma if one or two sides get nuked, but comments from the citizens were not relevant to decision-making (including threats around reputation or post downvotes).
It was great to see the other side sharing my post internally to calculate the probability of retaliation if we nuke them
It was a good idea to ask whether looking at the source code is ok and then share it, which made it clear Petrovs won't necessarily have much information on whether the missiles they see are real.
The incentives (+350..1000 LW karma) weren't strong enough to make the generals try to win by making moves instead of winning by not playing, but I'm pretty happy with the outcome.
It's awesome to be able to have transparent and legible decision-making processes and trust each other's commitments.
One of the Petrovs preferred defeat to mutual destruction- I'm curious whether they'd report nukes if they were sure the nukes

... (read more)

3quetzal_rainbow1y

There is something incredibly funny about Mikhail Samin playing General Carter. "There was nothing indicating that Stierlitz was a Soviet spy, except earflaps hat with a red star".

3Mikhail Samin1y

huh, are you saying my name doesn’t sound WestWrongian

[-]Ben Pace1y102

The game will end randomly between 6pm and 6:30pm. Here is the message players recieved.

Voice of LessWrong: Here are the rules for the final section of the game. The game will end at a random time between 6:00PM and 6:30PM PT. During this period, Petrov and Peterson can make as many reports as they like, and their dashboard will update live with any new missile activity (as always, with errors). Nukes can be launched until the game ends (Petrov and Peterson will get a karma reward/penalty only once for this section, based on the admins' gut judgement of whether they "got it right")

[-]Neil1y90

Do we know what side we're on? Because I opted in and don't know whether I'm East or West, it just feels Wrong. I guess I stand a non-trivial chance of losing 50 karma ahem please think of the daisy girl and also my precious internet points.

[-]David Matolcsi1y91

I am a Citizen in the game, and I'm writing a post doing a detailed analysis of what we can do to significantly decrease the chance of an unaligned AI killing us if it takes over. I plan to finish and post it today evening, so dear Generals, if you want to read the post today, please be cautious with the nukes.

2aphyer1y

LIES! (Edit: post did arrive, just late, accusation downgraded from LIES to EXCESSIVE OPTIMISM REGARDING TIMELINES)

2rossry1y

1. Great if true! 2. As a Citizen, and without suggesting that you are, I would not endorse anyone else lying about similar topics, even for the good consequences you are trying to achieve.

5David Matolcsi1y

I agree lying is bad. Also, to be clear, I will post my thing after 48 hours if the site gets nuked anyway, so not that big of a loss, but I would be annoyed.

1David Matolcsi1y

Planning fallacy got me, and it took much longer to finish than expected, but here it is now: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZLAnH5epD8TmotZHj/you-can-in-fact-bamboozle-an-unaligned-ai-into-sparing-your

[-]Yoav Ravid1y93

This is extremely cool! good job! Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, which will unfortunately happen mostly as I sleep (and as a citizen I hope to come out at the end of this with no change to my Karma)

[-]Ben Pace1y72

Here's the feedback form for today's Petrov Day games! Please let me know how it was for you (be you a General, Civilian, Petrov, or just non-participating LWer reading along).

Fill out the form and I'll include the data in tomorrow's recap post. I'm grateful to all who fill it out, your data feeds my decision making :-)

[-]nick lacombe1y70

What about the Citizens? [...] You can comment here where your Generals can read, you can send them DMs, [...]

how can the citizens dm their general? will there be link to their lw profiles posted somewhere?

[-]Measure1y60

Where is the Diplomatic Channels dialogue located?

7nick lacombe1y

right now Ben Pace commented it here. but I assume it will be added to the post.

[-]Tomás B.1y62

I would like to take this opportunity to express my undying loyalty to my nation and its human instruments.

[-]Ben Pace1y50

Petrov Day retro is mostly done, have a bit more coding to do before we publish it, so it's looking like we'll publish it tomorrow. Stay tuned!

[-]Lao Mein1y50

The text referred to this as a "social deception game". Where is the deception?

My guesses:

The actual messages sent to the Petrovs and Generals will significantly differ from the ones shown here.
It's Amongus, and there are players who get very high payoffs if they trick the sides into nuclear war
It's just a reference to expected weird game theory stuff. But why not call it a "game theory exercise"?
The actual rules of the game will differ drastically from the ones described here. Maybe no positive payoffs for one-sided nuking?
The sensor readings are actually tied to comments on this post. Maybe an AI is somehow involved?

[-]Tapatakt1y51

I think making an opt-in link as a big red button and posting it before the rules were published caused a pre-selection of players in favor of those who would press the big red button. Which is... kinda realistic for generals, I think, but not realistic for citizens.

2rossry1y

Think of it as your own little lesson in irreversible consequences of appealing actions, maybe? Rather than a fully-realistic element.

[-]ryan_b1y*50

I wonder how the consequences to reputation will play out after the fact.

If there is a first launch, will the general who triggered it be downvoted to oblivion whenever they post afterward for a period of time?
What if it looks like they were ultimately deceived by a sensor error, and believed themselves to be retaliating?
If there is mutual destruction, will the general who triggered the retaliatory launch also be heavily downvoted?
Less than, more than, or about the same as the first strike general?
Would citizens who gained karma in a successful first strik

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[-]Myron Hedderson1y40

This is fun! I don't know which place I'm a citizen of, though, it just says "hello citizen"... I feel John Rawls would be pleased...

[-]davekasten1y40

Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure playing with you tonight

[-]Lao Mein1y4-26

My prediction is that this becomes a commitment race. A general is going to post something like "I am going to log off until the game begins, at which point I will immediately nuke without reading any messages.", at which point the generals on the other side get to decide if 2 days of access to LessWrong for everyone is worth the reputational cost of being known as someone who doesn't retaliate. Given what I know about LessWrong and how this entire game is framed, you'll likely get more social capital from not retaliating, meaning the commitment works and ... (read more)

4rossry1y

My guess would be that a commitment to retaliation -- including one that you don't manage to announce to General Logoff before they log off -- is positive, not negative, to one's reputation around these here parts. Sophisticated decision theories have been popular for fifteen years, and "I retaliate to defection even when it's costly to me and negative-net-welfare" reads to me as sophisticated, not shameworthy. If a general of mine reads a blind commitment by General Logoff on the other side and does nuke back, I'll think positively of them-and-all-my-generals. (Note: if they fire without seeing such a commitment, I'll think negatively of them-and-all-my-generals, and update on whether I want them as collaborators in projects going forward.)

[-]Ben Pace1y30

Also note that we will be starting 10-15 mins late due to technical difficulties.

5Ben Pace1y

When you see the nukes on the frontpage, you will know the Cold War has begun.

1nick lacombe1y

will we see them on mobile?

[-]EGI1y21

The incentives are very unrealistic though. "Winning" a nuclear world war with strategic weapons is still quite bad for you overall. Not as bad as losing but still very bad. So flipping the sign of the karma reward for the winner would make the game way more realistic. And much more likely to yield the real outcome.

3Martin Randall1y

When the US beat Japan with nuclear weapons it was not immediately bad for the US. It led to the cold war which has an extinction risk, but it's not clear if that was avoidable. I'm curious what you're thinking of here.

2EGI1y

I guess I was not clear enough in defining what I was talking about. While it is possible to stretch the definition of "nuclear world war" to include WW2 and Little Boy and Fat Man were certainly strategic weapons at their time, this is not at all what I meant. I was talking about modern strategic weapons, i.e. MIRVed ICBMs shot from hardened silos or ballistic missile submarines, used by a modern nuclear superpower to defeat a near peer opponent. I.e. the scenario Petrov faced. If e.g. the US in Petrov's time had managed to pull off a perfect nuclear first strike (a pretty bold assumption), destroying the whole USSR's and Chinese nuclear triad without any counter strike at all, the economic (supply chain disruption, Europe and Middle East overrun with refugees...) and political repercussions (everyone thinks the US is run by complete psychopaths) alone would have been enough to ensure in expectation a precipitous drop in quality of life for nearly all US citizens, including generals and politicans. This is true even if the whole nuclear winter idea is complete bunk.

[-]HelloQuestonMark1y*21

(I asked permission from the LW team before posting.)

The source code is currently available at https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/compare/master...petrovSocialDeception.

const petrovFalseAlarmMissileCount = new DatabaseServerSetting<number[]>('petrovFalseAlarmMissileCount', [])
const petrovRealAttackMissileCount = new DatabaseServerSetting<number[]>('petrovRealAttackMissileCount', [])

const getIncomingCount = (incoming: boolean, role: 'eastPetrov' | 'westPetrov') => {
  const currentHour = new Date().getHours();
  const roleSeed = ro

... (read more)

1HelloQuestonMark1y

Considerations: * This is very related to AI races. It's probably better to not nuke anyone, even if you're the only one doing that and you expect your somewhat for-profit AI lab shareholders to be, on average, happy about the decision to nuke. * Please avoid nuking the other side, regardless of the payoffs for the generals. Remember your aesthetic preferences. It's not that much karma, even if you somehow succeed.

[-]DiamondSolstice1y10

Ideas for next year:

One General from each side is a defector. He wants the other side to win. If he is figured out, he will become a civilian.
1. Possible additions:
  1. Once this happens, a random civilian will be chosen as the next general (if they agree).
  2. Once this happens, a random civilian will be chosen as next general (if they agree) AND a random general will be chosen as the next defector.
One General from each side has to actively STOP nukes from getting launched (possible explanation: his overzealous men are pro-nuke, and he must send hourly (?) commands to

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2DiamondSolstice1y

5. One General FES (from each side) is ChatGPT 6. There will be an hour when each General cannot say anything on any channel, regardless of all circumstances. (Everybody can talk for the first hour)

[+][comment deleted]1y20

^{^}

Actually only 11 at the time of publishing, fill out your form if you'd like to be number 12!

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[Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario

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